Describing learning disabilities (LDs) has always been the hardest part of working in the field for me. After the fairly cautious, parent-reassuring description I mentioned here (people with LDs have a gap or two in an otherwise regular profile of learning abilities), it all gets tricky. Trying to find a description of a particular child in an “official definition” is usually not possible. Here’s the description we used at the Learning Disabilities Association of Ontario (LDAO) around the turn of the century (which is still the same):
“Learning disabilities” refers to a variety of disorders that affect the acquisition, retention, understanding, organisation or use of verbal and/or non-verbal information. These disorders result from impairments in one or more psychological processes related to learning (a), in combination with otherwise average abilities essential for thinking and reasoning. Learning disabilities are specific not global impairments and as such are distinct from intellectual disabilities.
Learning disabilities range in severity and invariably interfere with the acquisition and use of one or more of the following important skills:
oral language (e.g., listening, speaking, understanding)
reading (e.g., decoding, comprehension)
written language (e.g., spelling, written expression)
mathematics (e.g., computation, problem solving)
Learning disabilities may also cause difficulties with organisational skills, social perception and social interaction.
The impairments are generally life-long. However, their effects may be expressed differently over time, depending on the match between the demands of the environment and the individual’s characteristics. Some impairments may be noted during the pre-school years, while others may not become evident until much later. During the school years, learning disabilities are suggested by unexpectedly low academic achievement or achievement that is sustainable only by extremely high levels of effort and support.
Learning disabilities are due to genetic, other congenital and/or acquired neuro-biological factors. They are not caused by factors such as cultural or language differences, inadequate or inappropriate instruction, socio-economic status or lack of motivation, although any one of these and other factors may compound the impact of learning disabilities. Frequently learning disabilities co-exist with other conditions, including attentional, behavioural and emotional disorders, sensory impairments or other medical conditions.
For success, persons with learning disabilities require specialized interventions in home, school, community and workplace settings, appropriate to their individual strengths and needs, including:
specific skill instruction;
the development of compensatory strategies;
the development of self-advocacy skills;
appropriate accommodations.
(a) The term “psychological processes” describes an evolving list of cognitive functions. To date, research has focused on functions such as:
phonological processing;
memory and attention;
processing speed;
language processing;
perceptual-motor processing;
visual-spatial processing;
executive functions; (e.g., planning, monitoring and metacognitive abilities).
The psycho-educational reports that teachers receive are ten times as dense, filled with fifty times more jargon, and a hundred times less useful. I’ve been looking at them for 20 years, and they’re opaque at best, mostly useless at worst. You would suppose that a document describing how a child or teen learns best would be readable by parents at least, but they aren’t. Experts love to flex.
A Little Bit Simpler
At LDAO I translated the above into a simpler formula that says, I think, the same thing more clearly:
Learning disabilities can affect the way in which a person takes in, remembers, understands and expresses information.
People with learning disabilities are intelligent and have abilities to learn despite difficulties in processing information.
Living with a learning disability can have an ongoing impact on friendships, school, work, self-esteem and daily life.
People with learning disabilities can succeed when solid coping skills and strategies are developed.
LDs take so many forms, and vary in intensity so much, that it is not simple to list them all, but there are some broad categories which they all fall into:
LDs That Affect Academics:
Difficulties with spelling, reading, listening, focusing, remembering and writing can all have an impact on all areas of school-subjects.
LDs That Affect Organization and Focus:
A series of executive functions allow us to do things like plan, predict, organize and focus. LDs that interfere with these things can interfere with how we manage our lives and physical space. ADHD, which does affect executive functions, is coming to be seen as an LD because of this.
LDs That Affect Social Life:
We learn how to be socially successful, even though we don’t notice that we’re learning. So LDs that make it difficult to interpret facial expressions, body language, or tones of voice can have a real impact on a person’s social life.
LDs That Affect Physical Interaction with the World:
Again, without knowing, we are constantly receiving information about our surroundings and about our bodies: our balance, coordination and movement are all based on this information. So an LD that interferes with how we understand that information can cause a person to be uncoordinated or “clumsy.”
I Can’t Hear You!
But none of that really helped in the classroom. Although I always tried to normalize learning differences in my classes, describing LDs to a classroom of middle school kids, half of whom are overwhelmed with embarrassment and shame (the regular amount that comes with puberty, plus the embarrassment of being anywhere near special education), was nearly hobbling. The shame of certain parents was beyond toxic; their children burned with it. “Hi, I’m Ed,” they would joke angrily. “Special Ed!”
The biggest problem in educating kids with LDs is this: in our ranking and sorting education system, kids know where they stand, know they’ve been Othered. The route to a school like mine involves, most often, failure somewhere else, or bullying, or both.
So students arrive feeling misunderstood and vulnerable (and often angry) – in addition to the regular awfulness of switching schools. And this fact is just true in our society: it is far cooler to be “disaffected” than “dumb.” It is easier to not hand work in than to try your best and get ridiculed for it. Better to be silent than wrong.
I’ve had students in my classes who had previously been called out and mocked by their teachers. I’ve had students who have been gang-bullied or excluded since kindergarten. I’ve had students who had never had a friend, sitting next to students who had been belle-of-the-ball popular but had been forced to come to my uncool classroom because of “some bullshit.” My classes have been a mixture of awkward kids who were relieved to be somewhere safe, and angry kids who hated being associated with awkward kids. Talking about LDs openly was both essential to getting anywhere and also the nuclear-hot button in the room.
You can see why I always began by discussing my own LDs, and you can see why I eventually had to really investigate and interrogate the word “disability.” You can see the same strain all over the community – all kinds of crazy logos trying to indicate that ability is the key word, when it is clearly not.
I tried my hardest to discuss, explore, and present LDs factually and usefully. It was terribly hard, and I don’t know that it was successful at all in my first few years of teaching. I may have been too vehement. I tried laying the blame for it all on the school system: how it tries to teach everyone the same way because that is cheapest and easiest, and leaves out people who learn differently. I tried the Different Is Good tack, which I don’t think the kids bought.
Some Assembly Required
Then I was hired – through flukes, as always – to create a workbook aimed at middle school kids for the Learning Disabilities Association of Ontario (LDAO). I rarely use workbooks, myself – I follow my nose most of the time – so I don’t know if they’re any good. I also hate looking at my old work. People still use them, though – LDAO still sells them (with new, awful covers, and my name removed). The series encapsulated my thinking and approach at the time.
Then I was given an opportunity to do something similar for high school students, and I changed tactics. I chose a read-alone book, to accommodate the need for privacy while vulnerable, and made it a graphically enhanced book (not quite comics). It was there that I found an approach I could get behind. In it I described specific exemplar people with LDs, and I left them loose while describing the impacts of the LD on all aspects of life. Here’s one example; you can see and have that book here.
That led to an information campaign called “The Face of LD” (around 2006), which used this same approach: describe a person, and then describe how learning differences impacted their day-to-day life, without catastrophizing anything. I was proud of this campaign.
Are These Traits Really Disabilities?
At the same time, I was really beginning to doubt a fundamental aspect of my field – which also happened to be the toxic word for my students. I began to really wonder: are these traits inherently disabilities? Are kids with these learning features really disabled?
Dyslexic Genius
I had taught more than a few kids who had dyslexia – brutal, head-spinning dyslexia – who, if you stopped bothering them about their spelling and stopped asking them to read out loud, were exceptionally strong students. They used their listening and speaking skills and their memories to do the work – what can be called “using compensatory strategies.” Imagine a school system in an oral culture. Does the dyslexic kid even know they have dyslexia? This kind of student had an affliction that was a result of a text-based education system, so I had them do their studying and testing out loud, and the challenge was gone.
The usual approach to this kind of kid was to have them practice and practice the thing that they were unable to do. There’s nothing wrong with working on weak areas – it’s a smart thing to do. But there is something really wrong with working on those areas at the expense of learning other things. By middle school, for the most part, students are not learning to read anymore, they’re reading to learn. If they can learn by listening, you have a real choice: to spend effort trying to make them a confident reader, or to spend effort trying to make them a confident student.
If you don’t try to hammer a kid into a shape they are not inclined to be, you relieve a huge amount of the “problems” they have at school. That fit with my own suspicion of structures and strictures: who says we should sit all day? Who says we should all care about the same stuff at the same time, all the time? Who says you shouldn’t doodle while listening? Who says we need to sit up straight? I had little interest in making kids conform, even though that pressure was everywhere.
Plenty of teachers are deeply invested in the idea that our education system is a well-planned system and that their job is to help all kids fit into it. My not believing in the plan – but believing in the mission of education – allowed me to disregard things other saw as crucial. My confidence about my position came from looking at the results of the standard way: how well did it work, really? Most kids come out of that system either as fearful conformists, or thinking there’s something wrong with them. That’s a shit outcome.
A parent comes to mind – a lovely family of a lovely kid. He was a sad kid, really felt shitty about himself, but most of his issues were actually just related to dyslexia and fine-motor skills. He couldn’t spell well and his handwriting was illegible. (More about illegibility later.) I got him to type his work, using spellcheck (and a human editor when possible), and he was doing fine. But in interviews, his parents regularly, anxiously pressed me on why I wasn’t having him practice handwriting; I told them I believed they should stop worrying about it, full stop. They were worried but trustful. Five years later, at the boy’s grade 12 graduation, the father reminded me of this and said it had made all of the difference in their household. They’d listened, stopped bugging the kid about it, let go of their fear, and he had blossomed. He was heading to the post-secondary program he wanted, with great marks and lots of confidence.
Is There Any ADHD on a Farm?
ADHD was one of the most prevalent (and loud) LDs in my classes – and a huge number of the barriers to learning for those kids was easily removed by my not punishing restlessness, distraction, and interruption in any way. I would remark on it if the interruption was disruptive, but I did that without any judgement, none of the How Dare You nonsense.
A lot of the rest was solved by letting kids sit on the floor, or stand, or take more breaks. We went outside and ran around every chance we got (this caused anger in other classes, sadly). Nobody was punished for being funny at the wrong time (I always acknowledge a good joke, with a reminder about timing), and I never used the big sledgehammer against them: “How come you can pay attention to your video game??”
That made me really wonder: is there ADHD on a farm? It isn’t inherently human to work in a factory or an office. On a farm, there are 90 things always needing doing – some in bits over time, some in intense bursts of hard work, with corresponding downtimes. Impulsivity might exist, but it would result in a reputation for impulsivity, and not in a reputation as bad or dumb. And kids with ADHD focus just fine when they are interested. Farms are interesting AF.
Aside from nutrition and ubiquitous screens and whatever other garbage has intensified ADHD, I believe a lot of it comes from asking – requiring – students to sit unnaturally and passively in a learning factory all day. That structure is barely a century old – why on earth would it come naturally?
Y Kan’t Tori Read?
The same goes for reading. As a technology reading is at most ten thousand years old. Human beings are two hundred thousand years old – and many of our aspects are millions of years old. It is radically unreasonable to presume that all humans should have natural facility with reading. Blaming students for not being easy readers is like blaming your mother for not knowing how to use FaceTime, multiplied by generations.
Yes, we need students to learn to read. Illiteracy is hobbling. But the shaming is some real bullshit. If you’re using any of that, remove it right now.
What Am I Supposed to Do about It?
Here’s an immensely useful measure you can employ without too much effort: look at your lessons and ask what you are teaching. If you’re teaching creative writing, don’t bundle it with grades for spelling. If you’re teaching an essay structure, mark the essay structure, not everything in their work. If you’re engaging them in a conversation, trying to activate their critical minds, subtract “judgement for interrupting.” You can still remark on it, and guide the behaviour, but if a kid with a great point gets scowled at for expressing it in the wrong way, this will let them know that they should just shut up and not share the idea that might propel the conversation to new heights.
Some teachers – some people – find power in correcting others. Be mindful of that, too. We’ve all seen it: someone halting another person’s talking by correcting some grammatical aspect of it. It kills discourse, and hardly matters. The least important part of talking is correct grammar. The most important part is the information being shared.
About Legibility
You’ve seen this too, I’m sure: “This is chicken scratch!” Teachers insulting handwriting reflexively is equivalent to berating a firefighter for having muddy boots and refusing to let her put out a goddam fire. All of that garbage only serves the interest of conformity.
I’m not saying that conformity is bad, or unnecessary. In the interests of people doing big cooperative things, it is pretty important. In the interests of professionalism (say, making a proper bridge or performing a proper surgery or, God forbid, fighting a war), conformity and adherence to standards are essential.
The “be mindful” part is this: your students are not fighting a war or building a bridge, unless they are building a bridge or fighting a war. We do not need all students to conform. If you have a student who cannot not be messy, let it go, for goodness sake.
If You Can’t Understand a Child, Who’s “Incapable”?
Kids, I have observed, do not need everyone to be the same. I believe they are indoctrinated into needing conformity by adult society – and requiring conformity is itself disabling (witness my parents and their friends “not being able” to understand that priest).
A huge number of my students have “chicken scratch” handwriting. Fine-motor control and dyslexia and disaffection all contribute. To be decent and respectful, I found it necessary to learn how to read anything, so that I could read, say, their journals or test answers. If I had refused to accept or mark work that was misspelled or hard to decipher quickly, my students would have “failed” a lot when they indeed had not failed. If I ask them on a geography test to name the provinces of Canada from memory and they write Notaro, Quabek, Manitob, Sasaktwan, Alberto, etc. – they’re not wrong. They know the answer – they clearly have it memorized – and I’m an asshole if I mark them wrong, or take off marks for spelling. Teachers must separate out what we are asking and what is being answered if we are going to be fair. And school must be fair if we are asking kids to work at it.
In addition, I believe fundamentally in what some call “unconditional positive regard.” If a student enters my room, I must treat them with love – this allows me to ask the same of them with regard to how they treat each other. This is how you create a classroom where kids will push themselves to try, will engage in challenging things. A lot of kids will enter ready to be treated badly; it is our job to assure them that this will not happen. Reading their efforts with love goes a long way towards that. The relief you’ll see in their eyes when you ask them to clarify a word without drawing attention to the parts you can figure out on your own is a great signal. When a student apologizes for their messy handwriting, I say, “No worries, I can read anything”; I am telling them I will meet them where they are, not requiring them to already be better than that. Later on, when I ask them to produce a final draft of something, they are much more likely to try, much more likely to accept edits and correction and revision.
In the last post, I said we must first do no harm. With many students, that might actually mean first let them know they are safe – and the way to do that is to show unconditional positive regard.
That might help us all, if it spreads, with our social media insanity, the madness that asks us to look for and attack any and all errors and mistakes, our pouncing on people. But even if you enjoy engaging in culture war with your ideological opponents, students are not those people. They are kids.
I’m also not arguing – at all – that we surrender correct spellings or the requirement to take turns. I’m just saying these things can be taught discretely, thoughtfully, and not as a second level of requirement in every lesson we teach – and that all of this teaching can be done without berating anybody or wrecking anybody’s morning.
This begins with mindful attention to your own lessons and goals. Are you asking them to write their thoughts, or to spell their thoughts? Are you talking, or are you taking turns?
Where Do the Problems Lie?
I cannot see without glasses. In a society with the widespread and affordable technology of glasses, I almost never think of this as a disability. In a truly wheelchair accessible building where everyone works at a desk, what really is the issue for the person who needs a wheelchair? I’m not trying to downplay disabilities with facile argument, but I think we should examine this question.
Teaching is a technology too – and unlike 50 years ago, we know how to teach students in a way that meets their needs. That particular technology is more expensive – you need more teachers with more time, and IT costs money – but cost is not a learning problem, it is a spending problem. We know society has enough money to address it (just observe any bank bailout or military budget). If we don’t, and a student struggles because of that, whose problem is it?
Lots of what educators call problems are disruptions to the teacher’s plans. Undoubtedly it is “bothersome” to be interrupted or to have to arrange for scarce resources. But I had learned at my camp job early on that to have a successful day/camping trip/meeting, I needed to have a great, tight, implementable plan – and that I could never expect it to work. I am beyond grateful for that lesson.
Who Is the Adult Here?
There is something really funny about that outraged teacher expectation that everything will go according to plan. How dare you? was the main sentiment relayed by the teachers who hated me as a kid. Even then I found that funny. Teachers requiring some level of conformity are understandable, but I could never understand the “How on earth could you not be listening to me?” stuff, the daily TOTAL SHOCK at broken rules or laughter or lateness or whatever. The teenager inside me always reacts to staff-room venting sessions about this with “What did you think this job was?” and “You took this job thinking kids were going to do everything you said? Really?”
We Are
If kids are bored in your class, darling, look inside – and look at their lives, and look at the news, and wonder if they’re hungry. Maybe your class is boring? Maybe they’re working hard on something else that you can’t see? I don’t know why adults assume kids will do as they’re asked. I’ve taught adults – teachers – and none of them do. They never stop talking – never! A coworker I really dig once asked in good faith, “What about the social contract?” I had to point out that one does not exist in our situation: they didn’t sign shit. Their side of it is mandatory, and inelegantly designed. Our standards are what they are because students are generally compliant, but they do not have to be. That thing about horses drinking is a deep truth, and if we can’t force it, we must make drinking our water attractive and rewarding.
We have an internal measuring stick for kids that makes no sense:
Kids should be good at and interested in everything
Kids should respect all adults whether or not they deserve it
Kids should express themselves clearly and in the right moments whether or not adults do that
Kids should use the Five-Step Writing Process, whether or not their teachers use it
Kids should not interrupt, but should endure all interruptions (bells, for example)
There is something backwards about this: who is supposed to be more capable in our situation?
WE Are
If a kid can really make you mad – keeping in mind that they are 12 and you are 25, or 50 – whose problem is that? If a child swearing blows your mind, why? What planet do you live on? I’m not saying those reactions aren’t normal – they are – but you’re a professional adult whose job it is to understand kids. Why do kids have to carry your water? I lurk on Reddit feeds for teachers, and am always overwhelmed by the outrage and shock among teachers, always have to bite my tongue when they “can’t believe” how bad kids are. You can’t believe it? Really?
I think teachers who act like this are acting out their own childhoods, their own mistreatment (or their own successful behaviour). If you (unconsciously) believe that the system is well-thought-out and valid, then you might (unconsciously) feel you’ve earned the privilege of obedience, and want to be treated as your teachers demanded you treat them. That might feel like The Deal You’ve Agreed To, but it isn’t. No adult should have ever asked more of a child than they themselves were willing and able to do – that’s nuts. But it’s an old kind of nuts, and it runs deep.
Real Apologies to Teachers:
I am NOT down on teachers: I think they should be paid more, protected and respected by their employers, and given sensible, doable tasks in a thoughtfully designed, grounded system, and they are NOT, especially in the troubled USA.
I do not see that as being at odds with asking adults to behave like adults. Children are children, and expecting them to behave according to some imaginary, invalid standard is an unfair mistake. We had our childhoods, and if we didn’t get what we needed during them, that sucks, but we must deal with that as adults – through self-development, therapy, whatever – and not ask our children to provide it for us.
Thanks for reading. Your thoughts are very welcome: click the little box. BTW, if anyone can identify the deep and stupid music history reference in this piece, let me know. :)
If you like it, please share it.
jep