Overcoming (versus overlooking) learning disabilities
No matter how hard we work, no matter how brilliantly we create, no matter how smart we are, sometimes there are obstacles that get in the way and keep us from reaching our potential. These obstacles are actually more like land mines, to be totally honest, because the reason they trip us up is that we don’t know they’re there.
Land mines? I’m talking about learning disabilities (LDs).
I know, you’re probably thinking special ed class and that this doesn’t apply to you, but experts tend to agree that anywhere from 6 to 10 percent of students have a learning disability, otherwise called an LD. That’s as many as three students in your average-sized English class who have an LD—and many of them don’t even realize it.
Read this chapter whether you think you have an LD or not and you may just learn something that will help you or someone you care about. This chapter simply covers the basics, so if you’d like further resources on the topic I’ve included a list of suggestions in Appendix D or you could start by looking up articles by Ann Logsdon online. Ms. Logsdon is a school psychologist and a special education administrator who has been supporting students with learning disabilities for fifteen years, and she provided some great input on this chapter.
When the topic of learning disabilities comes up, folks tend to flash on images of severely disabled children or frightening mental institutions. Am I right? The thing is, LDs have very little to do with intelligence or sanity (though you do have to score an average to high intelligence to have an LD). And, if you try to ignore the fact that you have one it may make you feel a little nuts.
Let me say that again, because this is a really important point: experts believe that people must have average or higher intelligence to be diagnosed with an LD. Some even think the presence of an LD is the result of a unique brain structure. Put differently, that means teachers and parents typically discover that a student has an LD because she is too smart to be struggling this much in a particular subject.
Many great creative thinkers, performers, athletes, and leaders have had learning disabilities and have been able to succeed despite them. (Or, perhaps, because of them.) It’s true, and I’ll prove it.
These are just a few of many famous success stories among even more that are untold. You can’t tell me those people didn’t have some skills.
A learning disability is basically having a unique way that the brain manages the Input or Output process. Students with LDs might have difficulty fully understanding new information, integrating information (how am I supposed to take equations from math class and apply them to a chemistry experiment?), organizing information (I can’t organize my notebook, let alone understand the order of mitosis), or storing information for the long term (yeah, good luck remembering what I studied all last week for tomorrow’s test). Some people with LDs can get the information into their brains but they have trouble getting it out again, where organizing their thoughts on paper in essay form or giving speeches (especially in a time-stressed environment) might make them draw a total blank.
There are multiple kinds of learning disabilities, some more severe than others. The folks at Learning Disabilities of America suggest that a few common LDs you might have heard of before are:
And there are numerous other LDs beyond these with even longer names.
Let me also say this before we get much further—are you listening?—all of us struggle with what we’re learning at some point in time. It is a natural and normal part of the learning process to feel frustrated by new subjects or skills, and it’s that struggle that actually makes us smarter and stronger. Honest. Scientists have found that the additional effort required to master a task or concept actually strengthens our problem-solving abilities as well as our memory.
It’s analogous to a chick hatching from an egg. If you’ve never watched a chick hatch, look it up on YouTube. It looks exhausting, especially in real time. The poor, slimy, bedraggled-looking creature appears to be working itself to death for hours just to break itself out of an eggshell. If you’ve ever watched it in person, you know how hard it is to restrain yourself from reaching down and breaking the shell just to free the pitiful thing. But you can’t interfere. The mental and physical skills the chick uses to get out of the egg are exactly what it needs to survive its first few weeks of life. If you help break the shell, the chick may die prematurely.
Laughing at a joke requires five different areas of the brain to work together—yet another reason to love Bill Cosby reruns.
Humans are far more complex than baby chickens. Just ask your parents, who’ve been watching you break through the shell of your personhood for years.
All that’s to say, just because you have struggled at some point in an academic subject or a skill of coordination does not mean you have an LD. However, if no matter how hard you struggle with one of these areas you feel like you are making no headway in cracking the shell, you may have a learning disability.
It’s worth checking out if any of this sounds at all familiar. The worst thing about an obstacle is tripping over it because you didn’t know it was there. Once you see it, you can hurdle it. Read on, I’ll tell you how.
Below is a list of possible symptoms you might recognize in yourself if you have an LD, but it’s by no means an exhaustive list. Keep in mind that there is no magic number of how many of these symptoms a person needs in order to qualify. A diagnosis depends more on the combination and seriousness of each, which requires professional analysis. While we all, at some point, have been challenged by some or all of these, what waves the yellow flag that it might be an LD is if a student continues to have learning problems in a specific area that do not improve with effort and time.
As you read the list, a general rule of thumb is that if you have only one or two of these traits (and you don’t think they are really that bad), you probably don’t have an LD. But, it doesn’t hurt to follow through by talking with an academic counselor if you’re concerned. Who knows, some of your challenges in class might need more than just elbow grease. What a relief.
Experts, such as Ann Logsdon, remind us that someone with a learning disability has average to above average intelligence and may show some of the following signs:
If after reading this list you recognize enough of these traits as your own, definitely track down someone experienced in learning disabilities to ask for help. On a side note, it’s generally better to talk with an academic counselor than a teacher about whether or not you may have an LD because of the counselor’s training and access to resources, unless that teacher is specifically trained in diagnosing and working with students who have LDs.
Sometimes students are easier to diagnose because their challenges are external—they work slowly, have difficulty reading aloud, have difficulty sitting still or maintaining focus—and that makes their LD more obvious and sometimes easier to monitor. Phil is a great example of this, who told me once that he thought school was invented purely to torture him.
All I knew of Phil before I met him on the first day of class was that he had an IEP (an Individualized Education Plan for his learning disabilities), and so I arranged the seating chart to make sure he was at the front of the class where I could track his progress easily. He was a fairly quiet student, answering if he was called on but rarely volunteering information. He came to class dressed in baggy pants, a t-shirt, chains, and a pencil stub behind his ear, holding a spiral notebook and, eventually, a smile. He seemed a pretty straightforward guy.
By the end of the quarter, Phil was making low B’s in my low-level English class, was fairly easygoing, and didn’t stick out much on my radar. I made it a point as a teacher not to investigate any of my students’ disciplinary history until I had gotten to know them because I wanted to start out assuming the best and give them a clean slate to live up to those expectations. So, I actually knew relatively little about Phil outside of what I had seen in my classroom.
It wasn’t until a school counselor came to my room after hours one day, wanting to know what was going on with Phil and why he got a B first quarter, that I realized something exceptional was happening. I started to pull up grade charts to show Phil’s progress to the counselor, a little surprised at first that a counselor would show this much interest in a B student. It turns out Phil had been getting F’s in every other class since he came to our school two years ago and was nearly expelled after throwing a chair out of a window and threatening to beat up a teacher to his face in another class.
In all classes but mine, the counselor went on to explain, Phil was aggressive and a class clown. He made inappropriate jokes, broke school policy on a weekly basis, and was starting to gather his own fan club of delinquent followers. I never would have guessed. Phil? Phil Williams?
Essentially, the counselor had come to my room to see if I was either bribing Phil with good grades in order to keep him in check or doing something his other teachers could implement in their classes. I really didn’t know what to tell him. I had plenty of proof to show that Phil had earned his grades, so there was no trouble there. But I wasn’t honestly sure where to attribute the change. Was it that I had implemented his IEP from the start without waiting for signs of trouble? Potentially, though that’s something all teachers are required to do, so I can’t think it was an exceptional move on my part.
Was it seating him in the front row of class? Students often underestimate that those are the best seats in the house, and at one point there were preliminary studies showing how seating charts corresponded with grades, with a lot more A’s toward the front of the classroom. Once I got to know my students after the first few weeks, I would rearrange the seats to buffer students with IEPs by placing them next to students who were less distracting. So, it could have been the seating chart, though again that’s something I’m sure his other teachers tried.
I’ve reflected on Phil’s case many times over the years, trying to answer that counselor’s question. Not knowing any of his other teachers, the only potential change I could think of was that I gave Phil a fresh start. Honestly, I think that is what a lot of us want—a fair chance. When the playing field doesn’t seem fair, such as is often the case for those with learning disabilities, it makes students either explode (like Phil) or implode (like Jared).
I met Jared the first day of freshman Honors English when he slumped into a desk in the third row of class wearing all black, his fingernails even painted with black Sharpie. He looked disheveled and disinterested. I didn’t know anything else about him other than what I learned over the course of that first week of school by observing him show up to class with wadded-up, unfinished homework assignments, illegible handwriting, and, other than one black pen and a single beat-up spiral notebook that he appeared to use for all his classes, a backpack filled with wadded papers. Jared was never aggressive or overtly disrespectful. If I called on him he sometimes knew the answer, but even then he liked to linger before answering. Most of the time he complained of headaches or stomachaches, seemed simultaneously stressed and bored, and did his best to show that he was out of place.
I’d like to say that I was able to even begin to understand or reach Jared like I did Phil, but I really don’t think I did. I sure tried. But, no matter how I altered the lesson plans or the seating charts or my discussion and lecture style to appeal to his untapped creative side, he remained disconnected. Halfway through the year he was officially diagnosed with a learning disability, but despite my best efforts, and those of his other teachers, he remained a D student across the board. Sometimes I still find myself wondering why.
Was it his home situation? While family always plays a role in a student’s development and success, I had managed to interact with Jared’s parents and honor-roll older sister on a few occasions, and from what I could observe it seemed like a supportive environment. If anything, Jared’s parents were as baffled as I was at how to reach him. Certainly, with his IEP in place, Jared was dealing with a more level playing field. Did I give him the same fair chance I gave Phil? I’d like to think I did, and to the best of my recollection I’m certain I supported him as best as I could. Because Jared’s learning challenges were mostly internal, how well or poorly my teaching methods addressed his needs remained a mystery to me. I think Jared just wasn’t interested in succeeding, unlike Phil. Perhaps his self-esteem had been shaken by having an undiagnosed LD for so long. Perhaps he was simply rebelling against his older sister’s successful shadow. Whatever the reason, it was clear that Jared had made a choice not to change. Ultimately, it was his choice.
There are two reasons why I introduce these students. The first is to emphasize that whether learning disabilities are obvious or not, they are not the result of laziness, rebellion, or other character flaws. They are a genuine challenge that a student cannot simply ignore. The second is that we all have a choice: a choice to recognize our challenges—whether they are learning disabilities or otherwise—and a choice to overcome them.
Unless you’ve attended a private high school, college is the only place you will have to pay to learn. By then, an undiagnosed LD may have made the difference between which school you wanted to attend and which schools actually sent you acceptance letters, largely because with an undiagnosed LD you are unable to work to your full potential in a traditional setting. The key is to diagnose an LD as early as possible—before you start paying for college courses that make your head swim—and to find a way to learn around it.
The second reason why I introduce these students is to emphasize that an LD is not a death sentence to academic or financial success, just an alteration to how you learn. Albert Einstein and Charles Schwab are proof of that. If anything, diagnosing it will make your life easier since, depending on your LD type, you can learn strategies to overcome it, get extra time on tests, get to skip oral presentations, or get free chocolate at the end of class. (Well, maybe not that last one.)
The trouble is that learning disabilities are hard to diagnose. Were it as easy as “can you roll your tongue or not” there would be no need for this chapter. Not all learning problems mean someone has a learning disability. The important thing is that if you or someone who knows your study habits well suspects that something isn’t working as it should, it’s worth getting it checked out sooner rather than later.
Ben had a learning disability that went undiagnosed until halfway through his time as an undergraduate. It’s sad that it took so long for him to realize that something was off, but he says now that he just assumed all along that the struggles he faced with taking tests and studying and reading were the same struggles everyone else faced, only he got worse grades. Once Ben was diagnosed, he noticed a significant improvement in his ability to work within the university system and improve his test results. That’s the good news. The bad news is he had four semesters of a mediocre GPA to turn around. So, why wasn’t he tested earlier? It wasn’t that his parents were inattentive (they were incredibly involved) or that his teachers were oblivious (they had simply mistaken him for a Mack Slacker), it’s that his particular LD was internal and therefore not blatantly obvious. People misunderstood his attitude toward school as being the cause of his learning style instead of the result of it, and he slipped through the cracks.
A world champion brainiac, Ben Pridmore, memorized 96 historical events in 5 minutes and a shuffled deck of cards in 26.28 seconds. Suddenly your vocab list isn’t looking so bad, eh?
The great news is that all public high schools are required by law to offer free LD testing to students if the students, teachers, or parents suspect the student has a disability. The hitch is that public school practitioners can only evaluate students who are currently enrolled, unless the practitioner is also licensed for private practice. Most universities offer testing to their undergraduates as well, so check with your counseling department for more details. Specifically, that means telling your academic counselor “I’m having some constant, unavoidable trouble in the way I learn, and I’d like to get tested for a learning disability. I don’t want to be talked out of it, I just want to get tested. Can you show me how to sign up for that?”
Trust me, even if you have to pay for the testing because you’re outside the public school system, it’s much cheaper than having to retake courses in college (which will hike up your tuition and slow down your career) because you didn’t get the grades you needed the first time around. Another possibility, if your parents have their eye on the bottom line, is that some colleges with psychology programs offer evaluations at lower rates than private practitioners because the evaluators are actually graduate or undergraduate students who are supervised by a psychologist.
No matter who you see, if one evaluator gives you a clean report and suggests Study Method X, that’s just fine—give it your best shot and see what happens. But if, after diligently working at Study Method X something still feels “off,” set up an appointment to see a different evaluator. Keep asking questions until you and your parents feel satisfied with the answers.
It’s really too bad, but some folks get all the way through high school (or even college!) feeling totally lost or stupid because they aren’t good readers and can’t keep track of what’s happening in class—yet, they have no idea what causes them to feel that way. The amazing thing is it sometimes has nothing to do with a learning disability. It simply requires an eye exam.
Vision problems are fairly common. If your eyes feel tired after reading only a short amount of material, if you have frequent headaches, if you read slowly or have lost all desire to read, you might need to get your vision corrected. Sometimes poor vision in just one eye can cause these symptoms while the other eye is strong and makes it seem like both eyes are fine. Tricky little eyeballs.
If any of this sounds familiar, please oh please make the simple move to get your eyes checked. Some districts provide programs with free (or significantly discounted) eye exams, so ask both your school nurse and school counselor if they know of any. The test is painless and may even be free, and a quick read of the chart could simplify life in ways you never imagined.
If you have learning challenges, whether your questions are answered with a simple eye test or an LD assessment, the great news is that you have a way to get answers. Students with learning disabilities that go undiagnosed often do poorly in subjects that are unaffected by their learning disability, simply because their self-esteem has been rattled by the frustration of an unfair playing field. On the flip side, once they are diagnosed and begin to see improvement in their trouble areas they regain confidence in other academic areas that result in success across the board. (Because the topic of learning disabilities is more detailed than this book is able to address, I’ve included a number of resources in Appendix E if you have further questions about LDs.)
The other great news is that some students with LDs who feel challenged in their academics are often incredibly gifted, creative, and passionate about other subjects. It can make for a complicated personality mix at times because, while these students are super talented, they are often perfectionists and intensely critical of themselves, any failure undermines their confidence and they reject help as a result. These complex expectations, skills, and emotions can result in exceptionally gifted students feeling as though they don’t fit in anywhere. So the great news—especially if that’s you—is that you do.
Perhaps it’s a school club that focuses on your passion—mixed media art, anime, chess, tae kwon do, poetry, ballroom dancing—or a national organization or university summer program you can join that has annual workshops and camps—National Forensic League competitions, Sarah Lawrence College Summer Writer’s Workshop, Space Camp, Stanford Camp—or a study abroad program where you learn a new language while continuing your education, such as with the Rotary Club. There are endless opportunities out there (and, yes, many have scholarships available), so make an appointment with your academic counselor for starters to get some ideas and then do some digging. Ask around. The world is your oyster, and that makes you the pearl tempered by a frustrating piece of sand.
ON THE CATWALK
Alrighty, folks, this is the last one … are you feeling nostalgic?
1. What do Whoopi Goldberg, Albert Einstein, and Tom Cruise have in common? Not much, except that they (and many others) have LDs and have made successes of themselves despite (or, maybe, because of) them.
2. I’m confused—if you can be smart and have an LD, what is a learning disability? It is the brain having trouble getting new info either in or out.
3. You might have a learning disability if you … recognize the symptoms but ask an expert to know for sure.
4. Save yourself now or pay later. It’s more expensive to try to get through high school and college with an undiagnosed LD than it is to diagnose it and alter my learning style, and it could cost a lot more than money …
5. Please read the lowest line on the chart. My struggles in class might not be an LD, and glasses are an easy solution.
6. The great news is that if I get diagnosed with an LD, I may see my grades improve and school won’t be as stressful.