Thread by @erikaheidewald

omg i just found out about the phonics vs whole language debate and for decades people have been fighting over which is the best way to teach kids to read and apparently did not realize that phonics works for NDs and whole language works for NTs?? it’s... really fucking obvious

this is the problem with the assumption of neurotypical as default. neurotypical is not default. it’s not an overwhelming majority by any means, might not even BE a majority. there is no one best way to teach anything. there are always going to be at least two.

neurotypical people are holistic processors - they process things in chunks that do not need to be broken down into discrete parts. autistic people are data processors - we process all the discrete parts. this affects how we learn, think, process stimuli - everything.

allistic neurodivergent kids frequently can learn the way neurotypical kids do but it seems like most of them learn better the way autistic kids do. but we just make everyone learn the neurotypical way and act like you’re bad at learning if that doesn’t work for you.

when are we going to stop thinking that one way of doing things fits “human nature” and decide that everyone who doesn’t work that way just doesn’t have human nature? we don’t have to decide one best way of doing things, that is never ever going to be real.

i learned phonics at 3 or 4 from my mom and i spoke german and english then. i learned to read spanish in elementary/middle school, french and italian in high school, then taught myself the cyrillic and arabic alphabets and chinese characters. you learn how to learn things.

i’m not saying that to brag but just to say i understand that reading in different languages is different. but a brain that processes data rationally can learn just about anything if it learns how to analyze all the discrete data and the process to put them in

autistic kids need to know how things work and why they work that way or we’re not going to really internalize that knowledge and be able to use it. we need every data point and the big picture. we gotta know how the whole thing works. the education system doesn’t get that.

i’m not overlooking the existence of dyslexia, dysgraphia, and dyscalculia bc i deal with all of those myself. they don’t stop me because i know how things work, i know the process by which it is made, so i can use logic to figure it out. ND kids need to be given that opportunity

whole language makes no sense to me and i have a very hard time imagining how NTs learn since my brain doesn’t do that but i know a lot of them have a hard time breaking up concepts into discrete parts and using those parts. the parts don’t make sense on their own.

so i can see why some of them would benefit a lot from whole language - it just makes more intuitive sense for a brain that processes things as whole concepts. i can see how kids would benefit from using the way that fits their process to understand & use the other.

there’s nothing better or worse about being a holistic processor vs a data processor, seems obvious to me why humanity would benefit from having different people be able to see things those different ways. the problem is when we try to force one process on another.

could i have learned to read using whole language? idk. probably. but would i have then learned 8 other languages and loved reading in all of them? i really doubt it.