IDEAS re. student

It could be she has attention deficit disorder without the hyperactivity and perhaps even hypoactivity. I have a 14 year old freshman son who is ADD, inattentive with hypoactivity. His psychologist calls it a “slow cognitive tempo.” It does not mean he is not of average intellegince just the pace at which he does things is a lot slower. These students are prone to careless mistakes as you describe. Generally these students are good at seeing the big picture but often miss the details. For example I had his social studies teacher call me once because she was surprised my son missed easy questions on the test but was the only student who was able to write an essay about the big picture. These students are generally very quiet, kind natured, and give the appearance of being in a fog. Their notes usually contain “sloppy” mistakes. My son too tests much better orally then in writing, he also performs better if tests are read to him. It is as if doing two tasks at once is overwhelming. Just like other students with ADHD type issues these students do better on tasks that interest them, and also if they like the teacher. I don’t know if this is what is going on with this student but it might be. You might want to do a search on slow cognitive style. My son walks slowly, talks very softly, has word retrieval problems, and the like. What has helped him in the classroom is prefered seating (up front close to teacher), outline provided for notes, tests given in smaller quieter enviroment, tests read or given orally. Wonder if any of these wil help this student. If she is experiencing difficulty in the classroom learning it can lead to behavior problems and be why the other teacher wants her out. Just some thoughts.

Hi Anitya,

As the parent of an NLD child, I have to wonder what this child’s motors skills (both fine and gross) and social competency are like. In the written test you mentioned, the tasks that she was unable to do could very well be issues of a visual/spatial nature as opposed to verbal or “reading” comprehension. Many NLD kids have a really, really hard time with charts and graphs.

Anxiety and depression are common in NLD kids who are struggling in school, which would fit with Mom’s worry about the emotional aspects, and ADHD is a common misdiagnosis in younger NLD kiddos because so many of their errors can seem attentional until you tease out the difference root causes.

But I have to say, that my son would not have benefitted from resource pull out in earlier grades. He needed more support in the general ed classroom to help him pick up the pieces when he got off track. Unfortunately, at this point, there are no good remediations for the many minor deficits that NLD kids have. And because NLD kids often have a huge drop in processing speed with novel task, and most of school is BUILT around the introduction of novel tasks, they need support right up through school. (and sometimes, depending on the severity, beyond)

Even now, in middle school, my son is in all co-taught classrooms, doing grade level work, but with a SPED teacher there to help as needed. Interestingly, the one class that is not co-taught (Spanish, which is a mandatory 40 minutes a day, 5 day a week class in our school system for any childre without severe language based LD’s) is the one class where he is struggling mightily, in spite of a supportive and accepting teacher.

While I think that pull-out is vitally importatnt to remediate certain LD’s, NLD doesn’t go away, and it gets worse as the kids get older. I think that for this population, co-taught inclusion is probably the best answer.

Karen

This child has difficulty with visual processing. This IS my son. He is much better on several aspects you mentioned with remediation. He still has difficulty with visual detail. One thing that seperates him from a true adder in my opinion is that he can attend to auditory detail very well. He can listen to a book on tape for hours and tell you with exacting detail what went on. It doesn’t even matter what the subject is, he can listen to any book on tape and pick out the detail, so it isn’t about interest level.

If this is the case for this child she probably needs vision therapy.

I appreciate your help and ideas. Do your children have significant difficulty with math? I decided I need to pull this child for math instruction, she is totally lost. I am not pulling specifically for reading at this time, but I do see visual things and attention things. Yesterday I showed her a test that she did poorly on using a timeline. She read the first two timeline questions and anwered them perfectly. Then she got to the third and just apparently arbitrarily marked a choice, a wrong choice, w/o even reading the item. This kind of behavior perplexes me and it causes her scores to be low. The more I think about it, I think mom needs to finish the medical eval. she started then dropped the ball on. Mom has insurance that will cover this, less her $5 deductible and the program is a reputable one. Funny thing, mom teaches elementary school in a nearby district! You would think that she would want all the data she can locate!

Hi Anitya,

NLD, if that’s the problem, definitely causes problems with math. How soon this happens depends on the severity of the specific deficits the child exhibitis. My NLD son did OK in math until 5th grade. The more sequential “math facts” and add, subtract, multipy and divide (simple division) were not a problem for him. The minute geometry and charts and graphs were introduced, all bets were off. A good deal of the support he got in the 4th grade classroom was one-on-one or small group help in math. The same was true in 5th grade, though by mid-year we had added one 40 minute pullout a week, and he was staying for “homework help” (mostly math) 3 days a week.

He’s in 6th grade now, and does go to Academic Support several times a week now, not in place of his regular classes, but in the arts block, and what they work on a lot of the time is math. He also attends EVERY “extra help” session that the math teacher offers, which is at least once a week, with a second “review” day before each test. Because he’s worked really hard and has taken advantage of all the extra help available, he’s been able to maintain a B average. But if he were less motivated OR had less help available, he’d be absolutely lost.

As far as your student with the time line, one idea strikes me. I know that my son gets overwhelmed easily with visually challenging tasks. It could be that she worked as hard as she could to find the first two points needed on the time line, then gave up simply because she had expended more mental energy than she had available at the time. One thing that has helped Robbie with reading charts and graphs is to give him index cards to cover up the extraneous information on the chart. In the beginning, the SPED teacher had to actually sit with him, and move the cards for each problem, covering up the information that she wanted him to ignore. Now he can do it himself if he is calm, focused and the material is not over his comfort level.

He seems to be incapable of producing more than the simplest charts or graphs by hand. His data points “float” off the lines of graph paper, seemingly at random. He is also unable to estimate the position of any point that falls between two lines.(either reading them or producing a graph that shows them) So we have taught him to use Excel, and that is how he does all chart and graph work. (which of course, is a very useful tool even as an adult)

But again, these interventions are based on something that is clearly a visual/spatial NLD-type problem. And there are, of course, other possible explanations for the behavior you are seeing. I agree with you completely, that ESPECIALLY if the Mom can have a full battery of testing done without spending a lot on it, she’d be foolhardy NOT to take advantage of it. We spent a fortune on the neuropsychs for both of our sons, and consider it money very well spent.

We learned long ago with Robbie that the wrong interventions for the right reasons are stressful for the child, frustrating for the teacher and/or parent, and don’t accomplish much in the end.

Someone quoted something to me that made me laugh, but also is pertinent to these situations:

“Never try to teach a pig to sing. It doesn’t work, and it annoys the pig.”

Karen

I think you are on the right track…have you or the school psych. asked the mother what she thinks the problem is? Or does she not see a problem? To be honest, if this kid is not a behavior problem or social skill oddity in the classroom, I’d just keep suggesting the outside eval. for “output” issues and try to unify what everyone at school says about this child’s performance to the mother. There are many kids who sound like this in my son’s 4th grade classroom, low-average achievers with averae intelligence, some of whom get reading and math support and some don’t, but they are not all truly LD. I think I am in the minority in that I think the definition of LD will be tightened up under the new IDEA, and feel it was never meant to ensure endless services so that everyone performs at their level of cogitive ability.

My son could figure out even simple graphs and reading a numbers chart brought tears. We did IM which dealt with sequencing. We also did exercises from a book called, “Helping Children Overcome Learning Difficulties,” by Jerome Rosner that dealt with his visual spatial deficits.

He now can draw graphs, read maps, skip count on that numbers chart without a problem. This was one of the biggest issues his teacher had last year and it disappeared this year. He now does regular ed math without a problem and without any extra help. He can do his homework most nights by himself.

We don’t need endless services, absolutely. Effective services that address the deficit at the cognitive level would be money better spent.
Then get these kids out of sped and into the mainstream where they belong.

I’m not sure what “we” you are addressing. I wish “curing” NLD was assimple as running the child through IM. But research doesn’t support this. I have an NLD child, and I’d love to believe there was a way to make it go away. But everything I’ve read, and everything I’ve heard from parents of NLD kids (and from NLD adults) says otherwise.

Certainly you can improve on skills, you can teach compensating strategies, and you can help the child SLOWLY grow toward less rigidity, and the ability to handle novel situations better. But an NLD child will be an NLD adult. And it will probably take him longer to get there than the NT child.

In the adult world, when the person is not constantly bombarded with the novelty that is inherent in the school environment, and can choose a setting where their assets are valued and their deficits less important, they can lead fulfilling and productive lives.

My personal opinion, which is supported by the experiences of many other parents is that the MOST important thing we can do for our NLD children is to help them survive their school experiences relatively unscathed emotionally.

“Fixing” NLD kids on a cognitive level is a very alluring idea for desperate parents, but until I see some solid research that shows that it really works for a large portion of the NLD population, I am reluctant to force yet another therapy on kids who are already stretched close to the breaking point with other school and therapy requirements. (to say nothing of the stretched to the limit pocketbooks of parents who spend more and more money grasping at straws)

IM seems, at least anecdotally, to help some children make progress. For others it seems to have less effect. In either case, I have my doubts whether it will get a seriously impaired child to the level where they don’t need SPED help. If it really worked that well, and that reliably, schools would be pushing the program to save themselves huge amounts of SPED costs over the years.

Karen

I mean’t we as in my son and I as a unit. I didn’t mean to insult you. My son isn’t really NVLD but has visual spatial issues which is what I believe Anitya is talking about. I don’t think it is clear this child is NVLD.
My son and I have seen dramatic results remediating specific issues. It started with remediating his fine motor issues when he was 4. Then it was reading with phonographix which gave him the phonemic awareness he needed. Then math was addressed through improving his specific visual/spatial and sequencing issues. I spent a great deal of time trying to understand the underpinnings of my son’s deficits are. I see this little boy struggling and I refuse to accept that he has this incurable condition and the research shows that I am right. I try to address his deficits with specific research based methods. Jerome Rosner’s methods for improving what he calls visual perception but others now call visual spatial deficits are based on his research. Jerome Rosner is also well known for his early phonemic awareness work. The phonographix authors site his research in their work. IM has been shown in at least one study to improve sequencing. You can find that on their site.

I have found that using these methods to improve my son’s deficits have worked better than the straight academic tutoring we tried in the beginning.

I think sharing this information with people should be helpful and it is certainly not meant to hurt anyone.

There is significant research that shows the brain can change. This research is not used by the educational system.

I do agree with you that the most important thing any of us as parents do is to prevent damage to our children. My son is a very happy, undamaged child.

Hi Linda,

Sorry if I jumped to the wrong conclusion. As your message was linked directly to mine, I thought you were addressing me, and what I had said about the _possibility_ of NLD. (until a full eval is done, I know that the rest of us are just guessing at what might be going on with Anitya’s student)

If I sounded defensive, it’s because I have heard so often from some people on this board that SPED is for “remediating” kids and getting them back into general ed. While I think that is the ideal goal for those kids with LD’s where that is possible, there will always be kids with issues that CANNOT be fully remediated, and who will require some level of support and/or specialized instruction through their entire school career.

I’m glad that the interventions you’ve done with your son have been so successful. I completely believe in the plasticity of the brain, and we do many things outside of school to help our son develop those new neural pathways. I do agree with you that it would be nice if the school incorporated some of these into his school day, instead of leaving it completely up to us. I just don’t see it happening anytime soon.

I guess I’m also touchy because my experience with teaching staff is that “LD” is equated so often with “can’t read.” And when you have a child with serious global LD’s who reads several grade levels above his peers, it can be hard to get school people to recognize how serious his disability is. (until after he crashes and burns at least once per school year)

But even if the school did do active remediation of underlying cognitive deficits, I think it is unlikely that they could do enough to completely negate the need for SPED with a kid like my older one. My younger one has a number of “issues” as well, (including a 21 point VIQ/PIQ split, though not a dx of NLD) and with him, even though he got off to a rocky start with reading, the interventions we have done with him have been successful enough that he has not needed to be on an IEP. We continue to “manage” his school environment carefully, and the school did intensive reading intervention early. So I have first-hand experience with the right help at the right time being successful. But the younger one has never had the global deficits that the older one has.

So again, sorry if I jumped to conclusions that weren’t you intention, but now I hope you can see where I’m coming from too.

Karen

I guess I am a little touchy too. It has been implied at the school that I do “too much.” and that I need to let my son just be a boy.

Meanwhile the school does nothing but slap a label on him and dumb down the curriculum.

He has made great progress through outside interventions. I get upset when people say there isn’t anything that can be done for these kids when I have lived something very different.

I know that some kids can only go so far. I didn’t mean to imply that all things are curable, every case is different. My son is quite curable.

Karen,

Do you know if IM has been tried on a NLD population? It does work on the underlying motor coordination which is an aspect of NLD. We did IM last summer with great success, but I certainly would never say that my son is now not LD! How I wish it was that simple too!!

Beth

Hi Linda,

I certainly understand that it is hard to get to a “meeting of the minds” as far as what level of intevention and/or support a child should have, and how much they should or should not push. And when you finally have a good team that you work well with, and evryone’s on the same page, it’s the end of the year and you get to start over!

In our case, I think my NLD son has the ability to get where ever he wants to go… He’s a smart kid. But with a developmental disability like this, it’s going to be at his speed, not on the arbitrary basis of what a 6th grader “should” be doing.

And as far as the school saying your doing too much, I learned quite a while back, that sometimes you just can’t win. You do things outside of school, and you’re told that you are pusshing to hard, or expecting to much. You take a slightly more hand’s off approach, and you’re not doing your share.

I had a situation for a while last year, where I was being told by one person on my son’s team that I was doing too much, while another person on the same team didn’t think I was doing enough. There was no way to win!

So again, I can certainly understand your feelings!

Karen

Hi Beth,

I only know a handful of people who have done it with their NLD kids, so it’s by no means a statistical sampling. But it seems to fall into the same category as vision therapy, Brain Gyim, PACE, etc. There are a few people who think that it did wonders for their child, and just as many who felt like they had wasted their time, money and energy. When results are so mixed, it makes it very hard to decide WHICH interventions to to try.

I’ve taken a pragmatic approach. When emotional energy for this stuff is in short supply, I try to pick interventions that the kids LIKE as well as things I think might have benefit. If it’s something that I have to fight them about, I need to be pretty darn convinced that there will be substantial benefit. For instance, when Robbie was younger, we insisted on OT, whether he wanted to do it or not. But we also enrolled him in a gymnastics program that had many of the same gross motor and coordination benefits as OT, but was more “fun”.

More recently, we did insist on him learning keyboarding, and that took some ultimatums, cajolling and downright bribery. But we felt it was essential for him to learn before middle school. I’m glad we did.

I think one of the things to consider when deciding whether or not to do a specific therapy is the age of the child, and whether they will participate willingly. By the time we found out that Robbie had NLD, he was already 9 1/2. A lot of therapies that he might have accepted as a 5 or 6 year old, (and might have been extremely beneficial to him) were not things that he would have any part of at that age.

Karen

Karen,

I certainly see where you are coming from. Keyboarding has a clear cut benefit. A lot of other therapy is riskier in terms of outcomes. We have done a lot of therapies because I felt the outcome without intervention was very clear and very dismal. I was told when he was in first grade that he can’t seem to learn. Mostly, it has been good decisions. We did sound therapy because it was not very difficult to implement and thought if it did not help (it did), it wasn’t a great loss. However, we did PACE without a lot of benefit and learned the hard way that not everything works for everybody. It is difficult to make decisions because even similar symptoms can have different causes.

My son did not like IM that well at first. But he became very successful at it and it was a source of self esteem. I think had he not been able to learn to do it, it would have been like PACE—the worse thing I ever made him do. (I don’t agree. FFW was much worse. The difference is, eventually, he could do FFW while he never really mastered PACE).

Beth

…

I’m not an educator…but what if the mother,being an educator, doesn’t want to admit that her child has a learning disability- doesn’t want to face it for whatever reason? A denial kind of thing…Sad thing is, it’s that little girl that’s going to pay for it, and IS paying for it….Then again, that’s my take on it….
Nita

That couldn’t have been said any better,Ma’am! I’d have to agree 100%- especially as I’m an adult with LD…Yes, there are coping strategies used to compensate for the deficits….but to “Cure”? No. It’s always there, and will always be there…I should know. I’ve lived with being LD all my life. Do I loathe and detest it? Yes, and no…I loathe not being able to drive and be as good with or competent with hands on, as I am with “book learning”, writing, reading,ect…the Humanities,basically..I also loathe and detest the discrimination that occurs due to being LD- or different due to it…But no, I don’t regret it- I know that I was given other gifts, and strengths that I can offer in the job place or use to help my fellow man in hopes of doing my small part of making this world a better place to be. I have also been a statistic due to my LD- due to the general public’s misconceptions, and fallacies in the representation of those with LD and other “Invisible disabilities/handicaps”. As well as abuse due to BEING LD…..but, I do my utmost and best NOT to let it make me bitter or whatever…and strive for ways to contribute something positive despite of the Learning Disability I acquired in the womb that my birth mother placed upon my life with her ignorance and selfish behavior…(My LD wasn’t due to inheritance, mine was due to the fact that my birth mother drank like a fish while carrying me, and smoked as well…. was born three months early,with really small ear passages, and possibly did NOT get enough oxygen to my brain?Not for sure..but could well be..But,I got darned lucky with an excellent adoptive family- my REAL family….and also a darned good LD program in my area pubic schools….)
I really think that it depends on one’s attitude,outlook and how they percieve their LD or other Special Ed situation….maybe a case of choosing to find a way that’s uniquely “You” to make a difference, then finding the courage and temerity to use those gifts to make a difference….sometimes it just takes one person doing something really tiny….a post on a message board, one sentence uttered, or even one incredibly tiny random act of kindness….Even LD’ers can make a difference! Don’t see any reason why it can’t be possible or done…At least that’s what I think!
NitaKaren Randall wrote:
>
> I’m not sure what “we” you are addressing. I wish “curing”
> NLD was assimple as running the child through IM. But
> research doesn’t support this. I have an NLD child, and I’d
> love to believe there was a way to make it go away. But
> everything I’ve read, and everything I’ve heard from parents
> of NLD kids (and from NLD adults) says otherwise.
>
> Certainly you can improve on skills, you can teach
> compensating strategies, and you can help the child SLOWLY
> grow toward less rigidity, and the ability to handle novel
> situations better. But an NLD child will be an NLD adult.
> And it will probably take him longer to get there than the NT
> child.
>
> In the adult world, when the person is not constantly
> bombarded with the novelty that is inherent in the school
> environment, and can choose a setting where their assets are
> valued and their deficits less important, they can lead
> fulfilling and productive lives.
>
> My personal opinion, which is supported by the experiences of
> many other parents is that the MOST important thing we can do
> for our NLD children is to help them survive their school
> experiences relatively unscathed emotionally.
>
> “Fixing” NLD kids on a cognitive level is a very alluring
> idea for desperate parents, but until I see some solid
> research that shows that it really works for a large portion
> of the NLD population, I am reluctant to force yet another
> therapy on kids who are already stretched close to the
> breaking point with other school and therapy requirements.
> (to say nothing of the stretched to the limit pocketbooks of
> parents who spend more and more money grasping at straws)
>
> IM seems, at least anecdotally, to help some children make
> progress. For others it seems to have less effect. In
> either case, I have my doubts whether it will get a seriously
> impaired child to the level where they don’t need SPED help.
> If it really worked that well, and that reliably, schools
> would be pushing the program to save themselves huge amounts
> of SPED costs over the years.
>
> Karen