Re: Why did I take it so personally?

[Dr Susan C Oldrieve <soldriev@baldwinw.edu>]

>But the failure affects LD students far more than
> it does other students.  LD students often come to see themselves as
> failures and even when they learn to compensate for the LD and begin to
> realize success they continue to remain unconvinced of their ability.  For
> a professor to refuse to allow a student to make the effort or to refuse
> to work with a student on such effort only reinforces that students lack
> of confidence.  Even if the professor could not see her way clear to
> re-evaluate the results of such effort she should be willing to help the
> student learn what he needs to learn.  
>
I agree entirely with you Steve, and I think it is this self-image which
causes students to attribute many typical writing problems to their
learning disability.  I find it helps to tell them which of their problems
are typical rather than specific to them.  I find myself saying the same
thing to ESL students who need to work more on organization and
development of ideas than on their grammatical correctness.  Even with the
growth of peer reviewing in composition classes, students frequently don't
have a clear sense of how their writing stacks up against the writing of
other students--they don't really know what is "normal."

 	I have worked with more than 100 LD students over the four years I
> did that work and only two of those students tried to pass off their lack
> of effort as a function of their LD. 

I wasn't trying to imply that LD students use their disability as an
excuse for poor work--on the contrary, I would agree strongly that almost
all of those who reach our doors have refused to let themselves do that.
I was saying only that sometimes they don't know which problems to
attribute to their disability and which to just the normal difficulties of
writing.  That's where we can help them, even if we are not trained LD
specialists, because we have seen enough writing to have a better sense of
what the "typical" problems are. 


 > So my response to Meg's scenario would be to talk to the professor.  

YES!  As long as the student says its O.K.  The awareness of our legal and
ethical obligations to learning disabled students is still a new and
difficult concept for many of us in higher education, and we and our
colleagues need all the education we can get. 

      I was really made aware of
the lack of understanding just a few weeks ago in talking to a colleague
who actually said that students with learning disabilities didn't belong
in college.  He was a little taken aback when I told him that my father,
who is severely dyslexic and whose second grade teacher told his mother
that he was retarded, has a Ph.D in Nuclear Physics from Harvard; and that
my husband who has a double B.A in English and Biology from Cornell and a
M.Ed in Special Education from UNC Chapel Hill and who ran a credible (but
losing, Thank God!) campaign for a Congressional seat two years ago has a
significant language processing disability.  I didn't think people
really believed that we should shut our doors to students with
disabilities, but they do, and we have to work to make them see otherwise.
Thank goodness for the new laws!

                                         Susan