The End...Chapter 9

Surprising isn't it that we learned to write from a set of token symbols? Less than 6,000 years ago a culture invention changed the way the brain is connected to itself and even more surprising and interesting is the brain moved beyond itself and enlarged its functions and intellectual capacities. Learning to read ignites how the brain learns news skills and contributes to the intelligence. The brain rearranges the circuits and connections in the middle of older structures; it takes advantages of being able to commit areas to specialization, especially pattern recognition. It shows how new circuits can become automatic that more "cortical time and space" (p. 216) can be given to other more difficult thought processes.

"Each brain of each ancestral reader had to learn to connect multiple regions in order to read symbolic characters. Each child today must do the same thing. Young novice readers around the globe must learn how to link up all the perceptual, cognitive, linguistic, and motor systems necessary to read. These systems, in turn, depend on utilizing older brain structures, whose specialized regions need to be adapted, pressed into service, and practiced until they are automatic."

So that all the above can happen, without genetic transmission related to reading, unmistakable learning and teaching must happen in a very short amount of time. Our ancestors took about 2,000 years to develop an alphabetic code, children are expected to "crack the code" in about 2,000 days which is about six or seven years of age.

Once we as a society start to recognize how difficult it is for a young brain to learn how to read we can start to help and teach individual children. Some require need more help than others with one or more parts of reading. More we learn and understand about those parts we more effective we will be as teachers to all children. With this type of insight we truly realize there is no "one size fits all" type of teaching.

Dyslexia has a messy mix of genetic "talents and cultural weaknesses", that represents human diversity. This diversity dyslexia gave us "Picasso's Guernica, Rodin's Thinker, Gaudi's La Pedrera and Leornardo's Last Supper these are real and expressive and created by individuals who were dyslexic. The sadness is that no one sees it fit to tell children with dyslexia about these individuals. They sit in their classrooms struggling, embarrassed, humiliated school year after school year despite all their creative highly intelligent brain. No one tells their peers, no one informs them just what kind of individual they are and just what it is they are dealing with. As teachers it is up to us to alleviate these pressures and educate children that do not know and most importantly find better, different ways to teach this kind of brain to learn to read.

Neuroscience is focused on finding applications that will intercept the brain and help it to learn to read. The more we all know about the reading brain and the dyslexic brain the more we are able to help.

I chose to end my blog directly the way the author ended her book. "A book about how our species learned to leap beyond the text shouldn't have a last sentence. Gentle readers, it is all yours. . . ." (p. 229)