Our student is 18. He has difficulty with reading and writing. He has a Specific Learning Disability in the areas of sensorimotor skills and expressive & receptive language.
He needs a tremendous amount of help in reading. He does these sheets in which the beginning of the phrase is supplied: Congress passed more laws in 100 days than….any other Congress in American history. In other words, he finds the beginning of the phrase on the assignment sheet and the entire phrase is in the chapter. It might be in a slightly different order of words. Then, he simply has to fill in the blank, which is often just the latter half of the sentence.
He needs a great deal of assistance with this. The principal says it is because during his school career he has always been helped, probably as a SDC kid he was in a small class with a teacher and an aide as well. It sounds like “learned helplessness.”
How can we help him to be more independent in doing his assignments from the book? It does seem that when I leave him alone, he sometimes manages to do it fairly well without my help. At other times, he just sits there, griping about how tired he is (he has a construction job in the mornings) and grumbling about how hard the work is. I appreciate that it is challenging for him however I believe he could be more independent.
Suggestions?
John
Re: Processing delays, expressive/receptive language, 18 yea
I’m with Mary on this one- you are not in the sort of job where there is a lot of percentage in placing responsibility elsewhere. In fact, there could be lots of reasons, rooted in the assignment itself, that might be responsible for this issue, rather than some pass back to earlier years which cannot be changed. The only thing that we as teachers have control over is the way WE teach.
How are his basic reading skills? Comprehension (in narrative vs. expository text)? Has he been taught the scanning/strategic skills necessary to complete an assignment of this kind?(Did you teach them) Is this a history course or a reading course? Is he going to try to go to college next year? If not- what is the purpose of helping an 18 year old become more independant on this type of assignment? How does it tie into his vocational programming?
I agree that you may have a performance problem here rather than something soley driven by LD- but you need to start with the LD stuff and work outward to look for solutions:) And some of those solutions may reside in the presentation of the material…
Robin
Re: Processing delays, expressive/receptive language, 18 yea
I’m with Robin on this one.
Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty.
You say this student is eighteen years old and is doing construction work in the mornings. So we are talking about a young adult who is motivated and has work habits and some useful real-world skills.
So why is he doing worksheets that would be an insult to the intelligence of a ten-year-old??
OK, so his reading and writing skills aren’t up to the mark of what we would like to see. Do you really think this kind of worksheet is going to teach him anything? What are the goals of this program, and how do these worksheets supposedly reach towards those goals?
A system that takes more work, but also gets more results, is to do real reading and writing with him. For reading, reteach real reading skills. Many people on this board speak highly of Phonographix, and it would have to be more productive than what you are doing now. If he has to work with this particular text, at the very least, read it along with him as meaningful connected text, not just a dirty job of mining for answers. If this text is not required, read things that have real meaning to him — the day’s newspapers, a text on construction methods, a religious text, or whatever. For writing, ask him what he wants to say, give him some time to verbalize his answer, and give him guidance in writing it down.
As far as learned helplessness, well, you’re asking him to do work that is meaningless to him and for which he doesn’t have the skills, and which is on a really insulting level — why do you expect him to show a lot of motivation to force himself into it? If you give him the support to learn the skills for himself and to apply them to work that is meaningful to his own life, then you’ll see some independent work.
Re: Processing delays, expressive/receptive language, 18 yea
John, Have you tried color coding your student’s texts with high lighter? You might try one color for important concepts, another color for vocabulary and a third for definitions.
Re: Processing delays, expressive/receptive language, 18 yea
There are a few cases, not as many as perhaps one would want to see, where teenagers with ADHD - ADD tend to temporarily respond to an ADHD medicine which temporarily improves their ability to read and their attention span/memory.
You might possibly consider that and perhaps, after seeing your family doctor, a short term trial of an ADHD medicine to see whether it might possibly help a little/provide some insight into this.
The ADHD medicines as a generalization are really about the only external means I’ve heard about which actually can help the challenge you describe, that is, temporarily turn a short attention span into a medium or long attention span.
The weakest known stimulant/alerting agent is caffeine/coffee; one of the strongest is Adderall.
The ADHD meds do not work for everyone unfortunately. Good luck.
The principal is laboring under a common misunderstanding of what causes learned helplessness.
First off, let’s be clear that learned helplessness means, basically, not trying.
The cause of learned helplessness is repeated failure. When a child (or any living organism, for that matter) repeatedly tries to do something and repeatedly fails, it learns to stop trying. This is what happens to LD kids who are in educational environments hostile to their needs.
When an LD child is helped in a way that meets his needs, the child’s efforts at learning are rewarded with the experience of success. Success motivates further effort.
Learned helplessness is actually the result of inadequate help, not the result of too much help! The problem is that much of the “help” provided by schools and well-meaning adults does not meet a child’s needs, often through sheer ignorance of what those needs are and how they can be met. Good intentions are often entirely inadequate.
So, off my soapbox for now. The source of my information on learned helplessness is the book “Learning Problems: A Cognitive Approach” by Kirby et al.
Mary