Dyslexia: A growing concern, still undiscovered by many!

Dyslexia has been around for a long time and has been defined in different ways. Let’s try to understand what exactly is dyslexia. Dyslexia is a learning disability that can hinder a person's ability to read, write, spell and sometimes speak. Dyslexia is the most common learning disability in children and unfortunately persists throughout life. The severity of dyslexia can vary from mild to severe. The sooner dyslexia is treated, the more favorable the outcome. The % of children suffering from this disorder is increasing day to day but the lack of awareness is hitting the future of many brilliant minds.

Dyslexic children fail to express their confusion; they are often misunderstood as aggressive, disobeying or rebellious children because this disorder is taken as a childhood tantrum. Dyslexic students find it tough to understand things in one go so they need continuous patience and special attention to grasp things. Even after effective lessons in classroom they sometime find it tough to understand everything. It’s not the dyslexic children are dumb, in fact they have brilliant brains but it’s a fault on parents and teachers part who fail to acknowledge their disorder.

Dyslexic students often find it tough to understand alphabets, they fail to understand speed at times even numbers are a mystery for them.

Correct way to behave

It’s extremely important for parents and teachers to observe a child closely in their childhood days. Parents must listen to what their children are trying to express. Teachers should try to analyze the difficulties of such children rather than insulting them and at times discriminating with them. It’s very important for teachers to understand the need of a dyslexic child; just by some extra efforts they can help a dyslexic student to be a part of the normal race. Parents on the other hand play a vital role in a child’s life. They are the support and strength of their children. So, it’s of utmost importance that the parents must acknowledge this disability at the correct age. If this disorder is detected at a young age it becomes easier for teachers to cooperate accordingly. It’s very important for the parents to continuously boost their child’s confidence and prepare them to face the society with patience. Society on the other hand must respect and love such children and treat them as normal children. By continuous support from family and teachers a dyslexic child can have a equally or much better future as that of a normal child.

MOOCs-A Hope!

MOOC (Massive open online course) is an online course aimed at unlimited participation and open access via the web. In addition to traditional course materials such as videos, readings and problem sets, MOOCs provide interactive user forums that help build a community for the students, professors, and teaching assistants.

Children dealing with this disorder need to have more effective and different methods of learning. Being technologically advanced it manages to grab attention. Being an interactive source dyslexic child might find it more interesting. The self assessments are way more playful and can be used as an effective learning method. The best advantage for such children will be that they can study according to their willingness & availability of time. People with this disorder tend to get confused given everything in one shot so by MOOCs they can have repeated sessions on different topics as many times as they want. So trying out such online sites can be of a great help for dyslexic children.