Klarinet Archive - Posting 001114.txt from 2004/03
From: "Thomas" <thomas@-----.com>
Subj: [kl] Re: no one left behind
Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2004 10:31:52 -0500
Karl: > And many children with learning
> disabilities, physical challenges or other characteristics that make
> learning more difficult find ways to accommodate the environment and
> succeed despite their problems. Not every child who is learning disabled
is able to compensate > for his own problems and overcome them without help.
You just contradicted yourself, I think. I am not sure what you are trying
to say. If you are talking about a special classroom - most of the time
that is "too much" help - the children do not learn to become independent
when they have people waiting on them all day long. When you have children
with too many different disabilities, you can't dump them in one room, they
don't learn the same way and it does not serve any of them. Most school
districts or counties have some option for the severely retarded that do not
involve inclusion.
Here's another way to look at it - do you, as a taxpayer, want to support
our children on the public dole for the rest of their lives? Because if you
do, then dump them in one of these rooms where they don't learn anything
except to misbehave.
> It is not a child's "quirks" or lack of social skills that make it hard
in some cases for
> him to learn at the rate or in the way that "most" children do.
In the case of Autism and Asperger's, yes, most of the time it is. It is
the majority of the issue. The problem with this disorder is that these
kids have neurological impairments that prevent them from prompt retrieval,
which is a major problem when you are testing. It's also the same
impairments (we parents of these children call them "quirks", I personally
don't give a crap about PC because this is not a PC world we have to live
in) that make them unable to understand social cues, respond appropriately
to others (i.e. in answering verbal questions), and appear "stupid" to other
children.
> And the idea of segregating the kids who need special help, attention and
> accommodation was, before IDEA or NLCB, meant by its proponents as a way
> of providing that help in a setting that allowed closer contact between
> teacher and pupil and more flexibility in dealing with individual
> problems.
Social skills are a MAJOR issue with children with autism. They Need to
socialize with NT children (neurotypical, aka "normal") because they imitate
who they are with. If they are dumped in with the emotionally disturbed,
then they will act like them. Period. Autistic children who have been in
with NT children all their lives will regress when put in the dumping room.
And they are easily led by those who like to be in power (i.e. bullies).
Just because they don't learn the same way does not mean they need to be in
the SpEd room.
> Teachers need to deal with "quirks" and "annoying traits" all the time.
> If they only need to deal with the "normal" (whatever that is) child in
> the general population toward whom their schools are targeted, they will
> still have a range of styles and rates to deal with. The chaos (and the
> ultimate breakdown of instruction that results) comes from trying to use
> too many teaching strategies at once to connect to too many learning
> styles with too widely varied content, so that nobody can keep track of
> who is accomplishing what.
Problem is, 90% of teaching is verbal - lectures and the like. It IS the
same teaching style. Unless you are talking about the people doing the
teaching. Curriculums have been constructed this way for years. Yet the
stats are that 70% of our children do not learn best verbally. Also,
although there is more than there used to be, there is still not much
training in teaching the kinesthetic or the visual styles of teaching. This
is why music is so beneficial to children, it encompasses both of those
styles.
There is a very good book out called "Right-Brained Children in a
Left-Brained World" by Jeffrey Freed. ADD children are not the only
children the book applies to. It also applies to children on the spectrum.
Actually, many doctors feel that ADD may very well be on the autistic
spectrum.
You have to realize that there are WAY more of these children than there
used to be. It could be because of the chemicals in our every day
environment. It could be because of the mercury in MMR shots. I wouldn't
doubt if it was some combination of all these things. That autism and ADD
occur more often in males is more of a genetic thing, the weakness of the
traits in male genes that lend themselves and are more sensitive to ADD and
autism has been well-researched.
> Or, the bright kids get tired of marking time, the slower ones get
> frustrated with content they can't manage and parents get mad at the
> teacher because she/he doesn't understand their children's problems.
I learned to read when I was 3, and was reading 5th grade level books in
Kindergarten. We did not have any of the gifted programs, either, and this
was 30 years ago, not back in the 1800s. And yes, I was bored to tears at
times, but teachers would let me do independent study like they did with
Donna. One year they couldn't schedule me in the top English class because
of band, so they put me in the lowest class. The teacher said, "here's the
book for the other class, do your thing." And that was fine with me, I
also like working on my own.
The list of people I posted was a list of people who have been thought to
have had some form of autism. Dead or not, whatever situation they learned
in, it still remains that Einstein didn't speak a word until he was 3 years
old. This is a Major sign of autism.
Here's a list of Live people thought to be on the spectrum. I took this off
an Asperger's website.
Woody Allen
Tony Benn
Bob Dylan
Joseph Erber (young English composer/musician who has Asperger's Syndrome,
subject of a BBC TV documentary)
Bobby Fischer
Bill Gates
Genie
Crispin Glover
Jeff Greenfield
David Helfgott (Australian pianist)
Michael Jackson
Garrison Keillor
Kevin Mitnick
John Motson
John Nash (US mathematician portrayed by Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind,
USA 2001)
Keith Olbermann
Michael Palin
Keanu Reeves
Oliver Sacks (UK/US neurologist, author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for
a Hat and Awakenings)
James Taylor
That all these people are creative, or mathematical, or musical, does not
surprise me. There is an author, Thomas Sowell, who has written several
books on "The Einstein Syndrome" and "Late Talking Children". He talks
about the genetic relationship learning and language have, and how verbal
teaching is not the way to go. Yet why do we still do this????
Lynn
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