| Wednesday,
April 19, 2000 Cleanup after the rain, kitchen painting,
and taxes. Then I have to build a couple of new machines. Life goes on...
And this from a reader:
try www.fas.org/irp/overhead/groom.htm
, I didn't have any luck at the
servers either, but this works!
Mark K. Smith
And Mr. Dobbins found this link regarding the physician who diagnosed
Elian: http://www.drudgereport.com/matt.htm
See also mail I don't
regularly read Drudge, thanks to readers who find things for me...
as well as this on the Canadian hacker:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20000419/aponline124953_000.htm
And we finally know the origin
of the Rocket Car Web Legend.
I wrote the following disquisition on DYSLEXIA as
a contribution to a discussion group; it seems to have survived some
criticism by people I respect. It's not really a stand-alone essay but it's
close enough. The original topic was why dyslexia was not bred out of the
human race (Greg Cochran is part of the discussion group). There had been
some speculation on what advantage if any dyslexia might confer in a
non-reading society. This essay is now also found in Reports.
DYSLEXIA
The first thing is to agree on what "dyslexia"
"is". In our reading
consulting work "dyslexic" means a child that the local
public school could not teach to read. The local school is likely to be
using some "modern" system of "whole language"
instruction that does not involve systematic phonics and considers
systematic instruction to be "drill and kill".
(It would be amusing to see how well inability to do math correlates
with the diagnosis of dyslexia; many schools no longer require the
addition and multiplication tables to be memorized by rote, greatly
slowing the arithmetical progress of the students; such schools tend also
to non-systematic "reading" instruction, treating English as an
ideographic language. That produces a lot more 'dyslexics' than do schools
that use 'drill and kill' systematic phonics and 'sound it out'
instruction.)
The people I have known who are truly dyslexic - who really and truly
have problems seeing the difference between dog and god, bod and dob, and
other conventional reversal letters - have tended to have other
neurological problems, and I cannot think any of that is an advantage. In
at least two cases the aetiology is birth trauma; I don't say there might
not also have been an hereditary element, but the simple explanation is
that they were damaged by forceps delivery.
True dyslexia is quite rare. There are pseudo dyslexias, that are
fairly easily overcome by training pupils to use alternate sensory
modalities, such as 'writing it in the air', and even saying the word one
letter at a time before trying to decode it. And of course there were
dozens of cases of dyslexia cured in my wife's school by giving the kids
spectacles: they were so astigmatic that it was no wonder they couldn't
read. They couldn't see the letters.
The usual 'dyslexic' is a kid the teacher gave up on, and may or may
not have any systematic neurological problems. So before you erect a
theory of the natural advantages to dyslexia, think on a definition of
what dyslexia 'is' and how you diagnose it.
Lionel Tiger then asked if I
"would turn my laser" on ADD, and this was the result:
Well, I have less expertise on ADD than "dyslexia" simply
because it hardly existed when we were active in correcting "learning
problems" (which now seem to be "learning disorders"). So
far as I can tell, a great number of the cases of ADD translate into
"In school while being a normal boy", i.e., "we're having
trouble teaching this kid self-control, we're not allowed to whack him a
few as they did to you when you were an unruly kid in Capleville, so we
are going to drug hell out of him."
Having raised four boys to manhood without losing any to the
police, drugs, or madness, and without having drugged any of them, I can
tell you that boys need a heck of a lot of imposed disciple so that they
can learn self-discipline; something that I am sure comes as no surprise
to an anthropologist but seems to be a major shock to most of those in the
"social sciences" and "human sciences". I have noticed
that a lot of bright kids are drugged as ADD, and they become a great deal
tamer, but they also lose a lot of what we prize bright kids for.
When they integrated my wife's school (a county detention school
formerly all girls) she
got a lot of boys who would be diagnosed as ADD today, but the County
didn't at that time believe in drugging its wards and tried not to do it.
She managed to teach them without drugs.
I do not know of a good unbiased study of ADD. I know of thousands
whose conclusions were known before the study was done, or which use such
sloppy methodology that no conclusion could be drawn. It's a hard
experiment to design; but is it reasonable to assume that in 30 years we
have gone from an unrecognized problem to one requiring us to drug over
20% of the boys in school? It does not seem reasonable to me.
I do know that it is a
lot easier to drug kids than it is to teach them self-discipline. I also
suspect that the threat (with actuality if needed but the threat is
usually sufficient) of corporal punishment seems to help a lot in teaching
self-discipline: the kids need something to be afraid of. When I was young
we were seldom beaten whipped or otherwise struck, but we were somewhat
afraid of it, and more, we could use that fear with our peers: "I'd
love to do that with you but my folks would beat me to a pulp." Of
course they wouldn't beat me to a pulp, but by putting forth something we
all legitimately feared, we had a good reason not to put bags of burning
dog-turds on the neighbor's front porch and do other things that we
thought would be a very good thing to do except that the consequences
would be severe. And "being grounded" wasn't a big threat at
least not in WW II when it wasn't possible to "ground" farm
kids, and in high school when few of us had cars or access to cars in the
first place.
I suspect but can't prove that the explosion in cases of ADD correlates
with the total abandonment of corporal punishment for boys (and yes I know
that this sort of thing can be over-done. I have read Tom Brown's School
Days and other such stories; I can only say that in my time we were
terrified of the Sisters in early grades, the teachers in middle school,
and the Brothers in high school, but I know of no one actually harmed by
these "child abusers"...)
And I don't need abusive letters from psychiatrists who seem to think I
want nothing more than a chance to flog children. My point was that
teaching self-discipline requires a credible and effective deterrent to
the behavior you are trying to get them to extinguish. Mere withdrawal of
privileges and rewards is sometimes effective but not often. Kids know
what you will and will not do. Also, punishments that require a great deal
of wasted time are time wasters, while assigning academic work as
punishment is very likely to teach an obvious lesson we don't want taught.
A whack with a wide belt or ping pong paddle is mildly painful but no more
so than boy get daily in their normal course of life; it is over with
swiftly; and it is credible.
Let me emphasize again: teaching self-discipline is work for both the
teacher and the pupil. It is one of the hardest lessons for bright,
active, young boys to learn. It is also one of the most important.
Drugging them does not teach them much other than lessons about drugs; it
certainly does not teach mastery of urges.
I have no magic solution to this, but my wife tells me that in LA
County at least the drug companies are getting rich, more than a quarter
of the kids are drugged, and the situation is getting worse, not better.
I see a lot of mail about who is and is not
"fit" and "unfit" in the Elian Gonzalez case. I
haven't any data. Some say "The Miami relatives are unfit,"
because they taped the boy at what appears to be 1 AM. I don't see
anyone discussing their alternatives: the DOJ was threatening to take him
at any time (which probably would mean in the wee hours, with SWAT teams,
judging by the Federal Performance at Waco and drawn guns at the Vitamin
Research bust); I can understand if not agree with a desperate attempt to
get something on tape before that happened. But of course I am
speculating, and don't know.
Apparently some of the relatives have been arrested for DUI. If that
automatically makes on an unfit parent, we wouldn't have enough orphanages
and foster homes to accommodate the resulting flow. I have no idea of how
"fit" or "unfit" the Miami relatives are, just as I
have no way of knowing how one would grow up in a dictatorship with the
spotlight of news attention that will be focused on this boy. I do know
that the Miami relatives can, if they want, protect him to some extent
from the media, and I doubt that can be said of the father in Cuba.
The more I think on this the more I wish we had a Petition
of Right. And perhaps that will happen yet.
And on Freefind, so far
most comments are positive.
Long hike and a breakthrough. I now know how the next Janissaries book
ends. It surprised me. It will surprise you, too. It's a very complex plot.
Now to apply everything I know about the superiority of combined arms armies
against inferior commanders with better weapons.
And more frustrations. Does anyone know a WEB PAGE I can GO TO that has
on it the file names of the Techweb broadcasts, so I can drag one over to
GetRight and allow it to download so I can LISTEN to it? I get links to
the files but when I click on them the egregious, execrable, abominable,
horrible, and useless RealAudo thing pops up, intercepts, downloads a
little, plays a little, and stops. I hate that thing. It might be all
right if I could shut it up until the whole file is downloaded, but I have
been unable to figure out how to make it do that, and I hate it.
I cannot find a place with FILE NAMES of the broadcast files so I can
DOWNLOAD them. I presume they exist, but the references I am always sent
just have this long URL that when I click I get RealAudio. Hope
springs eternal and I let it try, and it ALWAYS craps out, having wasted
all my time, and stops. If I could just download the file....
OK, sometimes it works. But I'd rather just download the files. I think
I had better dig into the preferences, which turn out to be under VIEW in
the pull down menu. Maybe there is a way to make it do things in a nicer
way. It plays good when it plays, but that's not often.
TOP
|
CLICK HERE for
a Special Request. 
