Introduction (0:31)
“Give me five children who aren’t functioning in the classroom. Take away the child who is mentally impaired or retarded in some way. Take away the child who has a primary emotional disturbance. Take away the child who’s not had the opportunity to learn, and take away the child who has some modality deficit, who perhaps is deaf or blind. The child that remains is a learning disabled child. That is, the child is not functioning in school, and yet his modalities are intact, he’s had the opportunity to learn, he’s not disturbed, and he’s not retarded. One of the most common misconceptions about learning disabilities is that it’s a school problem, when in actuality it affects every waking moment of the child’s day.”
Experiencing Frustration, Anxiety, and Tension (3:44)
“‘The first page, Carol, earth to Carol, come in please…’ Raise your hand if you thought that was funny. Yeah, everybody likes that except Carol. Any time you as a parent or as a teacher decide to use sarcasm with kids, understand that you’ve created a victim. Now that little throwaway line that I threw at Carol, I will forget within five minutes, you will forget within five minutes, but it’s very likely to stay with Carol for the rest of the day.”
“If he’s going to accept ‘I don’t know’ as an answer, I’m going to stop trying to think of a response, and I’ll just say ‘I don’t know’.”
Processing (8:31)
“The non-LD children are processing an answer. The learning disabled children have to process the question. So, in effect, they have twice the processing load to do than the other students in the class. So even if the class is moving at a normal rate, to the LD child, it seems to be moving at this breakneck speed.”
Yes. This happens to me. Yes. Absolutely.
“Now that teacher would not punish Stephanie for not being able to read or unable to do math, because she understands a learning disability; and yet the child will be punished for having a processing difficulty when all of those problems are caused by the same thing, which is this inability to process language.”
“I ask [the LD student] questions I know she can answer, and eventually I’ll be over here lecturing and you begin to see her hand going up, because now she understands that she can survive this experience called volunteering in school.”
Distractability vs Attention Span– “The child with no attention span pays attention to nothing. The child who’s distractible pays attention to everything.”
Every day of my life is a trial in focusing on the right things. I have noise-cancelling Beats headphones that I wear during assignments and tests, and also while I do homework or anything that requires my focus. It muffles the outside world, all the voices, movements, noises. But even that paired with medication doesn’t solve the problem, and I think that is what teachers don’t understand.
Risk Taking (13:46)
“Why should I play this game? Because based on what I’ve seen, if I get the answer right, he’s not gonna say anything, and if I get it wrong, he’s gonna embarrass me, so why should I volunteer?”
I am a bit different, I am too outspoken and passionate to not take risks. But I absolutely can relate, to a certain extent. I just can’t remember.
Visual Perception (16:17)
Four things that happen when a child is unable to perceive
- “Look at it again. Look at it harder.”
- Bribe the child to do it. — “You would expect the doctor to give some kind of medicine. You wouldn’t expect the doctor to try and bribe the child out of his temperature, and yet that’s what we do with kids.”
- Begin taking things away.
- Blaming the victim. “The reason Debbie can’t tell me what this is is because she’s not trying hard enough.” *I feel like I can relate to this more. Segue into…
Motivation (19:13)
“Motivation only enables us to do, to the best of our ability, what we are already capable of doing.”
“Was Debbie motivated? Yes. Could she do it? No. Learning disabilities have very little to do with motivation.”
“What the LD child needs is a teacher. Not necessarily all kinds of commercial software, what he needs is a teacher to give him these direct instructions. Because once I give you this direct instruction, you will be able to see [the cow] perfectly clearly.”
I struggle a lot with staying on track in class and understanding what my objectives are. I feel stupid when I can’t conceptualize a task that the rest of the class has already moved on to. I feel terrible when I bring my group down during projects because I can’t understand what I am meant to be doing.
“No one in this room could do it. The real experience of learning disabilities is being the only person who can’t do it.”
Reading Comprehension (23:07)
“Comprehension has much more to do with background than it does with vocabulary.”
“We cannot assume that because a person every word in the passage, he can understand the passage.”
“The first story you understood every word, you couldn’t answer a question; the second story, you didn’t understand anything that it was about, but you can respond to all the questions. You see, that’s how complicated reading comprehension is. It’s a very very complicated task that we expect kids to learn on their own, and they cannot. They need direct instruction.”
Effect of Perception on Behavior (27:18)
“Many times the LD child will get into trouble and not know what he did wrong. And when he says ‘I don’t know what I did wrong,’ he’s telling the truth.”
“I can think of nothing that a kid can write on a piece of paper that gives a teacher the right to tear it up in front of them.”
“What the coach didn’t see is you responded to what you perceive, you misperceived the stimulus. Based on Stephanie’s perception of this stimulus, that was a very good answer. But see, I wear the suit, I’m the teacher, and I decide what the stimulus is.”
Visual Motor Coordination (31:39)
“Visual motor integration is a major problem for many learning disabled children, and the writing process is this difficult for them. This really is not the worst case scenario, it really is this difficult.”
Oral Expression (34:34)
“Many LD children suffer from something called dysnomia. It’s that word-on-the-tip-of-your-tongue phenomenon that we all have four or five times a day. It happens to the LD kid hundreds of times a day.”
This was a moment of epiphany for me. I would joke around and say I must have aphasia, but I was frustrated at not knowing what was wrong with me. I can’t articulate my thoughts most of the time. Writing is so, so hard for me. I have a wide vocabulary and I have always been good in my English classes because it comes naturally to me. But when producing my own original work, I first have to deal with the aversion to the assignment, not wanting to start because I know I will struggle a lot. Then, I have to deal with having a concept clear in my mind that I want to write, but I can’t find the words to appropriately convey my point for the life of me. I have to settle for whatever I can come up with. I end up hating what I’ve written and getting discouraged by my inabilities. That’s why I take so long to write essays and these blog posts.
“The human brain has two functions: one is storage, and the other is retrieval. […] But what happens with LD children is that there is a problem between storage and retrieval if they can’t get the information out. And many times they will get it out, use it, and then put it back in the wrong place, so when they need it again, retrieval goes into storage and they can’t find the word they were looking for.”
“You can only do one cognitive thing at a time, but you can do two or more associative things at a time.”
“For children with dysnomia, speaking is not an associative process, it’s a cognitive process- and they can only do that [at one time]. Imagine the difficulty this presents for a child who’s trying to take notes, who’s trying to listen and write at the same time. With all the wonderful study skills programs out there, we have to buy into the fact that there are some children who will never be able to take notes- because listening, for them, is a cognitive experience, and they can’t do two things at one time.”
“If anyone at home makes a mistake, he’s the first one to call it to everyone’s attention. Isn’t that true for the LD kids you work with? You bet it is! Because if you take a bright person and you make it such that they can’t learn, it becomes an obsession with them to convince themselves and everyone else that they’re not the only ones that make mistakes.”
“The greatest gift you can give children is the gift of time.”
Reading and Decoding (45:03)
“We learn, from the time we’re born til we’re five years old, that spatial orientation does not dictate object identification. […] Suddenly, you go to school, in the first grade, and some lady in the skirt says, ‘Forget everything that you know about perception. Because now, if you take this shape and hold it this way, it’s a P and it says ‘pup’. If you turn it this way, it’s a B and it says ‘but’. If you turn it this way, it’s a D and it says ‘done’, then if you turn it this way it’s a Q and God knows what it says. In other words, for the first time in our lives, spatial orientation changes what it actually is.”
“How many times, as teachers, do we tell a child who can’t do something that a task is easy. Think about that, the child can’t do it! He doesn’t need to hear that it’s easy.”
“Is your name Debbie?! Now I’m using that rhetorical question with Karen absolutely shut down communication. That’s no way to communicate, there’s no correct answer to that question, and it’s extremely intimidating. In other words, we only use rhetorical questions with adults when were trying to hurt their feelings, but we use them with kids all the time.”
“See, even though you read through that material, you don’t have any idea what the content was, because all your energy went into the decoding of the material.”
Auditory and Visual Capabilities (53:03)
“This activity is dedicated to that kid, and I’ve seen him thousands of times, who will go up to the teacher and say, ‘Excuse me teacher, I don’t know how to do this worksheet.’ The teacher says, “The directions are right there, read them.’ ‘Yeah, I read them, but I don’t know how to do it.’ ‘They’re right there!’ ‘Yeah, but I don’t know how to do it!’ Then the teacher finally says, ‘It says circle the right answer!’ And the kid goes, ‘Oh, okay, no problem.’ And sits back down. In other words, once I hear it, I’m fine, but I gotta hear it first. I’ve gotta hear it before it makes any sense to me.” *this is where I started bawling*
“Mural: Donor chapped on chair retreats. Again, I could’ve had you sat there and try to read it over and over and over, and until I gave you some auditory input, it wouldn’t have made any sense. That’s why it is important that some kids get their books put on tape, so that they can get the information through their ears. They can understand it that way, they can’t understand it when they get it through their eyes.”
Fairness (55:48)
“Five and a half hours of intensive honesty curriculum, and then on Saturday night I take Kitt to the movies, we get up to the booth to buy the tickets, and I bend over and whisper into his 12 year old ear, ‘Tell the man you’re 10.’ Understand, Kitt learned more about honesty in that five second exchange in the theater than he did in five and a half hours of lecture. Because kids learn their morals according to what they see, not according to what we tell them to do.”
I have a chronic problem with being late all the time, and I blame my parents for teaching me that habit. My dad is consistently late to work and other things, and then he would get mad at me for running late to school. I know I have to take the matter into my own hands and break this habit, especially if I want to set a better example for my kids. Or keep a job.
“I see classrooms and families being run based on the adult’s concept of honesty, the adult’s concept of truth, the adult’s concept of liberty, patriotism, religion; and yet those same classrooms and families are being run based on the child’s concept of fairness.”
“Fairness does not mean that everyone gets the same, fairness actively means everyone gets what he or she needs.”
“The one answer I will not discuss, the one answer I think is beneath contempt and beneath discussing, is the answer I hear most often is that ‘I can’t do that for Jovi because it’s not fair to the rest of the class.’ It’s got nothing to do with the others! Jovi needs it, the others don’t. It’s got nothing to do with the others.”
“How ludicrous, how unfair, how how absolutely foolish and unethical would it be for me to say, Carol, I’d really like to help you, I really would, but heck, we’ve got 30 people here. I haven’t got the time to give CPR to everybody, and it wouldn’t be fair to only give it to you.”
“Johnny, the LD child, needs a special tutor- how do I make that up to the other kid so that I’m fair to everybody? You don’t have to, as long as you can look into the eyes of the siblings and say, ‘Honey, if it was you I’d be doing the same thing.’ “
“We’re not gonna be able to work successfully with a learning disabled child in a mainstream classroom until teachers and parents begin to understand that in order to be fair, we’ve got to treat them differently.”
Commentary (1:01:08)
“I don’t want all these people to think that I’m stupid! And then I say, god, imagine kids with learning disabilities who must sit in class all the time saying, ‘All these people think I’m really stupid. And I know I’m not stupid.’ “
“I think it would be a good experience for a lot of other children in classrooms at some point to understand what their friends and their classmates are going through.”
“The problem that I see that my child has had, and I think most learning disability kids suffer from, is poor self esteem- which can be so offset by the teachers in the school if they’re enlightened about what they’re doing. So that, to me, is the exciting potential that this program has to offer, because they suffer so in terms of how they perceive themselves.”
This documentary made me realize that I have internalized all the struggles I have because of my ADHD. I gradually forgot that I have extra difficulties that other people don’t have, and when I had trouble with anything. I identified with the rest of my peers. I attributed my struggles to being stupid and I became frustrated and angry with myself. I started comparing myself to my peers constantly and was incredibly hard on myself. My self-esteem has plummeted and now I have to reevaluate how I interact with others and how to develop a relationship with myself.