I was looking for information on learning impairments in children and came upon this list:
· Mirror reading and/or writing
· Over learning of facts needed
· Attention span is short
· Learns new concepts slowly
· Distractible
· Attention span is short
· Learns new concepts slowly
· Individualized instruction
· Level of frustration is high
· Early detection means a better educational chance
· Auditory learning through tapes or tutorettes
· Reversals, inversions and omissions of letters and words
· Neurologically impaired (Medical label for SLD)
· Ranges of behavior from lethargic to hyperactive
It looks like the blind is leading the blind. The compiler of the list couldn’t remember that he had just written “Attention span is short”. Ignorance and incompetence is sometimes easy to spot when you ask someone to answer a question or compile a list. The compiler of the list also showed also that he was in the group that “Learns new concepts slowly”.
Chicago’s public schools were notoriously mediocre when I was a child so everyone who could afford it sent their child to Roman Catholic schools, RC or not.
It was also in the middle of the post WW2 baby boom so the nuns (armed with teaching certificates probably earned through 2 years of post secondary education) taught 50 children per classroom.
There were no learning disabilities in those classrooms.
If you didn’t keep up with what Sister taught, your folks smacked you too. (Sister might have smacked you and made you sit in the corner with black stars stamped across your forehead).
At some point people started talking about their learning disability as if it were a mark of royalty.
I’m pretty sure I’ve got a few (no one is perfect) but I try not to think of them as disabilities and more like an interesting challenge.
Well, we’re not supposed to “go there” with psych stuff, but the issue of diagnosing/drugging for ADHD on today’s children came up as I perused the list. Only in today’s world do we pump kids full of sugar, give them tons of visual, psychological, emotional and sonic stimuli then determine that there is something wrong with them for being "distractable’ because they can’t focus. And that’s not even to mention the hormone based differences between boys and girls (and what that entails behavior-wise) being politically unacceptable, like aggressive little boys.
o you went to a fancy school that had black stars. the nuns who taught us didn’t waste time on black stars. the only stars that we got to see where those what appeared naturally. this was a different time. i wouldn’t agree to all that abuse now.
i’m a baby boomer. the tuition at our school was $10 for the first kid, $7 for the second kid, $5 for the third, $2 for the fourth, and the fifth kid was free. that was tuition for the YEAR folks. many families took advantage of the 5th kid free rule and many families had a hard time coming up with the tuition. our nuns were vicentian sisters of charity, a slovak order. catholic grade school was the best thing that ever happened to me. i cruised my way through the rest of school, including college.
I was thinking maybe St. Pauli was some famous private school for girls. I had to go look it up. Hmmm, I don’t know----their skirts seem to have gotten shorter and shorter over the years and might be a bit distracting for a distractible student. I’m surprised djm and gonzo aren’t already here signing up.
An aside: I knew I was having trouble spelling “distractible”, but I didn’t know it had been in a movie.
