those who think less of Dyslexics while claiming to love them...

"Dutch designer Christian Boer created a dyslexic-friendly font to make reading easier for dyslexics like himself.

'“Traditional fonts are designed solely from an aesthetic point of view,” Boer writes on his website, “which means they often have characteristics that make characters difficult to recognize for people with dyslexia. Oftentimes, the letters of a word are confused, turned around or jumbled up because they look too similar.”

"Designed to make reading clearer and more enjoyable for dyslexics..."
     - Slate 10 November 2014

So says Slate. And here's DeZeen from 9 November 2014...

"Although it looks like a traditional typeface, Dyslexie by Christian Boer is designed specifically for people with dyslexia – a neurological disorder that causes a disconnect between language and visual processing making it difficult for the brain to process text. Dyslexia is estimated to affect 10 per cent of the world's population, according to UK charity Dyslexia Action."

...linking an unrelated authentic charity quote in a bid for validity.

Of course we can go back to TED, the late night infomercial of faux intellectualism. Here's Mr. Boer hustling his font... "now you can cook your fries with no oil, cure baldness, satisfy your wife, and, yes, cure dyslexia..." Yup, if you order now...

TEDxDubai2011

OK, if you've watched you will say that he is a Dyslexic, so how can he think less of Dyslexics? Well, its confusing. He's a Dyslexic but really he's a missionary. He is not doing research, he is taking a personal experience and selling it to all as a "personal (and universal) savior." It is not just that he gets the science wrong - though he is right about "thinking in pictures" for many, but he is far off at thinking its about a visual processing issue... but that's not the problem. For many dyslexics reversals and upside-down letters is no issue at all. In fact, no matter how you might describe the underlying issues of reading issues, you will find a scatter plot across any graph.

It is like the colonial subject in 1910 seeing his or her personal issues solved through an interaction with a priest or a minister and assuming that interaction is what the world needs. And at the heart of this is desired ignorance, it is ignorance built of desire not to understand people, to actually believe that people do not count if they are not just like you.

Honestly, at a younger age, I almost made similar mistakes. I found myself arguing for Times New Roman for text, and for WYNN as way of reading. But fortunately, I noticed this absurdity on third person I talked to. He liked Helvetica and Kurzweil 3000, and he wasn't wrong of course, he was different from me. The next person I spoke to found no font useful, no keyboard useful. The next wanted Garamond at a certain size in a certain color combination, though color - within boundaries - had little effect on me. She wasn't wrong, she was different.

So I didn't develop a system for dyslexics, I worked out a way of thinking about choice, because I did not want to rate people according to their distance in similarity from me. I called this idea Toolbelt Theory and I still like it, because I think it respects the people around me.

Toolbelt Theory from Albemarle County Public Schools

2009

So in a lifetime of being a Dyslexic, in 20 years of researching Dyslexia, I have learned that there is no best font for this, no best reading method, no best technology choice, no best color combination, no best anything... not even for me across a week or even some days, and I've heard that variability matters for others too. So we need to learn to choose from a menu of what works, to set defaults in browsers but to have other choices, to have a range of technologies.

I choose between 4 fonts, none are designed to look like bubbles being held to the ground because - well - that's not my issue. The computers the students have in our schools come with WordTalk and Balabolka and to in-browser Text-To-Speech system, and there are bookmark links to many others. My computers usually have at least five systems for TTS, my phone has three. But I never, ever, expect any other Dyslexic to choose the same combination.

I have learned that my experience is not "data" because I do not think those different to be outliers or "Children of a Lesser God." So please stop saying what Dyslexics need. And start talking about what choices humans need.

- Ira Socol

Affirmative Action in Education: Game Changers

A few years ago at a Disability Studies in Education Conference at Michigan State University we got into a fascinating discussion over dinner: Should schools/colleges of education use "Affirmative Action" ("Reverse Discrimination") to ensure that at every level - Bachelors/Undergraduate teacher training, Masters, PhD - there was far better representation of students with disabilities?

The argument for? Since most students do not actually do well in school, since most students with disabilities do not do well in school, we need more teachers, administrators, and teacher educators who understand - on a fundamental level - that education must change.

There was little argument against, this was not a group which would think that an effort like this would really be doing anything more than reversing all the existing discrimination against those who have struggled in school, but people were concerned that few, if any, schools/colleges of education - at least in North America - would do anything but terrible things to those incoming "disabled" students.

But despite all the obstacles, I have begun to detect something - a small but significant cohort of young, mostly male, teachers who are changing practice in schools in important ways. They typically had bad experiences as students themselves, often right through university. They struggled with attention issues, reading issues, math issues, writing issues. They were typically born from the late 1970s through the late 1980s and benefited as the first students with disabilities to have real human rights protections under the Americans with Disabilities Act and Sections 504 and 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (as amended). And they went through the bulk of their education before the No Child Left Behind legislation began to destroy opportunity in American public education.

Today they range from, say, 35 down to their early twenties, and I have been watching them.

Middle School Jazz Camp, Albemarle County, Virginia

Watching them as they change - in dramatic ways - classrooms, schools, and the culture of education. Now, I'm not saying - obviously - that these are the only teachers doing these things. Often, these "boys" are adapting what they saw from the best of their teachers who "came of age" long before NCLB or even the "Reagan-Bush-1 Conservatism," but they are forming a powerful new cohort often in opposition to the "mainstream" teaching staff trained for an era of testing and classroom management.

I see these guys in elementary schools, in middle schools, in high schools, in every content area - a new band of teachers who demonstrate...

1. Instructional Tolerance and a belief that childhood and adolescence are good things.
These guys don't "sweat the small stuff." They know, from years of struggling in school, that no one in any classroom was always paying attention, or was always on task, or was always behaving. So stuff like taking breaks by staring at the window, or looking at Facebook, or walking around, or just spacing out, are fine. So is the use of different tools by different students. So are different time frames for different students. So are flexible deadlines and flexible assignments. Learning matters, the rest really does not.
2. A very different kind of classroom observation skill, perhaps the result of watching from back corners, these teachers are unusually good at spotting who is getting uncomfortable, and who is struggling.
This group of teachers understands how to watch for students becoming uncomfortable. They know it well because - that was them. Uncomfortable students stop learning, surely can't process at higher levels, so solving that is essential. These teachers also seem "much better than average" at recognizing when things aren't working for a student, and are most willing to try different paths.
3. A multi-level practice of teaching with large group, small group, and individual interactions occurring almost simultaneously.
Multitasking is basic to these men. They tend, most of them, toward the ADHD spectrum, and they see all the things in a room, thus they are able to observe and intervene, watch interactions at many different levels, and understand the borderline between the chaos of a great learning space and the chaos of dysfunction. As "Borderliners" themselves, this boundary line is far clearer than it is to those who sat near the front and attended to the teachers' directions.
4. A focus on student comfort and psychological safety is perhaps the most important thing in how this cohort teaches.
Once you've been uncomfortable, this become crucial. So these teachers have the classrooms where kids are "safe," where they go when they need to escape. You'll find kids there even when they don't have class. You'll find kids sitting on the floor, on windowsills, gathered together or being alone. Wearing hats, wearing hoods, playing games, doing nothing. There is an understanding - a native, pure understanding - that no one can do higher level learning - being intellectually uncomfortable - without being physically and psychologically comfortable. The concept is from Maslow, but these guys know it from their own experience.

Choices, opportunities, passions which engage instead of force conformity
are the hallmark of these teachers' spaces.

5. An understanding of the need for the passion which connects students to school is basic to these guys.
Why would a student come to school each day? Don't say, "we made it a law." Why would each student come to school each day? If football, or the play, or music, or the chance to talk about poetry with a certain teacher, or the social scene at lunch or recess is the top emotional reason which gets a child out of bed in the morning and two your door, you cannot let that ever become secondary to anything else, because if that disappears, the reason to attend - or at least in our compulsory system, engage - vanishes. These new teachers know that. You will see them bringing games, music production, new sports, new clubs, and new conversations to the schools as they seek to meet kids at their passions.

I have worked with many great teachers, from all kinds of backgrounds, and I have worked with many great new teachers, from many backgrounds - and yet, what I see in schools suggests that there is incredible value in recruiting - at every level of education - a group of people with diverse school experiences.

As long as schools are primarily taught and run by, and future teachers are prepared by, those for whom school has been "easy," or who have succeeded in school-as-we-know-it, schools will be, primarily, for that one-third of the population. To allow all to succeed, our faculties - all of our faculties - must begin to feel a lot more like our students.

- Ira Socol

Dyslexia and Life

It is probable that struggling to read alphabetic text is "more normal" than reading well. That "struggle," that "difficulty," also might provide some very human advantages... except, of course, in school, or elsewhere among the "print-centric." 

"Dyslexic children use nearly five times the brain area as normal children while performing a simple language task, according to a new study by an interdisciplinary team of University of Washington researchers. The study shows for the first time that there are chemical differences in the brain function of dyslexic and non-dyslexic children," said a 1999 University of Washington study.

'"People often don't see how hard it is for dyslexic children to do a task that others do so effortlessly," added Berninger, a professor of educational psychology. "There are learning differences in children. We can't blame the schools or hold teachers accountable for teaching dyslexic children unless both teachers and the schools are given specialized training to deal with these children."'

So, when I received this wonderful birthday card last month, I thought about all of this. And I thought about the young Mr. Justin Hamilton, @EDPressSec on Twitter, who called me "a bomb thrower" in a Twitter direct message when I called his Department of Education's "crackdown" on alternative testing for special education students, "child abuse." (I could not respond to Mr. Hamilton privately, since he refuses to follow me on Twitter, as he refuses to follow virtually any other actual educator.)

But we know that if, for example, the United States Department of Education insisted that you could not graduate from high school without running a sub-6 minute mile - and offered no exemptions for those who might use a wheelchair or walking supports - we'd see that as abusive. Imagine that video, the kid who can't walk trying to drag himself around the track. And there is nothing at all different from that image than Arne Duncan and Justin Hamilton insisting that a dyslexic student "read" the way Arne and Justin and Barack prefer to - forcing a student who - genetically cannot do something "that way" - to struggle and find themselves, their teachers, and their school communities punished for their "failings."

This, like much of what happens to dyslexic kids during school reading programs, is abuse. It is an insistence that people be converted from who they are, at any cost. And this is true of Reading Recovery, of Success for All, of all the KIPP Academy reading efforts, even most of what you hear at TEDxED.

'"Dyslexia is a lifelong condition, but dyslexics may learn to compensate for it later in life. We know dyslexia is a genetic and neurological disorder. It is not brain damage. Dyslexics often have enormous talents in other parts of their brain and shine in many fields, e.g. Thomas Edison and financier Charles Schwab."

"In the language tests, the boys heard a series of word pairs that consisted of either two non-rhyming words such as "fly" and "church," two rhyming words such as "fly" and "eye," a non-rhyming real word and non-word such as "crow" and "treel," and a rhyming word and non-word such as "meal" and "treel." The boys were asked if the word pairs rhymed or didn't rhyme and if the pairs contained two real words or one real and one non-word. They responded by raising a hand to indicate yes or no. In the music test, the boys heard pairs of notes and raised one hand if they thought the notes were identical and the other if they believed them to be different.

"While the dyslexic boys exhibited nearly five times more brain lactate activation during a language task that asked them to interpret the sounds of words, there was no difference in the two groups during the musical tone test. This means the difference between the dyslexics and the normal children relates to auditory language and not to nonlinguistic auditory function, according to Richards and Berninger"

That 4.6 times the brain area, why does that matter? Speaking with a colleague's class of sophomore future teachers a few years ago one of the students asked, "If you could read "normally" - they did use their fingers to make the quotation marks, which I appreciated - wouldn't you want to?"

"What would I have to give up in exchange for that?" I asked in return. The class was confused, so I tried to explain that the 'clumsy' 'inefficient' form of reading I do is just part of what I consider a vastly different brain system which just might be far better at processing the complex imagery of multitasking (which "good readers" often claim is impossible) and multi-level perception. I think of all the things I have been "good at" in my life - design, storytelling, visual memory, police work, comprehending differing cultures, and I think all of those successes are due, in part, to the way my brain processes information - that "disorder" called dyslexia. If I could process print efficiently, would all that be lost? It seems likely, which is probably why "poor reading" is far more common among humans than "proficient reading."

Dyslexics do not use the left temporal region (as "good readers" do)
to sound out words. In fact, dyslexics and other poor readers
even avoid using that region when "successfully
compensating." (Shaywitz, 2003)

The world of evolution chooses "winners," and the multitasker, the multi-level comprehender, the visual thinker, remains extraordinarily valuable in many places around the earth.

The fact that, as one example, the United States has never, in over 150 years of trying, gotten two-thirds of Americans beyond the sixth grade reading level (what NAEP calls "proficient) suggests that facts are facts, more struggle with reading than succeed. More brains are wired "abnormally" - by school standards - than are wired "normally."

This was a gigantic problem during the Gutenberg Era, but thankfully, the Gutenberg Era is pretty much over everywhere but in school, and for everybody but the U.S. Department of Education. We don't read manuals anymore, we find the right clip on YouTube to lead us through a process. We don't write checks anymore, we swipe cards or punch numbers into our computers or phones, or we bump phones, or our phones get scanned. We don't use handwriting anymore, because it is slow and difficult to read, although our Windows tablets can convert our handwriting into real text. And if we struggle to read alphabetical text stamped onto paper or displayed on a screen these days, we turn on our reading software, and convert it to audio.

Even "out in the real world," where once menus written in fancy script like the one on the front of the above birthday cards had generations of American boys telling waiters "I'll have what she's having" on our dates, we can now go online, pull down the menu, convert it to normal text or audio, and act like we belong in the world when that waiter arrives.

But in schools, and especially on Duncan-promoted high stakes tests, none of these current century rules apply. Instead, we're back in the 1950s when dyslexia was often called "minimal brain damage" or minimal brain dysfunction," and those who "had that" disease were called - without any code words being used - "retarded." ("Retarded" meaning, since the 1870s in U.S. education, "unable to operate at the "normal" grade level for your age.")

We don't teach kids how to use these solutions, we don't teach them to choose the right solutions, and we don't evaluate them on how they'll actually function when they escape school. Instead "we" - starting with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and his flak Justin Hamilton - bully these kids, and torture them on standardized tests, and call them, and all who try to help them, "failures."

And sorry Justin, insult me if you must, but this is child abuse. There is no other way to describe it. And we need to stop it, and realize Gutenberg is dead, and we need to give students the tools they need to access communication and information, and to express themselves.

Because the alternative is awful. I want Justin and Arne to know that. I've even written a book, in part, about that. And if Mr. Hamilton or Mr. Duncan won't order it from Amazon (or the accessible pdf form), if they ask, I'll send them that chapter. Maybe, using their preferred reading method, they can read it, and start to understand. And then maybe they can go down the hall and actually listen to Karen Cator, and read her plan, and start to make education less about force from above, and more about letting the most kids succeed.

- Ira Socol

In this month's School Library Journal

I talk about "The Unhappy Place" and the need to offer access to literacy to all students...

Libraries terrified me as a child. They were places with too many rules, with an organization system that made no sense, with intimidating counters and information stored in a form I couldn't access.

But I loved books. Despite having what would now be called a severe reading and writing disability, as well as attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder, I devoured everything from Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel to a picture book that explained how electricity was created at Niagara Falls. I loved atlases and encyclopedias with their images, charts, and graphs, and magazines, from Life to National Geographic. So I braved this unhappy place, and, secretly pulling books off the shelf, I would disappear into a hidden corner to sit on the floor for a look. I couldn't check out books on my own. To do that, the library required that I write my name and address on the application form, something I was unable to do.

Is your library prepared for a kid like me? Can it accommodate a child who struggles with print in every form or one with attention and behavioral issues, and help him or her become a successful, motivated consumer of literature and information?  keep reading at the SLJ site...

and while you are there, never miss Amy Bowllan's Blog. 

- Ira Socol

Word Accessible: WordTalk and Ghotit

Sure, we can all hate Microsoft. There's so much they do that annoys us. But let's face it - they make the products that make most of our computers go. XP was a great operating system (is still for Netbooks), Vista - for all the complaints - is even better if you turn off "User Account Control" and stop it from indexing everything. I think Windows7 - as bloated as it will be - will be better still.

And Microsoft Office is the standard. Yes, OpenOffice copies it well, but Word, Excel, OneNote - these are fantastic applications - and applications which are incredibly easy to use with all kinds of accessibility applications. And, chances are, your school has already bought and paid for Microsoft Office. It is there, waiting for you to make it better.

And now, we have new ways to make Microsoft Word much more powerful, with two free add-ons - the newest version of WordTalk and the new Ghotit plug-in.

This doesn't mean to forget about the built in supports: You should be teaching your students about options from Equation Editor (math symbols), to altering Grammar Check settings as they need it, to using Auto Correct to simplify text entry (on my computer, typing "msucoe" produces "Michigan State University College of Education" - saving a great deal of time for this one-fingered keyboarder), to altering fonts, font sizes, colors, spacing and whatever else is needed to make the screen comfortable. We need to be offering those options 'every day.'

But these new systems, these can make huge differences for virtually every student.

WordTalk converts Microsoft Word into a text-to-speech system. This supports reading in many ways, and because it uses synchronized word-by-word highlighting, it dramatically builds sight-word recognition. Obviously, content becomes accessible and students become independent - they no longer have to wait for people to read to them. And because WordTalk now converts text to .wav and .mp3 files, text becomes supremely portable - put it on a CD, an iPod, your phone. (see the CALL Centre's guide to creating content accessibility)

But WordTalk also supports writing. When writers hear their words read back to them they recognize problems in ways they simply can not while reading print. They hear misspellings, they hear repeated and missing words. They hear repetitive words. They hear issues with rhythm, even issues with description.

And WordTalk, when combined with AutoCorrect shortcuts, even creates an elementary AAC device. Build key short-cuts for phrases, and WordTalk turns Word into a speech synthesizer.

Ghotit adds another powerful tool - context-based spell checking with definition-support and text-to-speech access. Adding Ghotit to Word changes the spellcheck experience completely. No longer do you have to be "very close" with your initial spelling. You can be way off and, chances are, Ghotit will find the right word. And then Ghotit will give you a list of word choices - with definitions. It will read those choices and definitions to you. And not misspelled words - but misused words as well, it notes words "out of context" (in a different color) and offers the same choices. So it is not just correcting spelling, it is building knowledge of the English language.

When Ghotit is in use, students begin to show more confidence in their writing, they begin to take more chances with an expanded vocabulary, because they know they are less likely to look foolish - to fail in spelling - to use the wrong words.

There is an online version of Ghotit, but with a simple, free sign-up, your school can add Ghotit for Word to every computer

There is a simple fact: Just as there should not be a school (or university) computer anywhere without Firefox with Click-Speak and Accessibar installed, there should not be a Windows/Office equipped school computer without WordTalk and Ghotit installed. These are free solutions which allow schools to meet some of their civil rights obligations under US and EU laws. They are a basic move toward making educational success possible for a wide group of students currently "left behind." And they are a first step toward bringing a school in line with Universal Design.

To not have these software systems available everywhere is nothing less than educational malpractice.

- Ira Socol

Future Near: Universal Speech Recognition

In a discussion on Enda Guinan's blog what began as a conversation regarding trying to explain to people what we [those of us in AT-related jobs] actually do when we go to work transferred over to a conversation involving speech recognition, which is one of the things which provides the wow factor when we demonstrate. From there, we got into the question of universal speech recognition, as in the question we are always asked, "is there a way that I can listen to the professor and have that converted into text." The answer is, "no, not really." But there is another answer, "the future is almost here." Very soon now we might be able to start saying yes.

Actually, we have been able to convert what the prof, or lecturer, or teacher is saying into text. It has just been difficult. The Liberated Learning Consortium has been doing this for a decade, and five years ago at an American Community College I outfitted a few deaf students with laptops equipped with ViaVoice speech recognition software, and their instructors with wireless microphones linked to receivers on those laptops. We got the instructors to train their voices on ViaVoice, and then, whatever they said in class arrived in a Word doc on the students' laptops. The accuracy was great, but the words came unpunctuated, which drove half of the students crazy (this is part of what the complex Liberated Learning system has tried to solve). And anything any other student said was, of course, lost. And... yes, getting the faculty to participate was not easy.

The world, however, is changing. The first paragraph of this post was dictated through jott.com. I have "fixed" it, but I have shown you where I fixed it. Green means that jott added a (?) and got the word wrong. Purple means that jott added a (?) and got the word right. Red is punctuation which I had to add. It isn't perfect - it never will be. Enda's name came out "___ duh _______" which is not correct. And yet, it is mostly correct, and the punctuation is there.

So now you can see speech recognition accuracy without voice training. Now you know where we will be very soon.

This is important. It means that we are perhaps only a year or two away from truly being able to have almost everything said in a classroom transcribed and available to those with hearing, attention, and learning issues and differences. That will make everything different for a whole range of kids - but let me focus on how this will change education for everyone.

When I have taught online courses two differences appear. First, online teaching is really hard - you can never "wing it" - everything has to be prepared and it is much more work to monitor online discussions than real-life ones. But second, you have this extraordinary record of what was said and who said it, what was discussed, what was asked, what was misunderstood, what was very difficult. It is all there, and not just fragmented in memory. You can go back and say, "wow! that didn't work," or you can say, "look at this, I really need to mediate this better." Perhaps more importantly, students can go back and say, "did I hear that right?" "did she say what I thought she said?" "could I have said that better?"

One promise of universal speech recognition is that ability to bring one of the best features of online learning into face-to-face learning. And bringing that in will enable a teaching and studying revolution.

It is close. Very close. Try jott.com today. Get a bunch of your friends to try it. And then start imagining what you could do with this kind of power in your classroom.

* jott.com is North America only for the moment. SpinVox is available in the UK and Ireland, but it is not inexpensive.

- Ira Socol

Worth reading: Liz Kolb on the Mobile Web. Paul Hamilton on Awesome Highlighter and Firefox.

The Drool Room by Ira David Socol, a novel in stories that has - as at least one focus - life within "Special Education in America" - is now available from the River Foyle Press through lulu.com

US $16.00 on Amazon

New! Digital version available through lulu.com

Look Inside This Book

Blocking Access from the Top

When you want to understand an educational institution's attitude toward people with disabilities, it is often helpful to start at the top. When you look at the top you can discover the priorities and attitudes which flow throughout the institutional structure.

This isn't to suggest that there may not be great people who are really trying beneath a disinterested or openly hostile point of executive power, nor to suggest that there may not be disinterested people or active resisters beneath a committed and active center of executive power. Those situations surely exist. But the attitudes at the top will usually be a significant way of measuring the potential for progress.

So I learned something important this week when I walked into the suite of Presidential Offices at my university. I was there for "another issue" but the attitudes toward disability immediately became the dominant thing.

"I would like to find out," I asked, "how I could meet with someone from the President's office, regarding 'x' because I have tried what seems like every other route through the university bureaucracy."

"We have a form you can fill out," the receptionist responded, "and someone will review it and get back with you." She reached into her desk and pulled out a clipboard with a paper form on it.

"Is that form available on-line, or in some accessible form?" I asked. "I have trouble writing."

"access to information and communication is a civil right for people with disabilities"

The receptionist could have responded in a number of ways:

She could have said, "I'm sorry, we do not have that yet, but I'll be happy to fill out the form for you."

Or she could have said, "I'm sorry, we do not have that yet, but I'll be happy to help you fill out the form if you would like."

Or she could have said, "May I get your information and have someone get back to you?"

The apology would have been nice. The suggestion that a flaw in the system might be corrected in the future would have been even nicer. But the essential thing which might have been offered, which should have been offered, was a way around the problem.

But what the receptionist said was this: "The president's schedule is prepared weeks in advance, it wouldn't make any sense to have it online."

A non-answer combined with a refusal to help or even concede that this was anything more than "my problem."

"according to the Office of Civil Rights (OCR), "there is an affirmative duty to develop a comprehensive policy in advance of any request for auxiliary aids or services" (Waddell, pars. 3-5)."

I took the form, scribbled my information as best as I could while muttering about "Section 504" and "federal law." I could tell the receptionist was annoyed. I typed her name onto the memo function on my mobile before leaving the office. I like to remember who I've been talking to.

Small thing? Yes.

Deeply revealing? Of course.

If we notice that the university president's office does not even have the legal and social skills training to deal with a very simple expression of disability concerns it becomes clear why the university's library is inaccessible and why accessibility software is not on university computers and why university faculty has no idea what makes a PDF accessible and why the office for disability services is widely reviled by the students who use it. It even explains why not even the educational program aimed at preparing teachers to work with students with special educational struggles to 'get it.'

I left the office and considered opening up my laptop in the corridor, connecting to the nearest Wi-Fi router, and filing an OCR complaint right from the President's IP address. But I decided to wait. The university president has a PhD in education after all, perhaps, if her staff forwards my concerns, she can learn from this "teachable moment."

And what did I learn? Now I understand much more clearly the lack of concern, the lack of urgency, throughout the university regarding either complying with the law or simply "doing the right thing." When leadership doesn't care, it is difficult to expect those below to be much better.

- Ira Socol

The Drool Room by Ira David Socol, a novel in stories that has - as at least one focus - life within "Special Education in America" - is now available from the River Foyle Press through lulu.com

US $16.00 on Amazon

New! Digital version available through lulu.com

Look Inside This Book

An inability to understand

powered by ODEO
interview with Melinda Pongrey of LDLive - 16 May 2008

[warning, the following might be less than fully coherently written]

When I present I sometimes tell the story of the star.

A long time ago I met with a special education teacher about a student we were providing technology for. As we were talking I was doodling, and I drew a star.

"If he saw that," the teacher asked, pointing to the star, "could he copy it?" I said that I was sure he could, in fact, that given his art skills, he could copy almost any picture. "Then why," she asked, leaning over, writing the word "star" in lower case print letters, "if I write this, he can't type it for me."

And in that moment I discovered something. I discovered why "this" - with "this" being special education or education itself - so rarely "works." It rarely works, I realized, because the two 'sides' - teacher and student - often have such radically different views of the universe that communication becomes impossible. In the decade since this revelation has been reinforced a thousand times.

"Well," I said to the teacher, "first, I don't think he sees words as individual letters, just as pictographs. Little images which might mean something. So he doesn't separate that out automatically into letters, and the keyboard doesn't have a "star" key." She looked at me puzzled, and I knew why. Teachers spent so much time being beaten with reading strategies that they have forgotten the obvious. Almost none of us "read letters." we read "word shapes" - pictographs - logograms - sinographs - whatever - every bit as much in alphabetic languages as in a language like Chinese. But we lie to students about it every day.

This is why you can read those emails you get where the interior letters of the words are all scrambled, but you can still read all the words because nobody actually reads using phonics or by sounding things out, you read by knowing - the better a reader you are the more automatic this is - that this picture - teacher (you'd recognize it even if looked like "taecher") - means something different than this picture - student. Just as you do not sound out the letters when you see a McDonald's or a BP sign. But, as I just said, we lie to students about this every day. We lie to them so much we actually convince ourselves of what we are saying.

So, no "star" key on the computer, but I had to point something else out. "Even if he could break that picture apart into letters," I told the teacher, "those letters aren't on the keyboard - well, only one of them is." She looked at me like I was crazy. I still do this, I ask teachers all the time, "What letters aren't on the keyboard?" On a very good day one out of thirty will figure it out.

I had to pick up a keyboard to demonstrate. "That 's" is there," I said, "but I don't see anything like the t, a, or r. And he doesn't know that those lower case letters match up."

That's something else we lie to students about. We tell them that there are 26 letters in the alphabet. Just about every struggling students know what a massive lie that is. There are lots of different symbols which represent the same thing and we have to memorize all these pictures - surely if we're trying to "sound things out." And that can be very difficult, because alphabetic language is a code system, just as musical notation and Morse Code are. The only difference is that those follow some logical structure, and the alphabet, especially as used in English, is just random nonsense with various sounds assigned randomly to various letters, depending on the word. As I sometimes say, it is as if the numeral "1" meant "one" if presented by itself, but meant "thirty-four" if it followed a "3" or "six" if it came before a "5."

Which is why most of us, almost every one of us, reads by word shape, or what educators call "sight word recognition."

But teachers live in a world constructed one way. A world in which phonics matters (if phonics worked in English, it would obviously be spelled differently), in which the alphabet contains 26 symbols, in which reading means decoding a series of letters printed in ink on paper, in which drawing a picture of a star is a less valid method of saying "star" than typing the word "star" on a keyboard.

And students live in a world constructed entirely differently. A world in which, though we say they can't read, they have no problem distinguishing McDonald's from Burger King simply by the sign. A world in which, outside of the classroom, they seem quite capable of communicating. A world in which they can gather a ton of information and knowledge every day without ever looking at letters in ink on paper. A world in which - to be quite honest - they are far better equipped to do everything from learn how their mobile works to following Ikea assembly instructions than most of their teachers are.

So teachers look at students and see an inability to succeed in things that have always - obviously - been important, even essential. And students look at teachers and see people lying - and not just lying - lying about things which seem obviously irrelevant.

This starts at the beginning of school with the alphabet. Because the kids know that they really don't need to sound out letters to recognize words - they've already been recognizing words for years. And it ends at university where students get knocked for "bad" citations even though every student knows that the only valuable citation is the hyperlink to where the source material lies.

To illustrate: On my last post an anonymous commenter said, "The idea of an illiterate pilot or paramedic is absolutely frightening. How, for example, can an illiterate person give the right dosage of the right medicine in an injection ("Quick, inject 30 ccs of morphine!" "Uhhhh....which one of these is morphine and how can I tell what 30 ccs is?")."

I have no way of knowing, of course, but this sure sounds like "an educator." An educator who lives in that bizarre self-constructed world of academics. Few otherwise might make the kinds of mistakes he or she makes.

Having worked, once upon a time, in emergency medicine, I can tell you that the last thing you want a paramedic doing is stopping to read the vial - perhaps sounding "mmmm-or-puh-hee-n" out phonetically. What you want is someone who knows what that vial looks like and feels like, and where it is, and can grab it every single time in, just as an example, a barely lighted corridor or a dark street corner with their eyes fixed on the patient. You even want someone who can eyeball 30 cc rather than taking the time to read the gradations. And you want the information flowing among the professionals in the clearest, easiest to understand communications system - which is whatever communications system the receiver prefers. Speak it to me, text it to him.

Mr. or Ms. Anonymous (or who knows? maybe Dr. Anonymous) actually thinks that we all operate daily in "book reading" form. But few of us do. We gather information multiple ways, we create meaning out of many things. We remember in many ways. And if people were really helping to help us learn, they would help us to find the paths we need to walk to know what we need to know.

But instead schools lie about how people learn and communicate, or, as the Anonymous commenter does (see, again, the post below), we insult. We say, "he's illiterate" and we limit his or her possibilities. We make things hard when we could be making them - if not easy - much easier. But we don't make the efforts because we're really, really bad at understanding each other. Instead, we're constantly trying to force our students to do it our way.

Could we do it other ways? Consider just a couple of ways of seeing things from the struggling end-users point of view:

Last week a student told me that when he is at home on line he copies the text of websites, pastes it into Word, and makes the letters big enough so that there are only a few words on a line. "then I don't get lost," he told me. "Wow," I said, "did they teach you that in school?" "No," he told me. "Do they let you do that in class?" I asked. "No," he said, "we don't use computers in class."

"I recognize a lot more words on paper since I've been using WYNN," a college student told me recently, echoing something I hear a great deal. "It really helps because I used to just freeze when I got to new words, but now I hear them and see them and it kind of goes all together."

"I made the keyboard labels with both upper and lower case letters on them," a teacher told me last year, "the kids love them. It has made a big difference."

"He's just been dictating to that computer for a week now," another teacher said about a fourth grader we'd armed with speech recognition. "He used to just sit there and throw things at the other kids, now he's completely engaged."

"Thanks for the Reading Pen," a nurse emailed me. "I don't run across stuff I struggle with often, but knowing that I can pull this out of my pocket and make sure I'm right makes a giant difference."

"You type faster on your phone," a friend told me. "Yeah," I said, "I love the word prediction, I don't worry about spelling." "Someone needs to develop a free iTap system for regular computers," he said.

"Thanks for turning me onto Jott," a social worker told me, "No one could ever read my handwriting before and so I'd have to come back from these field visits and type everything up. Now I just drive speaking into my headset, and I send the notes right to the secretary."

"I can't believe how much I've come to depend on audiobooks," a friend says, "My reading was getting limited because my eyes hurt at the end of the day. I never thought I'd be the one sitting with an iPod all evening, but that's what I do now."

Next time, when faced with a student who is struggling to do it "your way," think about this. Is "your way" really the only way? Can this student even see "your way"? Or is there a different way that's needed because the world looks different from "over there"?

- Ira Socol

The Drool Room by Ira David Socol, a novel in stories that has - as at least one focus - life within "Special Education in America" - is now available from the River Foyle Press through lulu.com

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Social Justice and Me

On Saturday I got tested.

I didn't want to do this, but the last reports that I have "documenting my disability" are over ten years old, and in the American social justice system, you need to prove you're "still a retard" far more often than that. After all, you might have "gotten smarter" in the intervening time. Not just me, of course, Americans want to re-certify blind people every few years ("haven't been to Lourdes lately, have you?") and those who cannot walk or those who have had a limb amputated. In the United States being humiliated once is never good enough, you need to do it periodically, to prove consistently your distance from normal, and then, if you fight hard enough, you'll be eligible for some basic human rights.

This is one of those things which proves America's commitment to equality.

I didn't want to do this, as I said, but a friend convinced me that I should at least, "have this report available." I'm in a battle with the university I attend regarding accommodations. This would be laughable considering I'm attempting to get degree with "Special Education" in the title, if it were not true: If a professor who wears eyeglasses without any special doctor's note or any university approval, weren't telling me that access to a text-to-speech system was only available if I could prove current disability, and prove it to the right people, and then explain why I needed that specific accommodation, and then had that accommodation approved.

So I spent about 3-1/2 hours Saturday working through what I used to call the "You're still a retard test." I guess I still call it that. For those unfamiliar with these tests, or who may have forgotten, this battery of tests are all "tests to failure." That is, they always keep you trying something until you can't do it, and can't do it repeatedly. So it's fairly impossible to feel good at the end of this process no matter who you are, or what you accomplish. Although this time, this time I ran right through the whole box of putting the picture story in the right order on the IQ test (in order to prove a "learning disability" you have to prove that you are not just "cognitively impaired," after all). I got them all right. "I do love picture stories," I told my girlfriend later as I drank it off at the nearest pub. A minor victory.

Of course about 25 minutes of that 3-1/2 hours was spent huddled over my "spelling test" with the assessor, trying to determine what, if any, words I had spelled correctly. "What's this letter?" he kept asking. I'd have to think about it, try to remember what I had written. In the end I think he decided that my spelling was superior to that of at least 3% of the population in my age group. Another vast period was spent battling with reading assessments. Which, yes, I got through, and, yes, I think I gave appropriate responses to most of. It's just that it took me some absurd length of time to read two pages of text, and left me sweating and shaking.

"I can read." I've said that lots of times. "It's just slow and hard." Does that mean, I wish to ask this professor, that I get the solution I need? or not? After all, what if I could prove that he could see his office door from his desk without glasses? Would that mean he wouldn't be allowed to wear them?

"And," I said Saturday evening to my girlfriend, "I can spell." And I can. "Just not handwriting it, then I get all confused." But then I've come to depend on the wonders of spellcheck and especially the amazing word prediction of iTap on my mobile keyboard, because that allows me to concentrate on writing, just as the be-spectacled professor relies on his optometrist's art so he is not struggling every minute to turn a blur into something recognizable.

But I don't make the rules. He does. The US was not founded by dyslexics, but lots of those founding fathers wore eyeglasses. So eyeglasses are normal. Eyeglasses aren't technology. But what I need are "special accommodations." What I need is "technology."

What I do with these test results remains an open question. I truly have to doubt the value of a "Special Education" degree from a university that thinks the way this university does, and, as I said in my Retard Theory post, sometimes open rebellion is the more important act.

But either way, it is crucial to consider what my little battle is about. It is especially crucial because of the way some have objected to my posts on Not Getting to Universal Design and Retard Theory. People write to me and say, "It is just ignorance," or "it is just incompetence," or "teachers just don't have the time to learn," or even "you'd be in worse shape in some other countries." They cannot conceive that what is happening is intentional.

Of course those who can not bring themselves to see it this way have generally been handicapped (yes! got the word in!) by an American education or an Asian education system copied from the American "Empire." In the American education system no one, not even really at university, learns anything about power. Americans are not supposed to think about power, or to discuss it. Power - in American myth - flows naturally to those who deserve it. If you are powerless it is because you deserve to be powerless. Bring up Marx or Gramsci and you'll probably be burned at the stake.

But I will argue that this is all about power and the maintenance of power. Every single time a method becomes more important than an accomplishment in education it is a battle for hegemony. Insisting that I read ink-on-paper rather than in the way I'm comfortable with, or even making it extremely difficult to read 'my way' (or requiring that I be labelled 'pathological' in order to read 'my way') is exactly the same as the Brits requiring Indians and Irish to speak English (or Americans doing the same to the Navajo and Sioux), and it is done for exactly the same reasons - to demonstrate power, to prove the superiority of one group over another, to control, to preserve the privilege of a self-appointed elite.

And if you argue that you are "preserving standards" or "enforcing norms" or "ensuring equality" or even that you are "simply trying to help me learn the right way," you are, "taking up the white man's burden," as Kipling put it. You are doing nothing more than clinging to your own power in your own world of comfort.

"Take up the White Man's burden--
Send forth the best ye breed--
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild--
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half-devil and half-child."

Americans, of course, have no idea that this was written about the United States' brutal colonial war against the Philippines, just as they have little understanding that their special education programs, their KIPP academies, their Teach for America programs, etc. all come out of the same spirit - "If we could only make you just like us, you'd be just fine."

But of course we know the subtext, from Kipling to KIPP, "You'll never really be quite like us, poor chap, but just keep trying. That'll keep you busy, and you won't be likely to rebel."

- Ira Socol

There are some fascinating conversations going on "out here" regarding these issues right now:

You'll want to read Ms. Mercer's Blog and What Do They Need? Part II and Part III.
and Paul Hamilton on Toolbelt Theory.
and Schooling Inequality on normal. and Schmozzle on normal.

The Drool Room by Ira David Socol, a novel in stories that has - as at least one focus - life within "Special Education in America" - is now available from the River Foyle Press through lulu.com

US $16.00 on Amazon

New! Digital version available through lulu.com

Look Inside This Book

Words

"The people up there said it was fascinating meeting you," she said. "Yeah?" I asked. "They said you suggested all kinds of things that they'd never thought of." "They're not good at looking." "No," she said, "they just don't know." "No, I guess they don't."

"Anyway," she continued, "one of them asked..." Her voice trailed off. Then she changed the subject. "What did one of them ask?" I asked.

It took three days to get the answer. "OK," she gave in. "One of them asked if you were Aspergers." "Maybe," I said. "Maybe I am." "Don't let it it get to you," she told me. "It isn't getting to me," I said, though it was. You work so hard on your "normal mask" at times, it's mighty frustrating when it doesn't work. "It isn't getting to me," I said again, "I have no idea where that line is and I don't give a f***."

Retard.

"You have many cutting edge provocative ideas. However, I am saddened that you could not find a way to express yourself without using offensive vocabulary. I believe you need to know how to effectively speak without hurting others and reinforcing myths and stereotypes. Please read Kathie Snow's article on People First Language, which can be found on her Disability is Natural website at www.disabilityisnatural.com. Thank you." - Anne Eason commenting on my May Day: Retard Theory post.

I told Anne that I didn't want to use "people first" language, which has always sounded 'diagnostic' to me. I'm not a "person with dyslexia" or whatever other 'diseases' certain powers that be decide that I have. When I get sick in winter I might be a "person with the flu." I have been, for example, "the patient with the severe allergic reaction." But my dyslexia, my attention 'issues,' whatever - those are not maladies that I "have." Those are identities which society has given me by declaring that I am not like them. So, just as I would not be "a person with Irishness," or perhaps, "a person with blackness (Africanness?)," I am not "a person with a disability." These terms are identity descriptors, existing because white, Protestant, male, heterosexual, normal people do not want to share their identity with me. So, if that label is so important to them, I will put that label first, thank you. Their slur becomes my badge of honor.

"[W]hat you are actually doing is perpetuating use of the word and presenting it as being OK for others to call you that since you are calling yourself "retard". It is not OK. It has been and continues to be a long hard battle to stop the use of this word. The people that want it stopped are the people who have been labeled and teased, the people who love them and the people who know it is wrong to talk to people like that. I understand where you are coming from, but what you are actually doing is perpetuating the use of the word toward the very people you want to stop labeling. I think that experience, which will come with time, will change your thinking." - anonymous commenting on my May Day: Retard Theory post.

I told anonymous that experience had brought me right to where I am now. I told her that I thought "Retard Theory" was as important an idea as "Queer Theory" and "Crip Theory." That the use of "that kind" of term was just as important. Of course, commenting on the same post Dave Hingsburger said, "Maybe this argument would work if the word applied to 'you' then it would have more power. Crip theory is often used by those with physical disabilities. 'Retard' refers to a specific population, I am guessing it's a population to which you do not belong. You cannot claim use of this word - it ain't yours." But damn, even if Dave doesn't want me to have the word, even if I wouldn't generally be described as having an "intellectual disability," or a "cognitive impairment" or whatever of those diseases people want to embrace, well... Dave, people don't say, "you can't read," to make fun of people like me and they don't say, "you can't sit still in class," and they don't say, "you have trouble with the rules of human interaction." They say, "retard." And they mean it.

Words have power, we either choose to own them or we choose not to.

"It has been and continues to be a long hard battle to stop the use of this word. The people that want it stopped are the people who have been labeled and teased, the people who love them and the people who know it is wrong to talk to people like that." anonymous said. But the word, well, there are lots of words...

And lots of words get used lots of ways.

'"All the other children at my school are stupid. Ex­cept I'm not meant to call them stupid, even though this is what, they are. I'm meant to say that they have learning difficulties or that they have special needs. But this is stupid because everyone has learning difficulties because learning to speak French or un­derstanding relativity is difficult and also everyone has special needs, like Father, who has to carry a little packet of artificial sweetening tablets around with him to put in his coffee to stop him from getting fat, or Mrs. Peters, who wears a beige-colored hearing aid, or Siobhan, who has glasses so thick that they give you a headache if you borrow them, and none of these people are Special Needs, even if they have special needs.

'"But Siobhan said we have to use those words because peo­ple used to call children like the children at school spaz and crip and mong, which were nasty words. But that is stupid too because sometimes the children from the school down the road see us in the street when we're getting off the bus and they shout, "Spe­cial Needs! Special Needs!" But I don't take any notice because I don't listen to what other people say and only sticks and stones can break my bones and I have my Swiss Army knife if they hit me and if I kill them it will be self-defense and I won't go to prison."' - Mark Haddon. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (2003. pp 43-44)

Here's the thing, for Anne, and Dave, and Anon, and anyone else who came through that post, objected, but didn't comment. If what you are fighting is "the word" all you will accomplish - if you win - is that the kids will "shout, "Spe­cial Needs! Special Needs!"' instead. And then, just as with "colored" and "negro" in US race relations, you'll have to unteach your new words.

That doesn't mean I want you to stop trying to get people to stop using "retard" that way, just as clearly identified gay activist groups would sure rather people stopped using, "that's so gay" as a general insult. But I do mean that if you accept the way "disability" is defined, if you accept the "medical model of disability," if you accept that diagnosis leads to accommodation rather than the idea that individual human rights leads to choices - If you participate in those systems without fighting them every day - your efforts regarding the word are worthless, because while you might change the word, you won't change the idea.

As for me, I want to take the word and "queer" it, as I want to take the idea of "normal" and queer that. As I want to use language, use argument, use action to make people doubt what they know - everything they know - about the ideas of disability and difference and human norms. It's this idea, taking the short bus and making it into a monster truck and using it to break down the walls.

Yes, words matter, and words can insult and hurt. And words can also have remarkable power when we own them, when we use them in ways our enemies don't expect, or in ways which teach new ways of seeing.

So, Dave, maybe I don't "qualify" by your diagnostic standards, or maybe I do, as some who've met me think. But I not only don't care what side of which of your arbitrary lines I lie on, I don't think the lines are real at all. I think the lines are your problem, and shouldn't be mine or anyone else's. And if upsetting a few people with a few words will help get people to listen to that argument, I'll use those words.

"I'm not following a plan written by a retard undergrad," the reported statement of a university administrator at one of my undergraduate institutions, responding to a "non-diagnostic" campus accessibility plan I had written.

Late addition: two other opinions on language and disability
From Diary of a Goldfish: The Language of Disability
From Wheelchair Dancer: On Making Argument: Disability and Language

- Ira Socol

The Drool Room by Ira David Socol, a novel in stories that has - as at least one focus - life within "Special Education in America" - is now available from the River Foyle Press through lulu.com

US $16.00 on Amazon

New! Digital version available through lulu.com

Look Inside This Book