Elizabeth came back from uni and moaned,"My friend told me that I have asked her three times about the same thing and I still can't remember the little fact of her back ground! What is wrong with me?"
It is a good thing I have put my free time to good use while she was growing up. I used to take students that nobody wanted to teach and attempt to make pig's ears into silk purse. One thing that I came across very frequently is what I call colander brain. No matter how smart a child is, if he or she displays some symptoms of learning disability, chances are I will fight against this short coming in tutoring. In simple terms, I will teach and reteach certain simple pieces of fact for months until I feel like strangling the child or I want to sit there and laugh at myself. Why should a sane and some what intelligent home maker like me want to attempt the impossible? After all, I was no longer ambitious and I didn't really need the extra income. Yet time and again I was stupid enough to take on challenges I was not exactly trained for. That way, I had to pray for God to help me, I suppose!
Back to Elizabeth, my advice to her is to apologize and admit that she actually still suffers from some remnant of learning problems that somehow her brain is wired differently from most other people. Don't get me wrong, she has a fantastic memory for songs, music, lyrics, music score, musician's history and things of that kind. But she has to turn to me to ask me what her friends are studying in uni, what gift to buy for one friend ... I actually filed up all her friends' likes and dislikes through the years that I have chosen some very suitable gifts on her behalf.
One old friend of mine who was in denial throughout her sons' upbringing finally admitted it took her about six years to help her son to learn January to December. She sent her son to a Chinese elementary school. The Mandarin way of naming the months is 1 month, 2 month, 3 month instead of January, February, March ... Of course it was difficult for him to learn the English way of naming the months while he was studying in a Chinese environment. It probably made no sense for him at that point to learn such "nonsense". Anyway, he is studying in a premier Australian university now. All that struggle is worth it. But during those frustrating years, either the son, the mom or both would end up crying after half an hour's session together working on things of this kind.
Through my years of working with LD, I have not come across two individuals that have the same problems. While we can kind of categorize the type of similar problems, no one can draw a line and say that dyslexia is like this and autism is like that. Problems often overlap. What works for one child may not necessarily work for another. If you don't love children and have no extra patience to put up with their idiosyncrasies, special education is probably not for you. If you have an LD child and you lack patience to teach him or her, then be prepared to go out and make plenty of money to pay specialist tutors to do your job.
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