Puzzled?

Couple of possibilities: one, that the LD person is smart enough so that s/he can compensate for the difficulties on things. Stuff everybody else learns to do one way, you learn to do in a different way. It happens all the time to a degree — kids with dyslexia memorize words without learning how to sound them out, so until they *have* to read words that you *have* to sound out, nobody knows there’s any skill missing.
It’s not a bad thing if that “different way” works for the stuff you do when you’re an adult; but just like memorizing words only works for easy words, other coping strategies in grade school don’t work in adulthood. One thing would be time management; when you’re in school, if you’re smart you can get by perfectly well without knowing what day it is and where yo’ure supposed to be. Somebody’s going to tell you where to go :-) , and especially if you’re a “good student,” you’re going to get the benefit of the doubt. The “halo effect” of being perceived as intelligent is huge… and can disappear if you don’t cultivate the appropriate social/management skills (which are different depending on where you land; if you end up working cleaning swimming pools it’s a little different from serving high tea at the bistro).

The other thing would be if the LD wasn’t there, but there were changes in the brain wiring between kid-hood and adult-hood. THose binge drinking years, or head injuries, or minor strokes… stuff happens.

Woops, that was me without log-in…
And it’s even easier for “no” symptoms to be evident until high school, especially if there’s a lot of at least one kind of intelligence. “No” would be in quotes because probably, with 20/20 hindsights, there were some hints… but not necessarily.

[quote:aca15ff6a7=”Anonymous”] One thing would be time management; when you’re in school, if you’re smart you can get by perfectly well without knowing what day it is and where yo’ure supposed to be.[/quote]

Sue, since when were you watching me in junior high school?
We had classes that pretty much stayed together most of the day, so I figured out really fast to just follow the rest of the class …

I think it is important to point out that LD is a catch all for problems with cognition that effect learning.

As the brain develops learning style change. Most of the so called experts either don’t know that or they fail to see its importance.

LD or Learning disablity is a term that describe a myriad of learning problems. It means some thing different to everyone - even the so called experts.

In many ways it is a misnomer. Usually kids who are labled LD reach their developmental milestones at the same time other kids do so in a sense there is no disablilty. I think one possible cause could be our poor educational system and inept and apathetic teachers who are unable to adapt to the needs of special children.

We had a fascinating “rotating schedule.” First day you went 1-2-3-4-5-6-7, the next day you went 2-3-4-5-6-7-1… and so on.
I enjoyed the math — in hindsight, I feel incredibly sorry for normal people who actually have a sense of what a “typical routine” is supposed to be like! Since everybody was always confused, I didn’t stick out, and at least it *was* the same sequence (and, I think, we all had the same homeroom, every day).
and that’s a good point about the catch-all. Think of the students who aren’t LD until the lack of good instruction catches up with them… then in high school, since they haven’t learned to write, they have a “disability in written expression.”

(I enjoyed the math of figuring out which period would get split in half for lunch, which period would end the day, etc… I enjoyed math, too, since Mr. CHerry let me wash his blackboards…)

I taught in a couple of schools with rotating schedules and alternating schedules (Day 1 and Day 2). When I saw which kids showed up in the room I knew what to teach. The hard places were the ones where teachers had to change rooms as well as students — I usually got it right but it was a trial.
One of the last places I attempted to teach added yet another wrinkle to this: they had a rotating schedule *and* periods of varying length, from 35 minutes to 80 minutes. The idea was that you could do special activities of various sorts in the longer periods. Of course if you are teaching four classes of the same subject, each one of a different length every day, and the school board is very very hung up on giving tests all the time and absolute “fairness”, keeping things coordinated can get really crazy. And then this school added yet another wrinkle; they didn’t believe in bells because that was too institutional and authoritarian. So the class ends (I do not joke here) at 9:23 and the next one starts at 9:27, there are no clocks in many roms (also institutional) and the students just “know” when to pack up and leave, usually five to ten minutes too early — well, the kids were really good at finding their way through this maze, of course this was the place that was two to three years behind math standards, but who cares about that stuff?