August. Time to start thinking about going back to school. I went back to school many times: preschool, kindergarten, 1st through 11th grade (I skipped 12th), 4 years of college, 2 years on my master’s and 3 years of classes on my PhD (when I was working on the dissertation there was no summer break). […]
With 2E kids, should we treat the gift or the deficit or both?
January 15, 2017 by 1 Comment
Children who are twice exceptional (2E) by definition have areas of great strength (gifts) and areas of great weakness (deficits). The traditional model, inasmuch as there was one at all, was to treat only the deficits, figuring that the gifts would take care of themselves. This ignored the fact that the gifts often made the […]
Big school, small school, home school?
January 7, 2017 by 2 Comments
When trying to find a good school for a child with learning disabilities (particularly NVLD), one decision is mainstream vs. special education. I talked about that in an earlier post: Drowning in the Mainstream. But another decision, particularly if you decide against special education, is the size of the school. Clearly, schools vary in size […]
Teachers: Don’t make the child the bearer of bad news
November 10, 2016 by Leave a Comment
Poor report cards, requests for a meeting, notices of problems in the classroom …. These happen. Sometimes, teachers need to communicate bad news to parents. Communication is good, even if it’s about problems. But, all too often, the children have to take the bad news home to their parents. This is a bad idea. […]
On paying attention
July 6, 2016 by 1 Comment
Pay attention! We hear it all the time and it certainly is important! But how does one do it? And does everyone do it the same way? I can’t answer the first question, but see How Kids Pay Attention and Why some Kids Struggle with it for some good ideas. But for the second question, […]
“Lazy” is a four letter word. Don’t use it in front of children
October 15, 2014 by 1 Comment
I’ve been called lazy a whole lot in my life, almost always by teachers who had no clue. Sometimes they used the euphemism “does not apply himself”. The best teacher who ever taught me, on the other hand, said I tried harder than almost anyone. But “lazy” is a four letter word. It should never […]
Figuring out how we learn best: Don’t change the peg, change the hole!
May 21, 2014 by 1 Comment
There is an old saying that “a square peg won’t fit in a round hole”. Yet much of education, especially for those of us with learning disabilities, seems to consist of trying to force a square peg into a round hole. But can we change the hole?
Accommodations: Who are they acccommodating?
February 27, 2014 by 1 Comment
In this post I discussed accommodations at school; in this one – accommodations at work; in a future post I will discuss accommodations at home. But today, I want to discuss a more general question: Who are they accommodating?
Accommodations at school
February 23, 2014 by 5 Comments
In a recent post I discussed accommodations at work. Now, I’ll discuss the much larger topic of accommodations at school. Larger, at least, because more has been written about it.
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