What do you do with “untidy handwriting” or “poor spelling”?

My parents used to get complains from my teachers about my handwriting and poor spelling.

In those days, I used to get punished for it each time they complained. And punishment usually came, not once, but twice: once by the teachers in school, and once by my parents at home. At times, those cane and ruler marks on the hands and legs would serve as reminders to produce neater handwriting the following days, or so they hoped.

It was a painful learning process. I couldn't spell many words till my university days. In my high school days, the humiliation did bring vivid images of life's ending across my mind.

Naturally, I was elated and extremely thankful then for the spell checker on the computer in uni. (Here's to you, good ol' Steve Jobs!)

Now, from research and practice, we know more about the causes of these 'problems'. When we know the cause, we can  find the solution. Many of the treatments today are much more effective, and most important of all – much less painful. My regret is that these were not known earlier and spared me the agony.

My mission now is to spread these knowledge and treatment to as many people as possible – children and adults – to spare them agony and vindicate them from the pain of their learning difficulties. 

Learning Difficulties

Speaker: Mr Pang Kong Eng
Date: 25th Feb 2011
Time: 7-9pm
Venue: International Plaza, 10 Anson Road

Here are some of the video clips I captured during the talk. They  are not fantastic quality as we took them using still image cameras and my iPhone4. We are looking for volunteer videographers who can help us produce better videos for all to watch and learn from.

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This is a reading exercise in which the letters are systematically coded as an illustration.

In a everyday reading, we have to decode the letters that we read. Then, we make sense of what we read. There is a lot of processing required in the brains and the rest of the body. However, most of these processes are low-level processing, like walking or munching. For accomplished readers, this happens automatically and becomes a transparent process.

A dyslexic person would have difficulty doing that decoding. When you are trying to figure out the cryptic text, what you experience gives a glimpse to what a dyslexic person deals with each time s/he reads.

Moreover, reading ability has as little to do with intelligence as colour-blindness does. You can't read a text doesn't mean that you are stupid. You know that, but the rest of the world doesn't, and treats you like you are. Such is the frustration that dyslexics are going through as you read these lines.

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Quiz:
Kpio boe Nbsz cpui qfut. Kpio ibt b eph.
boe Nbsz ibt b eph.
R: Xip ibt dbu bt qfu?
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hint:b=a, o=n, e=d
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This is what happens, having to decode what you read everytime.
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This is a comic relief, but also an illustration of how some people are not quite capable of contextual reasoning.
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This is about people with weak or overly flexible joints...
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This clip speaks about the effects of squabbling parents have on children's ability to learn.
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MORE LATER... STILL A VERY PRIMITIVE BLOG POST.