#if you have a dyslexia/ another processing issue or speak english as a second language you’re immediately forgiven for all of them though.

[five-crows-in-a-trenchcoat]

Guys I’ve got a question for you

[vergess]

About the 3 letter word reading problem- I hope reading disability is being considered, too. The teacher has a selection of children who are behind and struggling, the chance of undiagnosed reading disabilities is high. Dyslexia, for example. It's important teachers recognize when a child is struggling for so long a disability could be involved - help for such things is often more available to children than adults in the US, & the poor are least able to access help, especially as adults.

Yes, these types of disability are being considered. However, many of these disabilities require testing for the extremely basic skills that are no longer being taught in schools.

For example, testing for both visual disabilities and dyslexia involves identifying if the child is able to visually process the shapes and arrangements of letters.

So! What happens if children are not being taught what those letters are in the first place? Children whose primary difficulty in reading is a lack of learned skill will also fail those tests! But treatment for the dyslexia or visual disability, even where it does exist, will only partially resolve the actual problem.

The gap in basic skill is still there.

In fact, many English speaking Americans will only begin learning to read when they begin learning another language, because only then are they taught to relate letters to sounds.

Except, very few will learn another language in school.

And many at home learning apps assume you have certain basic literacy skills already.

So that isn't exactly a real solution.

Worse: this creates confounding difficulties for English as a Second Language (ESL) learners. Many of them, both children and adults, are very literate in other languages. But, not English. The knowledge of "how" to read in another language can help or hinder their reading skill in English. This is especially impacted by their spoken fluency in English outside the classroom.

These are just a few of the factors that make English literacy difficult to test with multilingual children. And, by adulthood, literacy rates tend to change very little. In many cases, this is because people age out of the school system and lose most opportunity to develop reading or research skills. Those who already learned these skills have them forever. Those who didn't learn them easily could, but the chances to be taught in a supportive way are gone.

Anyway! Back to disability.

Because people are being, often correctly, diagnosed with disabilities but previously completely effective treatments are no longer fully solving their literacy issues, we even create a false impression that disabilities are being "over diagnosed."

After all, if specialized glasses solve dyslexia's visual difficulties, but the kid still can't read then the glasses weren't the real issue. The child may very well be dyslexic, and the disability aid very necessary. But they still aren't being taught to read.

Worse still, we're actually under diagnosing. In spite of the illusion to the contrary!

These disabilities are often missed in people who perform specific testing tasks well.

For example: my own dyscalculia, which was undiagnosed in spite of my college level statistics training. It was easy to miss. I tested well. Spreadsheet formulas made more sense to me than basic arithmetic. So I got really good at them. I can operate graphing calculators like a freak.

I can't count past 13.

But I can count 12 zeroes. I know that if I'm multiplying absolutes, there will be the same total number of digits as there are both the numbers being multiplied. So I count them, not knowing what any of the digits are.

125x348 and ###x### look exactly the same to me. They're both going to make an answer that looks like ###,### or ##,###. If I focus, I can tell that these are smaller ones, so probably ##,###.

On a test, I can look for the multiple choice answer that has 5 digits. It will be the right one.

And I will have no idea what any of those numbers were. I had to tediously count ##,### to make sure it was 5 long, because I want to call it 2,3 and I can't remember that 2+3=5 because the numbers are already too fucking hard to look at.

But on anything more specific than a multiple choice, I need a calculator. In this case, the calculator says 43500. And that's 5 digits. Close enough to pass a test.

If anything we're still under diagnosing disabilities. However, we're also under treating them. Or, more correctly, we are not treating a confounding factor.

We have to teach kids to read to be able to treat reading disabilities.

And again, this is not a condemnation of teachers. Teachers often try to teach these skills, but are themselves prevented. Lawmakers and especially funding administration are to blame. No child should have a pass/fail test before age 10, only placement exams to determine their skill level for each subject they are being taught. If we want all children to have certain basic skills, then all of those skills need to be taught to the children based on their own demonstrated ability.

Not based on some arbitrary testing schedule that says kids by age 7 should be able to pass a test, or else their school is punished and the child forced into an even worse environment.

Mandatory testing is bad enough. Testing that adjusts funding based on a pass/fail rate is unspeakable. It's immoral. It actively punishes any school with a disabled student.