My 13 year old daughter has ADHD, seizure disorder, a LD in written expression and possible Bipolar. She is special ed qualified with an IEP in place. I am haggling with the school about what services they should provide to help her with writing. They work with her with a graphic organizer occasionally but I want them to do something more effective. Her English teacher, the general ed teacher on the IEP team, keeps saying she can write. She says this because my daughter can write sometimes. Her writing is usually the bare minimum, disorganized, off topic etc, but sometimes she writes something coherent. Her teacher thinks that because she done some decent writing this proves that she can write so remediation is not needed. Her writing was better in the third and fourth grade than it is now. It seems that her writing is getting worse as time passes. Do children have good days and bad days with an LD? Because she can sometimes write does this mean she does not need remediation?
Thanks for your insights,
Shelly
Re: writing ability comes and goes
My child is extremely inconsistant. He has good and bad days with everything.
I thought he was ADHD because he can be inattentive, again, this is inconsistant.
His vision therapist insists that he is not ADHD his behavioral optometrist thinks his inconsistancies will disappear after vision therapy.
His tracking issues are in their words, “One of the worst they have ever seen.”
Re: writing ability comes and goes
My OT and tutor both swear that the hallmark of LD is inconsistency. The OT equates to 8 cylinders and how many cylinders are we running on today? Also the fact that the teachers say, “I just saw her do it yesterday/this a.m., I KNOW she can do it if she’ll just try harder.
My daughter is so inconsistent, it’s scary.
Re: writing ability comes and goes
Inconsistency is also a hallmark of ADHD. Makes the uninitiated assume the kid is lazy, unmotivated, just not trying some days when in fact it is a symptom of the disorder.
Re: writing ability comes and goes
Didn’t know that. Thanks for the information. My daughter is ADD also so I guess that’s why she varies so much.
Re: writing ability comes and goes
The IM and other things have made my son less inconsistant. In the beginning he actually was consistant, consistantly not learning.
Maybe the inconsistancies are related to some but not all the pieces in place. Maybe that is what my son’s optometrist meant. Maybe he thinks this is a really big piece for him.
inconsistency -- a theory
I have large problems with vision and coordination and other health problems myself. I have developed a personal theory on the inconsistency issue.
There are some things you can do so well that you can literally do them in your sleep. Most people can walk, talk, do basic household chores, and so on, with almost no conscious thought. So even if there are some other factors interfering with functioning, a minor illness like the flu, a few glasses of wine, not sleeping the night before, distractions, high stress level, or some such, you can still do these automatic processes.
Those of us with a disability, however, are walking more of a knife-edge. It takes a certain amount of conscious concentration for me to keep my balance and walk at all times. It takes quite a bit of concentration not to bump into things (zero depth perception). It takes quite a bit of conscious concentration not to drop things. It takes a very large amount of conscious concentration and deliberate relaxation to write or type without the muscles tensing into the wrong place. It takes a certain amount of conscious concentration to talk without stuttering. This has its good side — I can have a couple of glasses of wine at Christmas and nobody notices because I walk and talk just the same. But put me into a high-stress situation, a distracting situation, or fatigue, and I fall apart. Since I’m already on the knife-edge, there’s no room to fudge things.
I think this is probably common among people with hidden disabilities such as LD. If reading or writing is hard work and requires all your concentration, then you will be more likely to perform badly when something “minor” interferes. Other people may think it is minor, but it may be the straw that broke the camel’s back to you.
You can help your inconsistent student by teaching deliberate relaxation, improving the comfort and atmosphere of the learning environment, removing distractions that the *student* dislikes (whether or not you yourself think they should bother anyone), paying close attention to health, making testing less stressful by practicing and becoming familiar with testing, and encouraging short breaks or changes of work when stress occurs. Once the student has control of the situation, he can push himself to his higher level of performance.
Re: writing ability comes and goes
My NLD son can “seem” extremely inconsistent also. But if you look carefully for patterns, his “inconsistency” is actually very predictable.
His out put/ performance go way down if:
It’s new material
He’s stressed
He is expected to have an oppinion rather than spit back facts
He’s asked to compare and contrast
He’s asked to “visualize” something (one of our BIGGEST issues)
There are others. But the bottom line is that what looks like inconsistencies to a specific teacher (particulalry the stress thing, since they don’t always know what’s going on in other classrooms, or in other areas of his life) is actually incredible consistent response to various issues.
Karen
Re: writing ability comes and goes
I agree—there are underlying consistencies to the inconsistencies. For my son, health has been a big one. He had negative ear pressure that we just couldn’t get a handle on. Even at low levels, I could see him struggling. Once we got that under control (six months of chinese herbs!!), things really improved. Sleep is another big one. Not enough sleep and it all goes down the tubes.
I think the reason sleep and health make such a difference to him is that he is has no margin in working. Anything that brings his functioning down just a notch impacts how well he does disproportionately.
He also is not very good at generalizing. So a little change in new material and forget it, seems like he learned nothing. Saw this recently with fractions. He did fractions vertically at school but homework was horizontal and he was completely lost!!
Beth
Re: writing ability comes and goes
My son has some of this but it got better when we worked on logic and reasoning. It is only a slight problem now. He can think for himself a little better and take the leap of figuring something out using his existing knowledge.
It is funny, sometimes if I just say to him, “There is logic to this, figure it out.” He can do it. He has to be reminded that things are logical. Maybe it is just more fun to be creative and come up with a solution from left field.
I think for him attention plays a role. He will be doing something and it seems very clear that he is just not all there. The other day we were doing an eye exercise and he was struggling with it even though he has done it well in the past. He said, “Wait, I just need to focus.” He sat on the steps a minute, found his focus and did really well on the exercise.
After, he said, “It is called focusing, mom.” I don’t know if they are teaching that in vision therapy but wherever it came from it was pretty cool.
Stress, fatigue, time constraints, understanding the purpose of the activity; small seizures affecting listening/memory; medication affecting concentration — all of these can cause variability in performance. Definitely push for her to get some kind of organized and regular help. Her performance should be judged on an average as a whole, just as it is in grafding.