Learning Disabilities and Everyday Life in the lab/classroom
The following is intended as a quick primer for people who are interested in the topic of learning disabilities. It is a huge subject and a single essay cannot do justice to it. On the other hand, if you are a writing tutor, for example, and you suspect your client has one or more, you should have some background to prepare you for what to do.
The first thing to remember is that you are not a professional, and cannot make a diagnosis. So, no matter what you see, or how obvious it may be to you, you have no right to fling around words like “dyslexia” until you are qualified to know it when you see it. In fact there is virtually no benefit to using words like that, anyway, so the first rule is: Don’t use the word or the possibility of diagnosis until you know what the benefit of the diagnosis would be. Being able to say to someone, “If you are diagnosed with X, you can get Y benefit,” is better than saying to them “You have X” (deal with it).
There are actually many kinds of dyslexia (which is itself only one of many they could have), beyond the commonly accepted one with involves readers and writers switching letters around, and reading right-to-left in a left-to-right environment, or vice versa, or writing in the same way. That is a very salient and noticeable disability, and people who have it adjust in certain ways, so often we don’t even see it, as they’ve already used their other skills to overpower it. But if you think about it, there are many other skills also involved in everyday reading and writing, not the least of which is short-term and long-term memory, and there are a number of things that can go wrong with the system at any point. So if we take the left-to-right one, and get to the bottom of it, it is caused by the brain misinterpreting the signal or interpreting it left-to-right instead of right-to-left. Like most learning disabilities, this is not the student’s fault; it is beyond his/her control, but it will cause some poorly informed teachers to berate the student for simple inability to read or write correctly. So we come to another generalization about LD students: that the mere fact that they are still in a student’s chair (or with their paper in front of you as a tutor), reflects incredible perseverance and diligence on their part. They need our help and they need tools to deal with the neuro-psychological cards they’ve been dealt.
So let’s look at the variety of disabilities we might encounter as a tutor or as a teacher in the classroom. ADHD is a learning disability in the sense that if a student is unable to focus or concentrate for any significant length of time their general progress will be limited in any classroom or study endeavor. But the world is pretty good at recognizing this (it is common) and there are lots of tools that teachers and tutors have already to deal with it. There is less of a stigma worldwide when people say a kid has ADHD and may need some medicine to help him/her concentrate in school. Remember our first law, though: it’s not your job to label an issue, and there’s no point even bringing it up until you know the system and know what kind of benefit or help they can get from being willing to label their condition.
There was an old adage that really bad handwriting was the first sign of a learning disability, but I’m not sure if it’s even still true anymore. For one thing, there are many people who, through no fault of their own, have simply never been taught cursive. But for another, there are plenty of reasons for bad handwriting, including simply not valuing good handwriting, that make it so it’s not a sure sign of general misfunction of the system of nerves that transmit what your brain wants and converts it into precise hand movements. We can make a generalization that if that system is weak or the person has trouble with it, it will show up in several ways. That seems to be a general truth. The person will have trouble buttoning buttons, for example, or won’t enjoy other fine-motor skills operations.
But these days so little of our actual writing is done by hand that this kind of student is most likely to have severe problems when an essay exam comes up (something that may have to be done by hand), but be perfectly fine when typing papers, or using a computer as we do so often in modern life. And there are ways to adjust for even that. There are many students who resolutely print in cases like this and never use cursive anyway. They have to start writing more quickly and make block letters faster than the rest of us, but they can do that; it doesn’t inhibit their progress.
In general one common law of dealing with learning disabilities is “Use strengths to overpower weaknesses.” Students with problems reading already know it, and though they don’t enjoy reading like others, they can and will improve their reading if they know how to improve it, and we can give them the tools regardless of what we call their problem or whether they are willing to give it a name in a formal setting. That’s why text-to-speech is one of our best friends, and speech-to-text will also help us considerably just getting the ice broken and getting started on producing something.
In the case of text-to-speech, a weak reader may be overjoyed to hear a passage at the same time they are reading, because the process of reading is making the words on the page audible in our minds, and this was the part they were stuck on. Now of course we can apply the calculator rule and realize that if they always have the computer do this, they will never learn to read, because they will never have to read as long as they have that text-to-speech function on their computer or reading device. They may come back to you, once they’ve found it, claiming to have read a dozen novels, and they’re right in the sense that, having heard them, they know what happened, and know the plot inside and out. But it’s just like anything else: if they have a reading test coming, and they know they won’t be able to use text-to-speech on that test, then they know that what they have to do is work on recognizing the printed words and their relation to the words they recognize in speech. The ball is in their court. They know what to do to improve their reading: use their good listening and lots of repetition to overpower it.
In the case of speech-to-text, it is most useful, as I’ve said, to break the ice. A student with weak writing over a period of time gets dreadfully afraid of producing something that will be considered inadequate by any teacher, especially teachers who tell them they will always fail because they turn letters around, spell things wrong, or just miss things that everyone sees are necessary.
Remember the general rules of LD: there could be several reasons for what you see, and you are not here to diagnose but rather just to teach and provide tools. Students who have constant problems reading and writing usually simply give up and get a job that doesn’t require such skills, but occasionally they persist and want to pursue higher education for reasons that are strong enough that they will, if given the chance, overcome whatever their problems are. You can be their ally in succeeding and provide them the tools and encouragement they need; new computer apps are not by any means the only tools they will need.
I will end with one example, myself. After a lifetime of ADHD, which I adjusted to mostly by drinking way too much coffee, I have reached the point where I no longer want the coffee and just need to use other concentration skills to overcome it. If I set off to do two things, and I might get distracted while doing the first and forget to do the second, intense concentration might help me remember to do both and not get distracted under any circumstance. If I can gather up the tools to do that without listing out the things I have to do (if my list has more than three, I definitely have to write them down), then I will. I sometimes need the help of the people around me to make sure I get everything on my list. I need to work with myself so that I can do everything I’ve set out to do.
And it’s not that different with other disabilities. They can be overcome, although most weak readers just find jobs that don’t require reading or writing or remembering how to spell. People can do what they set their mind to, and you can be there for them, figuring out which tools will help them with the things they intend to work on.
When I first arrived in a classroom many years ago, with the task of teaching a variety of students, of whom maybe the usual 1-2% had disabilities, I thought it was odd that I’d been given no preparation for spotting them. Yes, that’s wrong, but it’s not unusual. Most of us have no background in being able to see these things and then deal with them. And as a lifetime ADD/ADHD person, I remembered how I’d taken my lumps with the teachers who were more or less unprepared for a kid like me. I’d learned to be nice to them so they’d tolerate my inability to sit still. You will find this kind of compensating technique a lot, and it’s good, because otherwise those students would not be sitting in front of you now. That’s the last thing to remember – that the mere fact they are still there is a kind of success story, a miracle, given the way they’ve probably been treated. Celebrate their persistence, and encourage them.
Thomas Leverett
8-4-21
posted by tom @ 8:25 PM
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