Dyslexia & Learning Deficit Disorders

The Learning Deficit Disorders > Dyslexia

Kinkajou : Let’s look at how dogma in medicine blinds us to new ways of thinking and blinds us to seeking new solutions.

School and Learning Difficulties

Kids Paill Symptoms differ from Adults Children with Paill Spectrum predominantly show symptoms that show retarded mental development.

Erasmus : Failing at school is all too easily blamed on the teachers, the kids being stupid or a failure on the part of the parents.

Dr. Xxxxx : The Paill Spectrum model of disease says that one of the most important factors in education is how illness affects the minds and memory of the children in the classroom. Scrambled memory due to neural short circuits in the Paill Spectrum model is a far better explanation for the deficits observed in children at school.

Children can't remember sequences of symbolic logic (e.g. Numbers are a perfect example of independent logic symbol sequences). This leads to problems reading, problems writing and problems learning.

How can you learn to read when "bat tad dat pat bot tod pot top" all look the same to the pattern recognition senses in your brain. Words begin to blur into each other and spelling becomes difficult. B vs. P vs. D vs. G (bpdg) all look much the same and significant neural processing cycles need to be used by the child's brain to differentiate these letters when a normal brain recognizes the pattern instantly and perfectly.

Erasmus : Using the Paill Spectrum model, means that the progression of the learning problems and school difficulties or dyslexia can be altered. The future can be as you chose to make it for yourself or your children. Normal non-medical parents can change many aspects of their children's symptoms and signs of educational failure. An understanding of the process involved in causing these deficits in the children suggests new quick and easy assessment techniques that can be used to diagnose and to monitor progress of the disease over months to years.

Teacher at School Bad teachers are not the real cause of bad students.

Kids Falling Behind at School?

Kinkajou :If your children are doing badly at school, in this day and age, everyone looks for someone to blame. Common statements would be:

The kids may not be very bright.
The teacher is not very good.
The parents aren’t supervising the child’s homework.
The parents are not teaching the child good behaviour, which is why the children play up so much at school and are doing so badly at school.
The textbooks are useless.
The child needs more help and individual tuition.
The teacher is too busy to help my child.
The education system is letting my child down. etc.!

Very few people consider the problems from the child’s perspective. In the Paill Spectrum scenario: Yes, the child is not learning, but No it’s not really anyone's fault. Furthermore a number of simple strategies can make a big long term difference to the child's success at school, in learning and in reading.

Some children have severe memory problems. Other children have problems recognizing words, have poor spelling and often substitute letters. Many children fail to succeed because their medical circumstances do not allow them to succeed.

The dyslexia test.

Dr. Xxxxx : How do I Know if my Child has a Problem?

Commonly, many children develop failures in brain processing of information. For example, children may often be given complex instructions of which they can only remember to do the last thing they have been told, having forgotten what the rest of the instructions were.

An example, I saw once was a child who was wandering around the classroom annoying other children and was receiving detentions and punishments for his behaviour. The mother said that the teacher had told the child to open his exercise book, get a pencil from the back of the room and then answer the questions on the blackboard. Oh, yes, you’ll need the English textbook to read the story.

Consider these instructions from the child’s point of view. All they remember is that they need to answer the questions from the blackboard. They don’t know what it is that they need to answer the questions about because they either have not linked the story they have been reading with the questions on the blackboard or did not remember enough of the story they have been reading to realize that the questions on the blackboard relate to this particular story.

Alternatively, their word recognition is poor so that they are completely confused as they don’t understand the story at all.

They don’t know that they have to open the exercise book so don’t know where to write the answers down. They don’t have a pencil in any case.
These children are unable to process instruction sequences, either in memory or in memory sequences.

This process in the Paill Spectrum theory is likely to be reversible.

What does this child do at this point in time? (Having received the complex list of what to do?). Exactly what the child does, in fact, do. Wander around the room annoying other kids because they have become completely lost in terms of what they are supposed to do.
They are not bad kids. They are kids with very severe unrecognized problems.

Dr. Xxxxx : How Can I Assess This Type of Problem in A Child? Dyslexia Dyslexic children process speech symbols with much greater difficulty than normal kids.

The traditional assessments of this learning difficulty involves a complex assessment of a number of learning skills and takes a trained health professional at least an hour to administer. Fees involved are often high. The result is "sort of useful” but nothing really can be done specifically to fix the problems found. Many specialists assess the child and strange descriptive terms like “dyspraxia” may finally be settled on as a diagnosis. Everyone seems to find diagnosis difficult and there don't seem to be any specific treatments.

The Paill Spectrum disease model proposes a "rapid screening test" able to be administered by an untrained person and able to be administered to an entire classroom or group of children in minutes.

Goo: I can do it!

There are very specific patterns of response that emerge when these tests are done.

The test is a number recall test, not a spelling or word recall test. There are good but simple reasons for this. In words there are complex sets of rules that may predict what letters should appear in a word.

In number recall, every number is an independent number. It is just as likely that any number can be in any position, so that pattern recognition or recall or learning is not tested. What is tested is innate or “brain hard wired” speech symbol processing ability.

Writing Problems in Paill Spectrum Typical Dyslexic writing

Dr. Xxxxx : Results Of a Test: Interpretation

Children who have problems will:
Write their numbers back to front or upside down.
Recall only a few of string of numbers: i.e. forget a lot of numbers
Have characteristic patterns of number substitutions e.g. the first and last numbers in a sequence may be swapped or alternately the fourth and fifth numbers in a sequence will often be swapped.
More importantly, response to therapy will be obvious in the
Quality and number of correct answers in this test.
Kids who are getting better will be seen to be getting better, By anyone who bothers to do a 2-minute assessment test.

Response sheets from the past can be easily compared to response sheets in the present.

In children with problems, it is worthwhile to watch the child doing the test. Hesitation and difficulty in doing the task tell a story also. As children improve they become faster and more confident in their responses.