Tag Archives: Learning disability

Special, Very Special Education

28 Jan

Too much parental care and love may create a lifetime emotional dependency which will prevent the child from fully realizing his or her potential (author).

Special education services are sometimes declined by parents, rarely by schools. If the child exhibits unusual behavior or difficulties in learning as compared to the majority of his/her peers, a professional evaluation is done with the parents’ permission who may still refuse to accept the findings. I find it strange that when a doctor tells parents that their son is sick, they don’t even question his/her judgment. So why do they question experienced education experts?

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Peter

28 Mar

Peter (not his name) is 15, with nary a stubble on his pinkish cheeks, and yet he is already a genius with computers. Some teachers don’t even bother with tech support, a very slow and inefficient service; they interrupt a class and ask for him, the teen who can fix anything electronic, whether hard- or software. The incredible story is that he was diagnosed with a severe learning disability and belongs, ipso facto, to special education. I suspect a touch of autism also, though his assessment doesn’t mention it. After all, aren’t we all a bit autistic, a word that means “love of self?”

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Misconceptions In Learning Disabilities

25 Feb

A good inclusion teacher will do his/her best to motivate his or her students, especially the ones who are struggling or who refuse to do the work regularly. Sometimes, a non-disabled teen will reject the help, it has happened to me, believing erroneously that I am not their teacher or that it would place them in the same category as the special education classmates. Yes, there is a certain stigma attached to the label “inclusion student”; the perception is probably due to the lack of comprehension by both regular students and classroom teachers. The question I am asked most often is “What exactly does Learning Disability mean?” I try to clarify the best way possible to my teaching colleagues that these students do not perceive stimuli normally, even though their intelligence level is average-normal. It would take a trained psychologist to give all the details, I am not, but the tool we use to detect such learning disability (LD) is a series of tests which show severe discrepancies between the potential and the actual academic performance. For example, if a child’s verbal ability is calculated at 100 and he/she performs at 85, we call that a learning disability in reading comprehension.

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