Patti's Blog - Advocate for Elders, People with Disabilities and Their Families

Recent Research Points to Better Math and Reading Test Scores for Readers With Disabilities Who Use Audiobooks

Excerpt from: Learning Ally (click for full article)

 

Students with print disabilities who have access to audiobooks significantly outperform their peers in math tests, according to a recent study conducted by the national nonprofit Learning Ally, the nation’s leading provider of accessible audiobook learning resources for students with disabilities such as dyslexia and visual impairment. The study reinforces the organization’s recent findings that audiobook resources bolster student performance in reading.

Decoding Dyslexia: How a New Jersey Parents' Group Started a Movement

Excerpt from: Huffington Post (click for full article)

 

One group of parents in New Jersey decided to do something to address these issues. Just a little over a year ago, twelve parents met in a local library in central New Jersey to launch Decoding Dyslexia-New Jersey. This group came together with the ambitious mission to "raise dyslexia awareness, empower families to support their children and inform policy-makers on best practices to identify, remediate and support students with dyslexia in NJ public schools." These parents knew that if they continued to see their challenges as unique and personal, there was a slim chance that the situation for dyslexic children and their families would change. Galvanized by their common struggles, they endeavored to change their state laws so that children like theirs could get the education that they deserved.

One should never underestimate a group of determined parents.

Video: Dyslexia: A Landmark Case

Excerpt from: National Center for Learning Disabilities (click for full article)

 

“I would love to be able to read the way you read. I’d like to pick up a book and just be able to read—because I don’t know that experience,” Dr. Marilyn Bartlett, a professor of law and education, said to us recently, with tears in her eyes.

Dr. Bartlett, who has dyslexia, was denied accommodations for the bar exam. She filed a lawsuit to fight for her rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990—and won!

Her story is informative and inspiring. So inspiring, in fact, that Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor once made a dramatic statement about Dr. Bartlett. Don’t miss this incredible video interview.

Author's childhood with dyslexia, stories on deaf community lead to book about children who have little in common with their parents

Excerpt from: Media dis&dat (click for full article)

 

Andrew Solomon’s enormous new book, “Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity,” is about children who are born or who grow up in ways their parents never expected. It’s a subject Mr. Solomon knows from experience. He was dyslexic as a child and struggled to learn to read. As he described in “The Noonday Demon,” which won a National Book Award in 2001, he once suffered from crippling, suicidal depressions. And Mr. Solomon is gay, which made his parents so uncomfortable that as a teenager he visited sexual surrogates in the hopes of “curing” himself. 

Mr. Solomon, 49, is also different — different from most writers, anyway — in that he is independently wealthy and lives in baronial splendor in a West Village town house that once belonged to Emma Lazarus, who, though she wrote about those poor, huddled masses, was not herself among them. The book party for “Far From the Tree” was held not in some editor’s cramped Upper West Side apartment but at the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Mr. Solomon has recently been named a trustee.

His other great discovery, he added, was joy. He had been prepared to encounter sadness in the families he visited; what surprised him was how much love there was. “This book’s conundrum,” he writes, “is that most of the families described here ended up grateful for experiences they would have done anything to avoid.” 

Reviewing “Far From the Tree” in The Times, Dwight Garner said, “This is a book that shoots arrow after arrow into your heart.” But it’s also a frightening and disturbing book. Its chapters are a vivid catalog of all the things that can go wrong in giving birth to and then bring up a child, and also raise difficult ethical questions: whether it’s proper to give cochlear implants to deaf children or to subject dwarfs to painful limb-lengthening surgery, for example.