How do I inform my teachers of my LD

Bring your records with you from high school with your most recent evaluation and IEP. Colleges provide accommodations under Section 504 of the Americans with Disabilities Act- not IDEA. The constraints are a bit different, You need to provide documentation of a disability which substantially impairs a life function in order to qualify. If you don’t have documentation then you will probably need to arrange private testing. Colleges are not obligated to pay for this the way public schools are. They may have you arrange testing anyway if your most recent stuff is from high school- that is pretty old.

There is a lot of good info about section 504 on this site- check LD in Depth or the postsecondary board.
Robin

Is your LD documented at all?

If it is, then I’d go to the college disabilities office and talk to somebody there.

For that matter, if it *isn’t*, go there. You need to jump thru the hoops, get evaluated and what have you if you want to get accommodations.

If you’re meeting with these folks too soon to get an appt at the disabilities office, go ahead and tell them that well, actually, you’re pretty darned positive you’ve got a learning disablity because reading is significantly more difficult for you than most people — and with your shared knowledge of mathematics, you all know what “significant” means.

What do you do when you have reading to do? Is listening your strength? Or do you need to be working with pencil & paper? (If you’re planning on more advanced degrees this is important because oral defense of the best thesis in the universe can be basically impossible if you’ve got an auditory processing problem).

Do you know what it is about this semester that was different? That’s what your buddies at the meeting will want to know too.

Hi Terry:

I am a college senior to I noticed people keep saying go your disability office. I attend private University and we do not have a disability office but we do have services . Look in your catalog under disability and see where they were further you too. I just want to say the advice the other people are giving is very good if you attend the public University/college. But the system is different with sometime in private University. Also one more tip make sure to ask who ever you see about disability services for a copy of the policies and procedures.

About the meeting with your professor and the dean. The key with that meeting is go to it really prepared to show them what changes are going to make.

1. Go talk to whoever is in charge of disability services and talked to them about setting up services. Be prepared to tell them what services are interested in. Be prepared to tell the dean and your professor what you are doing to set services that. And tell them what services are going after.

2. I can see your biggest fares is telling your professor who you’ve had for six upper division class. The professor may be shocked .But the professor might turned out to be your greatest advocate. So be honest. If you’re scared to tell them .Tell them you’re scared to tell why you had such a hard time this all through school and why it’s been so difficult this semester.

3. Never to late to ask for help.

4. Be prepared to be honest and to pour your heart out.

You might want to look into Recordings for the Blind and Dyslexia (RFBD).

If you need more encouragement or help or just someone to talk to please fill free to e-mail me at

Good luck at your meet.

Sincerely,
See

Hi Terry:

I am a college senior to I noticed people keep saying go your disability office. I attend private University and we do not have a disability office but we do have services . Look in your catalog under disability and see where they were further you too. I just want to say the advice the other people are giving is very good if you attend the public University/college. But the system is different with sometime in private University. Also one more tip make sure to ask who ever you see about disability services for a copy of the policies and procedures.

About the meeting with your professor and the dean. The key with that meeting is go to it really prepared to show them what changes are going to make.

1. Go talk to whoever is in charge of disability services and talked to them about setting up services. Be prepared to tell them what services are interested in. Be prepared to tell the dean and your professor what you are doing to set services that. And tell them what services are going after.

2. I can see your biggest fares is telling your professor who you’ve had for six upper division class. The professor may be shocked .But the professor might turned out to be your greatest advocate. So be honest. If you’re scared to tell them .Tell them you’re scared to tell why you had such a hard time this all through school and why it’s been so difficult this semester.

3. Never to late to ask for help.

4. Be prepared to be honest and to pour your heart out.

You might want to look into Recordings for the Blind and Dyslexia (RFBD).

If you need more encouragement or help or just someone to talk to please fill free to e-mail me at

Good luck at your meet.

Sincerely,
See

No I have plenty of documentation. Every 6 months I am reevaluated by my doctor (for my ritalin perscription). I had a psychological evaluation sbout 6 or 7 years ago (its a good 20 some pages worth of reading). I know my college has a copy of it. My auditory skills are great, its just the reading. Thats mainly the reason I am in engineering, because when I look at a book, numbers still look like numbers. As far as my reading stratagy, I dont even attempt to read the whole page. I’d say about 10 words stick out on a page so I just fill in the rest of it in my mind.
Its very belittling and only a very few of my friends know about it. As far as why this semester fell apart for me, I spent 2 months of it unmedicated. I have always had a very high perscription of ritalin. In january they decided to switch my perscription over to concentra (its a 12 hour ritalin). It caused me to develope a severe insomnia problem, and every time I tried to eat I developed a gag reflex. It was just unbearable. Anyways, my weight dropped from 150 to 125 and I was just incredibly sick (and somehow I also picked up mono). Its also the only time I have been unmedicated in the last 7 or 8 years.

~Terry

Terry: You have had the smarts to overcompensate for your reading disability then you can find away to complete your college degree. Firstly read Mapping Carrers with LD and ADD Clients by Raizi Abby Janus and then get Accommodations in Higher Education Under The Americans with Disability Act: A No-Nonsence Guide edited by Michael Gordon. The find yourself an outstanding psychologist or neurpschologist whose speciality is testing for LD Adults. They can write a report after testing that will state your disability and your ability to continue to develop youorself in teh field of yoyr choice and then what accommadations you need both in school and on teh job to make your successful. Call the LDA organization in your city or state and some city or states have stronger Orton Dyslexia Chapters that can give you the same referals. After you find out the name of a state certified clinican then go to you local Vocal rehabilitaion Office and ask them to pay for this evaluation whihc in most communties they will with little hassels. Then after you go through the testing you take this report to your colleges office for students with special needs and ask them to set up a meeting with the repartmetn chairs of the courses that you are having problems with and together you all can develop aplan for you to complete college including how to address all the other teachers about the problem.

Seems to me that you don’t even need to discuss your reading disability, if you don’t want to. You had health problems related to trying to adjust medication. I would explain to your professors that you are ADHD and that you have successfully been treated with medication for some time. And so on–tell them what happened. I would offer to get doctor’s documentation as well.

Seems to me that if you now have your medication adjusted correctly that you should do fine and I would tell them that too.

Beth

Well, in that case, I think I would get documentation from the doctor that you had a very temporary medical condition that really messed things up for you!
I”d also get a hold of a computerized text reader so you don’t have to “fill in the gaps” with your mind so much. You’d be surprised at what you’re missing ;) especially if there are obnoxious liberal arts requirements that you’ve still got to fulfill.

Do you have a copy of your most recent eduational evaluation? Take it with you. It’s too bad you didn’t advocate for yourself a long time ago, but maybe you can get some accomodations - with a new evaluation. They are only valid for three years. Don’t give up - just continue to work around the problems.

Terry — I do advanced math and have an engineering degree as well as tutoring reading, and there is something about your self-description that just doesn’t add up.
Your post is very well-written — did you get some help, or do you really write better than you claim?
If you have done a real engineering degree you must have gone through calculus. You must have dealt with the classics like “Wheat is pouring out of a bin in the shape of an inverted cone of height 3 meters and radius 2 meters. If it is flowing at a rate of .10 cubic meter per second, at what rate is the depth decreasing when it is 1.5 meters deep?” So, can you read those classics, did you get help, or is your college not giving you real academic demands?
I’ve taught this stuff and I know you can’t get through the standard engineering math classes, or science, or engineering, without fairly accurate reading. You may not be terribly fast, but if you succeeded in well-taught and up-to-standard classes you must be doing at least OK. Of course you can probably do better, but you have to be functioning.

When you describe reading by picking out a few words and making up the rest of the story, you remind me very very much of a student (very bright) who came to me at the beginning of Grade 4 as a total non-reader — great at guessing, getting “help” (ie con-artistry), and communicating, but could not actually read even the kindergarten books. Within a year we had him close to grade level.
You went to elementary school when the fad was to let kids re-invent the wheel and make up their own systems of reading and writing, actually about the same age as the kid above. It didn’t work and a lot of people had to be taught to read much later because they had not actually been taught at the beginning. You should not blame yourself and downgrade your own abilities because of a really stupid and inefficient fashion in teaching. You can almost certainly learn to read much much better than you do now.

I do worry about the habit of picking up a few words and making up the rest, because in engineering if you are inaccurate in even one word you can kill a large number of people — there was a plane that was saved from crashing by incredible piloting when it ran out of fuel — seems the new gauge was metric but the old fill tables in English measure had been used, just the trivial detail of whether you read a volume as liters or gallons; and that of couirse was one crash that was prevented, and what about all the others where we don’t know the cause? When an engineer tells me he is guessing, I shake with fear.

You say you have done upper-level classes with the professors concerned and have done well until this semester. This is actually a GOOD thing, not a problem. They know you as an intelligent and hard-working student and they *won’t* write you off as just another whiner (Believe me, as college instructors we meet a lot of people trying to whine their way through school, and we lose all interest and belief.). Go to the ones you get along with, explain the difficulty just as you have here, and (this is the hard but most important part) make a definite commitment to get real reading teaching and to do any other work these professors want you to do. If you make a commitment and keep to it, they will be very happy to help. Professors value intelligent and hard-working and self-motivated students, who are very rare.

Real reading teaching will involve a strong phonics skills program, writing, and spelling. Look at the LD InDepth page for details on why and how. Look at Teaching Reading or get back to me by email for practical suggestions on where to start.