Been There, Done That
Today’s I conclude The OnTrack Reading Story on this site with a page titled Reconciling the Research Conflict.
My early indoctrination, and it was very nearly an indoctrination, into teaching methods for reading came from sources that emphasized phonics instruction. This was a clear backlash against the Whole Language methods that had taken over many classrooms including, by law, all of the classrooms of the state of California, in the last couple of decades of the Twentieth Century.
By the time I’d brought myself up to speed on the controversy I was nearly completely convinced that most reading problems were then being generated by inadequate, or wholly missing, phonics instruction in our classrooms. This is one of the side effects of wars, including the reading war of the time. People tend to choose sides. Unfortunately, vision problems weren’t even on the main battlefield of ideas.
Oh, the developmental optometrists along with a small subset of researchers in schools of optometry were publishing all right, but the main battle was Whole Language versus Phonics, and that battle drowned everyone else out. And I was right in the thick of the main battle, in the sense that all of my attention was drawn to it.
It was only through a fortuitous combination of events that I learned to appreciate the role of vision problems in generating poor readers, and possibly even underlying dyslexia. My Phono-Graphix trainers warned that some kids like that existed and even suggested that we find a reputable vision therapy department. But it was truly a fluke that the only developmental optometrist within 100 miles of my office was in the same city as my office. And it was an even bigger fluke that we ran into each other. And what if David had not appeared? After all, I’d worked with several children before David without suspecting vision problems (some of whose parents I later called back to explain the possibility that we might have overlooked a vision issue, by the way.)
So, if you’re convinced that it’s all phonics and auditory issues, I’m here to tell you “been there, done that.” The page I’ve added today details the lengths to which I went after I started to question my initial assumptions, which I now believe to have been wrong, so take a look at Reconciling the Research Conflict.