Making the Words Stand Still: A Master Teacher Tells How to Overcome Specific Learning Disability, Dyslexia, and Old-Fashioned Word Blindness

by Donald Lyman

An influential master teacher details his own struggle with dyslexia and presents an innovative, effective approach to helping the learning-disabled

272 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1988

Reviews

[Jen]

This book was interesting . . . he obviously has a lot of experience teaching at-risk kids who really needed help learning to read. But I didn't really feel like the book gave much instruction beyond a couple anecdotes. It felt mostly like his reflections on his years teaching and on why some kids' brains just work differently. It was written in 1985, and at that time our current understandings of learning disabilities and developmental disorders were very different - he kind of groups everything under the label "Specific Learning Disability."

His understanding of what's happening with such kids (and he was one, himself) is that they think more in pictures and ideas, they relate most to the physical world - and the task of translating their world into symbols (ABC) and words to learn to read and write just doesn't come naturally to them. Here's a quote:

"Learning-disabled children must learn symbolic/semantic language. How do you help a child who has little difficulty visualizing and understanding concrete reality make the quantum jump to visualizing and understanding a string of symbols? It took millennia for mankind in general to make the jump. The learning-disabled child has only a few years at most to become acculturated in a literate society, and he will often become an awful problem to himself and society if he does not." (p. 74)

His idea here is that when you view human development over the course of millions of years, and the fact that we've only been recording thoughts with writing and learning to read for like 5,000 of those years, it stands to reason that some people aren't naturally adept at learning what is actually a new adaptation. Which is actually an interesting idea.

So overall, an interesting view into this guy's career as a teacher and thoughts about learning disabilities, but this isn't going to give you a lot of SPECIFIC instruction in helping someone overcome dyslexia.

[Brenda · Rating 4 out of 5]

This has been thus far the best book about dyslexia I have read. The one downside is that the author frequently cites remarks from his students verbatim - some of them use foul language (that is why I gave it four stars versus five - the author could have edited out their language when citing his students). If you can handle the language and realize it's how some people deal with frustrations, you will see past it that this is a great book.

I found the chapters about the mind-brain very intriguing. I would definitely recommend this book to any who wants to understand the dyslexic child and wants to know how to help him/her.