Last week we had the pleasure of hosting Laughton King, from Whangarei, a well-known speaker on dyslexia.
As well as presenting a parenting seminar about his "With Not Against" approach to parenting, Laughton facilitated workshops for teachers and parents specifically about what dyslexia is, and how we need to be thinking about it for the children and adults that are affected by this learning preference.
We thought you might like to have a taste of what he shared, the parents and students that met with him certainly related to this message. Picture this: My diesel-fuelled bulldozer has been carefully designed and engineered for a certain purpose. It does not need to be rewired, recalibrated nor otherwise "fixed" - it will work perfectly as long as I fuel it with the diesel it was designed for. My bulldozer is not in any way deficient, nor is my digger, my tractor nor my truck. Neither is my brain.
Consider that the child who thinks predominantly in pictures (the classic "dys-lexic") is like a diesel engine - and needs to be fuelled with diesel. But, in that our schools are orientated around language function (a style we could liken to petrol) they are like petrol stations, supplying good quality petrol - but they don't do diesel.
My personal experience, and that of many diesels ("dys-lexics") like me, is that the very system used by our schools to educate us (language), has been the direct cause of our failure.
