Post #15 Learning Disabilities Introduction
“Mom, you know how I am not perfect.”
It was the end of a school day for all three of us. Absent-mindedly I turned to Yasik merely to check off my ‘to-do’ list the perfunctory question, “How was school today?”
I was not prepared for such a heart wrenching response. It hurt. Wanting to comfort, I whipped out an emotional band-aid I hoped sound unequivocal.
“No. Yasik you are perfect in every way that counts”, which I ended with a lame, “Everyone has struggles.” I listed his good points all of which were absolutely true but he countered anything positive I could conjure, focused on telling me of only one actual instance when he answered a question in class and was right. “Mostly,” he said, “I let others do it because I don’t know how.”
At bedtime Dave picked up my attempt at comfort with yet another band-aid.
But of course, Yasik, 12 years old at the time, was, by then, well past the reassurance offered to a child with a boo-boo. By now we three knew on some concrete level that the wound was deep in each of our hearts, but it ran most deep in Yasik’s heart. He told Dave that evening that he wanted the teacher to let him go out of the classroom for extra help because he knew being adopted from a foreign country, he was different and because reading was hard for him, he was behind the other kids in the classroom.
This wound had been making itself plain, roller coaster fashion, in almost daily assaults since grade 1. One day the roller coaster chugged upward. Yasik was confident of his understanding of time and numbers, asking for a minute to play before getting ready for bed. I said, “A minute is 60 seconds.” In true Yasik distain, he came back with “Nobody can count that far.”
Another day the roller coaster plunged. After school in grade two, Dave was helping Yasik prepare for a spelling test. Yasik managed to get several words firmed up and was beaming with his success. Dave was happy too, yet added a fatherly sermon-in-a-minute, intoning as good pastors do, “You are learning these words so you can read them and write them and go on to more and more spelling. It never stops.” Yasik dropped his head to the kitchen table and wailed.
Up went the roller coaster again as Yasik played so well his soccer team carried him over their heads off the rain-soaked field. His athletic skill had given them the first game of the season. Down went the roller coaster when I got sharp with Yasik one Monday morning as I tried to push him to do 15 minutes of piano practice, eat, dress, and practice spelling before the dash to school. I demanded he go through the words one more time. He struggled to comply, looking so lost, thankfully, it halted me. I called him to me, held him, fighting tears and we went over the words together this time. He laid against me, not holding back at all – and spelled them all correctly.
How does a child get the message that he is not perfect? Or our neighbour girl, a young girl whom we first met as she stood on the deck of their home belting out a song in pure joy? How does she get the message in grade 5 that she is the “class problem”?
I’m not harried these days; I have the time now. I want to come to some understanding of the ‘what’, ‘how’, ‘why’ and definitely the ‘so what’ of Learning Disabilities or ‘LD’. I will start with the ‘who’ because beyond the basic questions about LD, which can’t be left out of the equation, I have a more specific investment in seeking understanding. I want to understand my son’s experience, making my study very specifically a ‘sample of one’, a sample of one family’s experience of learning disabilities in the context of adoption.
It is a study of his experience of abandonment, hospitalization and orphanage or institutional care. How are these experiences entwined with LDs? Context matters.
And since adoption into our family? Pretty much from the fall Yasik entered grade one, the label, LD, has been part of our family’s identity though for most of our active, growing family and working years, it dragged along with us like some long-suffering, ghostly apparition needing to get our attention before it could go poof. Now I turn to this apparition, giving it the attention it has been clamoring for, allowing it to show me some perspectives on all the ingredients in a recipe for a learning disability: abandonment, institutional care, schooling, and brain wiring.
I am, hopefully, seeking these perspectives without indulging in providing advice. Time and again in the reading I have done to prepare this set of posts, I have come across these warning labels: “While no consensus has been reached…”, “Research does not support…”, “The definition of “learning disability” (LD) varies according to the source…”, “Sometimes there’s a temptation to oversell conclusions, …”[i]
Kinda’ puts you in mind of the six blind men of Indostan, doesn’t it?
A further reason to avoid offering remedial advice comes from articles that question the studies like one popular for a time that suggested there was a specific dyslexia gene, or dyslexia is simply a twisting of letters like ‘d’ and ‘b’, or programs which offer a way out of a learning disability, often accompanied by a hefty fee, ironically not seeing the oxymoron in ‘the science is settled’. Too often, these programs keep a back door open for themselves by suggesting if the program doesn’t work, the child is simply not trying hard enough or the parents have gotten in the way.[ii]
And let me add: There is no virtue signaling here. Yesterday, the young girl two doors up told me of her struggles with reading. I was all ears as this is just what my study is about. I asked her how she coped. She came back with, “Do you want the right answer or the truthful answer?” I was amazed that someone so young had thought through the problem to this extent. She said, “Honestly I just shove it to the back of my head… until it pops.”
When I tried to encourage her by telling her that she was uniquely artistic and creative, she replied in a fair degree of frustration, “I don’t want to be just creative. I would rather be able to do everything equally good than just be good at somethings and not so good at other things. I just want to be able to do everything”. And I, who have read a fair bit and thought through the ideas presented, could find nothing to say that would have moved her to hope.
In seeking to understand our personal experiences with learning disabilities I am attempting to interpret research; I am reaching into knowledge I have little preparation for. I found a warning in this sentence, The moment you start to arrange the world in words, you alter its nature[iii]. Warning taken.
Note: I am using Grok, Google and Chatgpt without citing their references though each site provides these references.
Footnotes
[i] Hall, Susan L., & Lousia C. Moats, Ed.D. Parenting a Struggling Reader: a guide to diagnosing and finding help for your child’s reading difficulties Harmony, 2002, 84
Forbes, Samuel, Prema Aneja. “Why there’s no such thing as normal in child development.” December, 23, 2024 https://theconversation.com/why-theres-no-such-thing-as-normal-in-child-development-244681
Burnett, Dean The Idiot Brain: a neuroscientist explains what your head is really up to HarperCollins Publishers, Ltd. 2016, 114
[ii] Lee, Jenny. ‘Dyslexia challenge is a race against time: UBC scientist Max Cynader is making strides toward solving the dyslexia puzzle” [Final Edition] The Vancouver Sun; Vancouver, B.C. [Vancouver, B.C]. 03 Oct 2002: A19. I could no longer access the article.
Mathias, Vicki. “Study confirms gene is linked to dyslexia: Youngsters in the city have helped researchers confirm that there is a gene associated with dyslexia or other reading problems.” Evening Post Bristol (UK). 02 Oct 2008: 68.
Shaywitz, Sally, M.D. and Jonthan Shaywitz, M.D. Overcoming Dyslexia, 2nd ed. Alfred A. Knopf, 2020, 117, 118, 119
[iii] Shields, David. reality hunger: a manifesto Alfred A. Knopf, 2010, 65
