Thoughts and Amusings

I think as Christians its all very well to spout out Micah 6:8 but I wonder how much we put it into practice. For me last year in my last teaching paper I had the chance to choose a research topic and I chose dyslexia. Unfortuantely for me I did not get a good mark, the reason why - Dyslexia was not recognised in the NZ education system as a recognised learning disability. This I thought was pretty poor as there are thousands of kids out there who have Dyslexia and who are not getting the help they needed all because the MOE had decided that 'labels' were not a good thing for kids. I.E. TEACHERS WERE NOT TAUGHT HOW TO HELP DYSLEXIC KIDS! So I made it my hobby horse telling anyone and everyone about it. It just so happened that around that time TV1 had a big thing about Dyslexia on its close up program and the fact that it wasn't officaily recognised, and the thing has been growing in momentum ever since. Anyway some great news has come through....

Dyslexia, that's d-y-s-l-e-x-i-a.

It's taken a while for the Ministry of Education to get its head around the word but affected families and the Dyslexia Foundation are celebrating long-sought recognition of the needs of those identified as having the reading and writing disability.

It came yesterday in the form of a statement titled "Ministry improves understanding of dyslexia".

After denying for decades that the condition existed, the ministry said it would put greater emphasis on assisting students who struggled with reading and writing, including those identified as dyslexic.

Anne Jackson, deputy secretary (schooling), said dyslexia was a term used to refer to a group of students with a range of persistent reading and writing difficulties or disabilities.

The Ministry of Education recognised that more needed to be done to identify such students as early as possible and to provide them with effective interventions based on their specific needs.

"We are also developing a resource for teachers that outlines strategies for working with students with reading and writing difficulties," Ms Jackson said.

She added that the ministry had recently completed an analysis of international research into dyslexia, looking at various international definitions of dyslexia as well as scientific attempts to locate and describe the causes and symptoms associated with it. - NZ HERALD