![]() ![]() But when she said she thought her kids were dyslexic, "People talked to me very tentatively and defensively and told me that wasn't necessarily true." She was excited to tell them she'd finally figured out what was going on. Long requested a meeting with the staff at her children's school, Barrington Elementary. She called her husband and said, "'I know what the problem is now.' It was an epiphany!" The woman who was standing up there and describing what dyslexia is and what dyslexics need was describing me and every single one of my kids," she remembered, her voice cracking with emotion. "I walked into that seminar and I did not move for two hours. There was a seminar about dyslexia, something she knew little about. She's a speech-language pathologist and she went to a professional conference to update her credentials. Then after her youngest child went to kindergarten in 2008, Long decided to go back to work. Long told the teachers her kids weren't learning to read but she says the teachers kept assuring her they were making progress. Gayle Long's kids went to public school in Upper Arlington, Ohio, a suburb of Columbus. Her sisters and brother struggled with reading, too. ![]() "I'd spend hours every single night trying to read," said Emily. They wouldn't say the word 'dyslexia.'" Christine Beattie "They wouldn't acknowledge that he had a problem. Emily was taught to read using the "whole language" approach, which encourages children to learn words by sight rather than sounding them out. If Emily didn't know a word, the teacher told her to guess based on the pictures in the book. "The teacher would show me a picture of a cat and then point to the word and say, 'Here's the word 'cat,'" recalled Emily, 22, Long's oldest. Long's four kids were taught to read differently. "I could use the rules of the language to decode words," she said. Phonics is a method of teaching children to read by showing them how sounds correlate with letters. She grew up in the 1960s, attending elementary school when phonics was in vogue. Long says she never learned to be a great reader, but she got by. "My grandfather would bring me books and I would write 'Rockets' on the front. She was always in the Bluebirds, the lowest reading group. "There were three reading groups: The Rockets, the Jets and the Bluebirds," she recalled. When Gayle Long was a little girl, she struggled to learn to read. Listen to this audio documentary on the Educate podcast. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |