Maryanne Wolf, Winner of the Samuel Torrey Orton Award, 2011

Maryanne Wolfe, winner of the Samuel Torrey Orton Award at International Dyslexia Conference, 2011, says, “We want to have our students learn to think for themselves.” Partially quoting Marcel Proust in her book, Proust and the Squid, she underscores the previous thought, “We feel quite truly that our wisdom begins where that of the author ends…” Wolf describes the brain as the “quintessential re-arranger of parts,” in that each reading brain must establish new neural connections in order to learn to decipher print.

Speaking about those students who struggle to learn to read, Wolf appealed to the IDA audience to appreciate “cerebral diversity. We [as a society] needed it before reading was invented. We need it for art. It is not about the brain’s deficiency, but about our ignorance about how to interact with that brain’s unique organization.”

She urged teachers to stimulate oral language by talking with students, and to “teach words in their wholeness, connecting them to phonemes, to orthographic patterns, to meaning, and to sentences. Be whimsical! Do not be boring! Instruction is a courtship between teacher and student.”