Recently, in Janet Steffenhagen’s blog, she shared with the readers an email sent to her by a mother whose child is learning disabled. What followed was a great deal of heated discussion and even I submitted a post to support this “long suffering” mom, Teresa Corsie. To make a long story short, basically, Teresa’s son had a terrible time in public school and was not getting appropriate help. Finally, the parents took him to James Cameron, a school specializing in teaching children with learning disabilities. Now the child is doing well.

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As I sat in my office thinking over the details for my office dedication ceremony tomorrow, I couldn’t help thinking about the words of St. Augustine…

“Hope has two beautiful daughters: their names are anger and courage. Anger that things are the way they are. Courage to make them the way they ought to be.”

It was back in 1998 that I had a direct confrontation with some school administrators because of my friend’s son. The vice principal of the school basically told me that “even if the boy had dyslexia – whatever that was – there was nothing they could do about it.” I was angry about the attitude displayed by this vice principle. In fact, I was so angry that, years later, I ended up with a Ph.D. from UBC specializing in learning disabilities.

I honestly hope that mis-diagnosed cases of ESL children with a language-based learning disability such as dyslexia will be more and more rare in future. There is a lot of work ahead of us. My friend, Dr. Susan Kwan, a board member at SUCCESS, is a supporter for educating the public about dyslexia. This April, I will be speaking at the Dyslexia Conference organized by Dr. Kwan for the Chinese speaking public. I will share more details here at my blog as the information becomes available.

In today’s fast-paced and quickly changing world, as professionals, we have to keep current constantly or we risk becoming “Dino the Dinosaur,” grinning a silly grin as the world passes him by because he hasn’t been keeping up. Of all the information processing skills that humans possess, reading is the most basic skill to have for navigating our text-based world. If you cannot read, you are very limited in what you can do. True, we can have the computer read to us nowadays, thanks to visionary-inventors like Kurzweil. However, it is so much more convenient being able to read without any high-tech aids. And this is what gets me up every morning. I have a passion for teaching children and adult alike to learn how to read.

I love books and I love reading. I feel very bad for those who cannot read because their inability to read prevents them from being able to obtain and assess information for learning. It seems that the more “basic” the skill, the more crucial it is for us to master it. Perhaps that is why, for computer programmers, the more basic the programming, the more they get paid. Without the basic processes in place, the computer cannot run the more sophisticated processes. At least, that is how my friend and colleague, Cecil, explains the work that his wife does! Similarly, without mastering basic reading skills, one cannot go on to learn content in the various branches of knowledge. It really sets one back as a learner when he or she cannot read.

If 21st century students are to take advantage of George Siemens’s connectivist ideas in learning, they must be proficient readers. True, there are educational podcasts available, and one can take in information by hearing; however, text-based information enables one to glance and quickly “get the point,” so to speak. This made me think that we, those who are involved in doing research in the science of reading, have an important task. Without the ability to read, making “connections” in the academic world would be extremely difficult if not next to being impossible.