Education Where Things Are Now & Looking Ahead To Fall Semester [Premium]

Education Where Things Are Now & Looking Ahead To Fall Semester [Premium]

by | Jul 4, 2021 | , , , , , , , ,

As expected, many students have experienced learning loss because of school changes related to the pandemic. As new cases fall and immunizations rise, school plans begin to take shape.   Although some educational reports have tried to take a rosy picture of the pandemic’s effect on education, learning loss appears to be worldwide with the widest losses among lower socioeconomic groups, Blacks and Hispanics, and students with disabilities.     The research firm McKinsey & Company found that learning loss during the pandemic average 6.8 months for K-12 students. In order to make up for losses, the report recommended at minimum 50 hours of targeted instruction over a two week period. Many states put waivers on dyslexia screening, teacher training, and intervention requirements due to […]

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Tech Executive Justin Johnson [Premium]

Tech Executive Justin Johnson [Premium]

by | Jul 4, 2021 | , , , , , ,

“One of the things I love about startups is I get to engage the strategic thinking part of my brain across a broad set of things…”   John Edgar introduced me to Justin from Macrometa and he shared his career and dyslexia story with me: “What I do now is, I work in a very early stage startup. So I do a lot of different things. Part of it’s visual, I manage user experience. With UX UI, or Developer Console, our company is kind of like cloud computing, like Amazon Web Services. We just have a little different play on it, where we do a lot of similar things to what Amazon does, we just do it all distributed across multiple locations, and we manage […]

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Why Many Dyslexics Thrive in Technology [Premium]

Why Many Dyslexics Thrive in Technology [Premium]

by | Jun 27, 2021 | , , , , , ,

In every year that we’ve had our college scholarships program, technology majors have been among the winners. Dyslexic innovators are also often tech innovators themselves or innovators at the boundaries of technology and people. But why is this?   There are many reasons, but certainly one central reason is that technology is a particularly adept at compensating for the greatest challenges that dyslexics face, while requiring the strengths that creative human problem solvers bring. The net result is a dyslexic innovator who can solve real human needs, while recognizing how they must leverage their own strengths. Thomas G. West, author of In the Mind’s Eye: Creative Visual Thinkers, Gifted Dyslexics, and the Rise of Technology, has lamented the fact that much of the education today […]

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Inspiration: Tech Executive John Edgar

Inspiration: Tech Executive John Edgar

by | Jun 20, 2021 | , , , , , , , , ,

As Chief Technology Evangelist and VP of Strategy at Digital Ocean, John Edgar helped grow the company from #1000 to #2 cloud provider in the world (second only to Amazon). How did he do it and how did he arrive at the top of his profession in technology, after leaving high school feeling as if he could never get accepted as a computer science major? Look at John’s references on LinkedIn today and you’ll see some impressive recommendations from tech industry leaders. For example: “In the year that John and I worked together at DigitalOcean, he transformed from growing the tech evangelism team from nascent to one of the company’s most critical and lucrative marketing channels, to a self driven one man fixer who successfully […]

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Starting from the Positive Side of Dyslexia [Premium]

Starting from the Positive Side of Dyslexia [Premium]

by | Jun 20, 2021 | , , , , , , , ,

Last week I had a chance to talk with Aillie McKeever of the Schwab Learning Center at Stanford. In 2019, before COVID pandemic had fully taken hold here in the US, Stanford’s Schwab Center had decided to prioritize strengths in their approach to each and every student. They announced a “paradigm shift” to a strength’s based model of education. Every student would have a folder with a strengths section included in their assessment. Neurolearning shared its MIND Strengths Questionnaire with the center to examine the impact on students there. From Aillie: “In 2019, the MIND Strengths questions were included in this interview for every new student. Doing this seems to amplify students’ recognition of their strengths. As Learning Specialists leading the interviews, we noticed that […]

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The Double Whammy: Dyscalculia and Dysgraphia [Premium]

The Double Whammy: Dyscalculia and Dysgraphia [Premium]

by | Jun 20, 2021 | , , , , , , , ,

What happens when a student has both dyscalculia and dysgraphia? Be prepared for an educational path that has a timing of its own. Dysgraphia often accompanies dyslexia, but dyscalculia too. If you or your student has two or three out of these 3 “d’s” be prepared for a challenging course and a need for individualization for many years. The most typical presentation for dyscalculia relates to students who have trouble mastering the sequence of numbers and recall of basic math facts. When dysgraphia gets added to the mix, you can imagine how it may swamp working memory, causing students to lose track when they work through math problems. In a very real sense having both dyscalculia and dysgraphia also robs students of being able to […]

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Dyslexia and Bilingualism [Premium]

Dyslexia and Bilingualism [Premium]

by | Jun 20, 2021 | , , , , , , ,

There are many bilingual or multilingual families who are also navigating a path through dyslexia. Bilingual students with dyslexia usually have similar problems in both languages, but some languages are “easier” to learn if the phonology and spelling are more predictable. So functionally, it is possible for a student to appear dyslexic in one language, but not so dyslexic in another. The focus of this article, is not whether a student should elect to learn a second language, and if so, when, but rather what challenges and potential benefits that bilingual dyslexic students do have to look forward to if they ultimately master two languages and also have their dyslexia remediated. LATER BLOOMING If dyslexic students as a group are considered late blooming in general […]

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Quick or Slow Remediation? [Premium]

Quick or Slow Remediation? [Premium]

by | Jun 13, 2021 | , , , , , , , , , , ,

The learning challenges of dyslexia can be very mild or quite severe, but the severity of challenges are not the sole determination of whether remediation will be quick or slow. Once we visited an elite private school for dyslexia on the East Coast. Their aim to get students through their program in 2 years, in part, was successful. The school had solid training of its teachers and great resources, but the program was not unlike other structured literacy programs. Why was it that they could get students through so fast with their programs? Part of the answer was the strict criteria they had for student admission. With a long waitlist for spots, they had decided to accept to their program only students who had strong […]

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Algebra: What Students See and What Mathematicians See [Premium]

Algebra: What Students See and What Mathematicians See [Premium]

by | Jun 13, 2021 | , , , , , , , ,

  Ben Orlin is the author of Math with Bad Drawings and Change is the only Constant: The Wisdom of Calculus in a Madcap World.       Besides have a good sense of humor, Ben is good at recognizing the differences in the way students and mathematicians see math problems. Take for example, the math problem, What is 7 x 11 x 13. What goes through your mind when you see a problem like that? I reach for my calculator, or might try 7 x 11 first, then look for a pen a paper, but what Ben suggests is that mathematicians imagine this.   The following examples Ben shared about Algebra had me laughing aloud:   The mathematician’s simplification involves recognizing a pattern. But […]

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Writing: Elaboration [Premium]

Writing: Elaboration [Premium]

by | Jun 13, 2021 | , , , , , , , ,

If you were to compare dyslexic and non-dyslexic university students in writing, it’s usually the case, that on average, dyslexic students write fewer words and fewer words that are polysyllabic. The reasons are several; slowness with word retrieval, writing, and spelling, organizational challenges, and working memory overload are likely contributors. Because multisyllabic words are more challenging phonemically, not only are they harder to recognize and remember while reading, but also they are harder to spell.   THE BIG PICTURE OF ELABORATION The big picture of elaboration is that you want writers to fall in love with words, whether it’s a beautiful passage evoking imagery, or funny turn of phrase, or incisive argument. Students who are the easiest to cultivate as great writers are those who […]

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