Opto mize Ebook: Chapter 1 Reading

Chapter 1. Reading disabilities, learning disabilities, dyslexia and vision therapy. How eye tracking problems can create barriers to learning.
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Chelsea was a kid who had always struggled at school. She was bright and hard-working, but she couldn’t seem to learn how to read. As she moved from grade to grade, teachers always referred to her as an “emerging read- er.” But her mom knew that was just a polite way of saying “illiterate.”
It wasn’t just reading - Chelsea had trouble with writing too. When she was younger, she’d refused to cross the midline when writing her own name: she’d write the first three letters with her left hand, skip the L, then write the last three letters with her right. Occupational therapy helped with that, but as she got older, her writing skills remained poor. She would leave whole words out of written sentences, and the words she did write, she usually spelled incorrectly - using the wrong letters, or using the right letters but in the wrong order, or writing letters as mirror images of themselves.
Her mom, Janice, tried everything. She and her daughter wrote in cornmeal or sand, they outlined words in different-coloured blocks, they used phonics, they labelled every object in the house, they spelled out loud. Nothing seemed to work.
By grade 4, Chelsea was still struggling. Her mother could barely make out what she was trying to convey. Chelsea had an older sibling, so Janice knew this wasn’t normal. The teachers also recognized that Chelsea was having trouble, and they tried to help. There was a “reading recovery” pro- gram at the school, plus individual teachers often gave up their lunchtimes to coach her. But the standard refrain was that all kids develop at their own pace. Maybe Chelsea was just going to come to reading late.
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CHAPTER 1: READING
CHAPTER 1: READING
The school modified her homework. If the class was doing 21 spelling words, Chelsea only had to do five. “But to sit down and actually review those five spelling words was a two-hour ordeal,” her mother recalls. Even after an hour of study, a simple word like “love” would end up spelled with a “d”.
It always ended in a blowout. There was screaming, door-slamming, rage. Once, Chelsea kicked a hole in the wall. The family had become used to outbursts like these; Chelsea was an aggressive kid. At home, she took her frustrations out on everyone, but especially her younger sister. At school, she got into fights with other kids, and some parents didn’t want her around their daughters. She regularly threatened to set her mother on fire. “She was hard to live with,” says Janice.
Looking back, Chelsea remembers having a lot of built-up anger. “It was not being able to physically accomplish anything,” she says. “I liked to see progress. I just felt really dumb.”
Janice was looking for an explanation that made sense. In whatever spare time she had, she’d surf the web. One night, at 2 a.m., she stumbled on a blog post by someone with a kid just like Chelsea, who, the blog said, had been helped by vision therapy. Janice had never heard of it.
The blogger described the child before and the child after. “I was reading the ‘before’ and thought: this is my child. They could have just replaced the name in there and it would have been her story too.”
A vision therapy assessment suggested Chelsea’s problem could be fixed. The idea of vision therapy intuitively made sense to the family. A device that tracked Chelsea’s eyes as she read showed how poorly her eyes were mov- ing through lines of text. They heard about how that could be rectified. But it wasn’t cheap and would take about nine months. “This was a complete leap of faith,” says Janice. “I’d never heard of it. But I had this vision of her working at McDonald’s for the rest of her life.”
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