When I was a kid I used to enjoy Mad Magazine, which I loved for many reasons, the irreverence, the hilarity, the satire, and more. One feature that I remember in particular involved cartoons that spelled out nonsense words as sound effects. For example:  ”Glomp!” “Flaaack!” ”Pffft!” ”Sproing!” (above – a page from Mad with...Read More

Estimates are that 15-20 percent of the population have some degree of dyslexia, which sounds like an exotic disease, but really just means ”trouble with words.” Increasingly, scientists are getting closer to an understanding of why certain people have such difficulty in decoding the printed word.  There seems to be a consensus that the difficulties...Read More

Let me start by telling a story based on actual classroom research.  A research psychologist gave 27 students in a high school classroom wireless pagers and told them that whenever they received a ”page” they were to write down on a form he’d given them whatever was going on in their minds at that moment. ...Read More

An opinion piece in yesterday’s New York Times really made a deep impression on me as an educator. It was written by Libyan novelist Hisham Matar, and entitled:  ‘‘Books Can Take You Places Donald Trump Doesn’t Want You to Go.”  Mattar writes about how books can help us ”stumble upon ourselves in the lives and...Read More

A new video series–Dyslexiaville— has come out developed by Academy Award winning director/producer Peggy Stern (Best Animated Short, 2006 – The Moon and the Son:  An Imagined Conversation), that is created by and for kids with a diagnosis of dyslexia and other learning differences.  I watched the first video and it was hilarious – lots...Read More