Tuesday, May 30, 2023

Social emotional learning for everyone, or special interventions for disruptors?

›
Grit, growth mindsets, social-emotional learning (SEL): these edu-fads are flourishing as never before. The claim, of course, is that non-ac...
Friday, May 26, 2023

A Review of the Movie Spellers: a Documercial for Spelling to Communicate

›
          “Quiet people have the loudest minds.” Stephen Hawking. Thousands of nonspeakers around the world are spelling fluently on letterb...
Wednesday, May 17, 2023

Should we be teaching grammar rules to native speakers?

›
Here are some thoughts, from one of my vanished Out in Left Field posts, on K12 writing instruction. What seems to predominate in K12 is nei...
Wednesday, May 10, 2023

A final post on autism-related challenges that are supposed to explain away our concerns about FC: motor control, echolalia, and word retrieval

›
In two recent posts, I discussed what we know about motor difficulties, intentional control difficulties, and apraxia in autism. As we saw, ...
Thursday, May 4, 2023

The imperiled pleasures of parsing Austen

›
How many of today's middle school students (or older students), I wonder, can properly parse the second sentence in the excerpt below? ...
Sunday, April 30, 2023

Autistic readers and pre-modern literature: do they really "want abilities"?

›
In my various autism classes, I routinely discussed the challenges that autistic readers have with non-literal language.  These challenges a...
Thursday, April 27, 2023

Do facilitated individuals have apraxia issues that explain away the concerns about FC?

›
  (Cross-posted at   FacilitatedCommunication.org ). In my  last post  I wrote about motor difficulties in autism and argued that these chal...