I was fortunate enough to have the chance to chat with national radio host Charles Adler on September 10, 2012, regarding a paper I co-authored called “Visual Impediments to Learning”, slated to be published this Winter in the Journal of Behavioural Optometry.
Doing live radio has its advantages and disadvantages, mainly you get great exposure, but you only get one take. There’s one point at about the 5:55 mark I say we are ‘..ascribing behaviour to something that is fundamentally tied to poor vision’. This would be better expressed as ‘we are ascribing poor behaviour to something medical, whereas the behaviour is fundamentally rooted in difficult vision’.
It was a great interview and opportunity to get the word out about the fundamental importance of checking not simply eyesight, but visual function in children entering Grade 1. Vision is the gateway to learning in the classroom, and children deserve to have visual obstacles removed before we force them to deal with our expectations of them.
My thanks to Mr. Adler and his crew for bringing much needed attention to this critically under-managed issue.
As a footnote, Mr. Adler was moved by the discussion because he himself suffered for years with undetected visual impediments to learning. In fact, he was so interested, he had his staff re-cut and re-mix the interview into a montage.
Interview: Link on the CharlesAdler.com site.
Click here to hear the montage.