Special Education Today newsletter 4(3)
Here's what happened on SET during the week that began 8 July 2024
Welcome to the weekly update for 15 July 2024 covering the activities from the previous week on Special Education Today. SET was pretty quiet during the week, so this newsletter is not packed full of juicy tidbits. Boring…I know.
After the following photo (and perhaps as a consequence of it?), though I’m going out on some limbs. So, read on…don’t quit just yet!
Photo
During a visit to a wooded area in southwest Virginia, I took a photo of the far side of a small body of water with a hillside beyond it. The trees and other growth on the bank and hillside were were reflected on the still surface of the pond.
The scene appealed to me as one of those that a talented photographer would shoot. The reflection of the greenery really was quite exotic looking sort of similar to what one might see as a jigsaw puzzle.
Reflections are pretty interesting phenomena. In this case they lead to a misperception. That photo is not what it seems. Oh, it is a reflection of brush and woods on the surface of a pond. However, up is down and vice versa. I flipped the photo. What seems to be the top really is the the surface of the pond. The upper parts of the trees are actually near the bottom of the image. If one looks closely at the upper left quadrant of the photo, on can see something like spider webs…but those are actually thin clusters of pollen floating on the surface of the water.
Perceptions can be deceiving. Yes, I know I created the ambiguity in this image. But, it led me to reflect (ahem) on how perceptual anomalies have misled educators, parents, psychologists, medical doctors, and—yes!—kids about disabilities.
In learning disabilities, we mistakenly chased visual-perceptual problems in reading. In the 1990s, a very brief public-service advertisement promoting awareness of LD aired on television; it showed curves of color in multiple hues rotating about a central point with reversible letters (p, b, d, q) while a narrator said something like, “Is it a bee? Is it a dee? Is it a pee…."1 Given what we now know about dyslexia, we may mock this idea, but the idea that kids misperceived letters was terrifically influential in the past. We now understand that it’s not so much a problem of a perceptual disability, but about learning sound-symbol relationships.
Consider the case of “strephosymbolia,” which translates as “twisted symbols.” Samuel T. Orton (1928, 1929, 1963)—yes, that same Orton as in Orton-Gillingham—predicated much of his view about dyslexia on a theory about the idea of strephosymbolia. Here’s a super-simplified overview: Orton contended that engrams—biophysical traces of memories, as discussed by Semon, 1921, in Josselyn et al., 2017)—were stored in reverse versions on both sides of the brain. Thus, in one hemisphere, there would be the shape of a “b” and in the opposite hemisphere there would be the shape of a “d.” The same would apply to the memory traces for entire words, as shown in this illustration.
Orton argued that individuals who hadn’t developed “unilateral brain habits” (some might use different terms such as “incompletely established lateral dominance”) would get confused when they saw (ahem!) the word “was.” They might not “know which hemisphere to consult,” so sometimes they would say “wuz” and sometimes they’d say “saw.”
Orton wasn’t the only one who barked up the perceptual tree. There were others such as Newell Kephart and Marianne Frostig (see the excellent history by Hallahan & Cruikshank, 1973). Fortunately many descendants of Orton later de-emphasized strephosymbolia.2
Anyway, if we see the shoreline upside down, don’t fret too much. It’s just a perceptual fluke. We can live through it. Just copy the photo and open it in your own image manipulation program…and turn it right side up. Of course, you can write to me directly and I can send you a copy of the unaltered original. Complaints about this long digression? Help yourselves to logging them in the Quip Section at the end of the post.
The situation
Even is SET is kind of thin (see the next section), it’s wonderful to have subscribers and readers. Thanks to those who have been regulars (some of you for years!). Thanks to for helping SET grow by sharing.
Here is a special thanks to a randomly selected subset of paid subscribers. You folks—Tom Z., Linda L., Kristin S., Vicki W., Ed P., Joel M., Clay K., John U., Demetrius A., Jen W., Christine T., George S., Laura L-D., and Ann R.—are among those who keep SET showing up for everyone who reads this rag. And, here’s a special shout-out to Li-Yu H., Kathy M., and Mike G. for providing not just support but also advice (and even reassurance when I go off the rails).
The semi-sorta ToC
Here’s the catalog of all two posts I published in the past week. If you’re a free subscriber, you got your $$’s worth. If you’re a paying subscribers…apologies that your per-post cost went up last week; please look to the future.
Special Education Today Newsletter 4(2): What was happening (at least at SET) the first week of July 2024?
Deemphasizing 'key words' in word problems: [No subtitle; published 10 Jul at 7:00 AM]
Notes & comment
As probably every reader of SET knows, on 13 July 2023 the US experienced yet another instance of what I consider its horrific embrace of violence as means for solving perceived problems. To be sure the immediately foregoing sentence reflects my personal perception of events. Some may disagree with my choice of words such as “horrific,” “embrace,” “violence,” “solving perceived problems,” or other aspects of the sentence.
Regardless of quibbles about my language, I hope we agree that a person firing rifle shots at former US president Donald J. Trump is an event we wish would not occur, something that simply should not happen. Assuming that we agree, we might ask a reasonable question: What’s to be done about violence?
In the early 1990s, facing violent events of that time, Jim Kauffman collaborated with a group of educators (too many to name) and prepared what I refer to (and I think Jim does, too) as the “Violence Statement.” The PDF in the immediately preceding link is available through the good graces of the Open Science Foundation; you may need to register), but let me provide a tease about the content composed of the first paragraph:
We are in no danger of becoming a nation of wimps; we are in imminent danger of becoming a nation of thugs. We know the details of violence among children and youth in our society. We recite the litany of this violence with shame, sorrow, disgust, and terror. For decades we have failed to act on what we know about the causes of violence and aggression. We can not afford to delay effective action any longer.
The violence and aggression of the young have no single cause nor a single solution. Decades of research have revealed several contributing causes and partial solutions. If we take any of the following steps, we will become a less violent society. If we argue about which step should be first or complain that taking only one or two is insufficient, we will waste energy and delay progress. If we take all these steps together, we will reap the benefits of concerted, coherent action. None of these steps is easy or quick, nor is any a full remedy; all require intelligence and persistence.
Following that introductory paragraph Jim provided seven paragraphs of research-based recommendations for teaching our kids—not just those who have disabilities—to resolve disagreements without resorting to violence.
The technology is available. That technology is not based on the pop-psych advice that some may give children (e.g., “If somebody hits you, you hit him back and harder”). It’s available in curricular form (see, e.g., the Montessori Peace Curriculum) as well as familiar work on The Good Behavior Game (Bowman-Perott et al., 2016; Smith et al., 2021) and its excellent sibling, class-wide function-related intervention (CW-FIT; e.g., Kamps et al., 2011).
So, I hope readers will anticipate that I am going to recommend—with regard to employing nonviolent means of solving conflicts as well as learning to read, write, and compute—all of us associated with SET will teach our children well and will teach our colleagues to do the same.
References
Bowman-Perrott, L., Burke, M. D., Zaini, S., Zhang, N., & Vannest, K. (2016). Promoting positive behavior using the Good Behavior Game: A meta-analysis of single-case research. Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions, 18(3), 180-190.
Hallahan, D. P., & Cruickshank, W. M. (1973). Psychoeducational foundations of learning disabilities. Prentice-Hall.
Josselyn, S. A., Köhler, S., & Frankland, P. W. (2017). Heroes of the engram. Journal of Neuroscience, 37(18), 4647-4657. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0056-17.2017
Kamps, D., Wills, H. P., Heitzman-Powell, L., Laylin, J., Szoke, C., Petrillo, T., & Culey, A. (2011). Class-wide function-related intervention teams: Effects of group contingency programs in urban classrooms. Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions, 13(3), 154-167.
Orton, S. T. (1928). Specific reading disability—strephosymbolia. Journal of the American Medical Association, 90(14), 1095-1099.
Orton, S. T. (1929). The "sight reading" method of teaching reading, as a source of reading disability. Journal of Educational Psychology, 20(2), 135–143. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0072112
Orton, S. T. (1963). Specific reading disability—Strephosymbolia. Bulletin of the Orton Society, 13, 9–17. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23769472
Roy, D. S., Park, Y. G., Kim, M. E., Zhang, Y., Ogawa, S. K., DiNapoli, N., Gu, S., Cho, J. H., Chow, H., Kamentsky, L., Martin, J., Mosto, O., Aida, T., Chung, K., & Tonegawa, S. (2022). Brain-wide mapping reveals that engrams for a single memory are distributed across multiple brain regions. Nature Communications, 13(1), 1799. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-29384-4
Semon R (1921) The mneme. Allen, Unwin.
Smith, S., Barajas, K., Ellis, B., Moore, C., McCauley, S., & Reichow, B. (2021). A meta-analytic review of randomized controlled trials of the good behavior game. Behavior Modification, 45(4), 641-666.
As I recall, at the time that these PSAs were being developed and disseminated, Dan Hallahan—then an officer for the Division for Learning Disabilities—objected to this particular one of the advertisements. Other organizations working on the advertising project prevailed, though, and the brief video was used as one of the series of ads. I believe I still have a copy salted away on some hard disk somewhere and, if I can get permission to publish it, I’ll post it (and maybe others) in a later article here on SET.
Also, it’s important not to dismiss the idea of engrams. There’s really fascinating work happening now in studying the localization of function (e.g., memory, discrimination, and more). Brain scientists are getting close to locating where single memories are stored (see Roy et al., 2022).
