ABSTRACT
The field should be gratified and duly enlightened by the paper written by Joseph R. Jenkins and Rollanda E. O’Connor entitled “Early Identification and Intervention for Young Children With Reading/Learning Disabilities.” These authors provide nothing short of an exploded view of the complex elements that punctuate the complicated process of reading in an alphabetic writing system, especially for young children with reading/learning disabilities (R/LDs). For both the mechanically minded and the mechanically disinclined, an exploded view of most things is good, because it permits a look at the working parts that make up the whole apparatus and invokes an appreciation of the complexity of the whole. In fact, we need more exploded views of things that work for us in important ways, like the zipper that “cleverly exploits the principle of the inclined plane to join or separate two rows of interlocking teeth” (Macaulay, 1988, p. 21) or the gearbox that keeps an engine running at “its most efficient rate while allowing the car to travel at a large range of speed” (Macaulay, 1988, p. 44). Exploded views remind us that an operation or process, however ordinary and natural in appearance, often betrays a complexity in both form (e.g., zipper with rows of interlocking metal teeth) and principle (e.g., the inclined plane).
