denial

I wish I could offer some help or advice but we are having this debate in my house also. My brother who is 14 and diagnosed with several LD’s does not want to ask or receive and help. The minute I ask him to get ready to start homework, he goes from happy go lucky to miserable and pouty!

I have been reading some behavioral modification articles and am going to try them. There are some good article at schwablearning.com

K.

Would he accept help on the outside of school? My own son was more willing to accept help outside of school than in it. From a knowing friend, or caring relative or even a hired tutor. College students will sometimes tutor cheaply.

Without help in or out of school, it seems sadly that he will continue to fail. Perhaps you could tell him that you think you understand how he feels and that in accepting help in school, he will also be accepting that he is different and that you know how hard that is for anybody to accept. Tell him that if he’s ever ready to accept help from anybody, you’ll be there to see he gets it.

Good luck.

Eileen -

There may be more going on than just denial. Depending on how these accommodations would be implemented, there is a strong possiblity that they would let other children know that he is “Special Ed.” It can set up the child for some really awful ridicule from the other children. Your child may already see this going with some other child, and not want to bring it on himself.
Our child experienced some pretty terrible harassment including prank phone calls at home.

Perhaps this isn’t the root of your child’s situation, but it’s something else to consider.

Peer pressure is so very powerful, and not all tecahers or other adults are discrete enough to prevent embarrassment or keep the classroom bullies from geting amunition.

Good luck to all, and please let us know if you find solutions to this problem.

Boy have we been there and trying to have the teachers see that this is a real issue is a major obstacle.

I am happy to report though that things have improved for us and it was sparked by being completely honest with my son about what was going on.

He absolutely refused to accept help, modifications and all that good stuff. For the first three years of all of this, I tried to protect him, trying to spare his feelings and thinking that if I told him he had LD (and what it all meant) it would take away what little confidence he had in himself. Honestly, I was not in denial that it existed, I was just afraid that I would screw it up!

We had no choice but to be straight with him because last year he took a total nose dive. He was convinced that he was stupid and said he would rather be dead than have to go to school. He had just turned 10. It was true depression and it was our family’s darkest, scariest days.

He began seeing a private psychologist and the smoke began to clear. The psychologist helped us use the appropriate language and timing. Every day became easier to talk with him about his strengths and weaknesses and he finally accepts the help and modifications this year. He has even begun to tell his teachers what works for him and what doesn’t. He is becoming a little self-advocate.

My biggest influence, other than our psychologist, was Mel Levine’s book “A Mind at a Time.” Once you (the parent) understand what’s going wrong, you can explain (or as he says demystify) it to your child. On his website he also has a program to use with children for explaining how we learn and why we each learn differently.

Letting him know that there is a REASON why he is struggling will help take the burden off of him and possibly help him to accept assistance. Right now he may be beating himself up and views accepting help as giving up. His resistance is actually a good sign; he is a fighter! He will not give up. But eventually he might if the smoke never clears. Now he just needs to know WHY this is all happening to him. There is a reason, and there is a way around his struggles.

I learned the hard way that protecting my child from the reality only made him suffer more than was necessary. I truly wish I could turn the clock back and do it again the right way.

But … we are moving on, and for now, things are going well; one day at a time. I am confident, though, that we are now on the right track.

This (private tutoring) was the route we went. It made a tremendous difference for our son. If he has LDs though, make sure you find a tutor qualified to remediate the LDs he has.

I also meant to add that letting HIM know that HE had control was a true turning point.

We didn’t force the reduction in the spelling list, we left it up to him to choose when he felt the full list was to much. This approach really helped. He began to make the decisions for himself and began asking for help when he knew that HE had the OPTION.

After he is comfortable talking about the issues, maybe he would respond to being part of the decision making?

Thanks for the ideas. I’m sure that a big part of it is wanting to fit in in the classroom, and I can’t blame him for that. We’ve made progress over the past few years with homework. At first, just the word would make him start screaming. Gradually he would do it with my help, and this year he is insistant that he do it himself without any help. I’m just hoping that the next step is for him to do it on his own, but to stop and ask when he is confused, instead of just plowing through.

For now I just take the completed work and do the problems with him so he can correct them. I’ve found that he is able to see what he did wrong much easier than when the paper comes back with all the errors circled.

I’m fortunate that he will actually work with me, and I never work with him unless I am able to remain completely calm and patient. The minute either of us loses patience I stop and try later.

Thanks again.

As soon as we started explaining why my son was having trouble he felt so much better. Its been a process but he’s now at a point (6 months after being evaluated) where he can speak very casually about having a brain that needs to be taught to read differently than some other kids. He also knows other friends who do OT or tutoring for different problems and that helps. He also still resists reducing the spelling list however, because he doesn’t want to be different. I told him its completely up to him, but that he stood a better chance of getting some right if he focused on fewer. I think giving them some control (when so much is out of their control) is key.

Now what I think is interesting is the contrast here. My son has known for several years that he learns differently. I told him that when I took for his first evaluation—we needed to find someone to teach him to read. He was just finishing first grade as a nonreader. He seems to accept that, including the inequity of it (listen to him tell his younger brother how life is not fair).

On the other hand, I don’t give him choices. I changed, against his desire, his spelling program this year. He is in fourth grade but really cannot spell. A reduced list was not going to teach him to spell, especially one that seemed to have to rhyme or reason to it. So I did some research and had his teacher substitute a program written by a leading reading specialist for her lists. My son was mad. I told him you can’t learn to spell by starting in the middle. Noone has taught you to spell so you need to start at the beginning. He occasionally grumbles but puts up with it because he knows he has no choice.

Beth

I would be really interested in the program you switched to. I agree, they need to LEARN how to spell. But current spelling programs do not TEACH you how to spell especially if you have an LD in the gen ed classroom.

Right now we are just following the crowd and getting by, but I would love for him to LEARN how to spell.

Please share your program info?

Sure. Janis shared it with me. It is by Scholastic and is written by Louisa Moats and someone else (can’t remember). I ordered the second and third grade books from them. I called Scholastic because the web site was not detailed enough.

I looked at the books and thought he was at the second grade level so that is what we went with. Interestingly enough, his teacher thought the words were hard and that the second grade was really third grade. I personally think that shows how ineffectively spelling is usually taught.

Each week the words have a pattern. Last week it was words with the short u sound represented by o. So he had words like from, come, some, of. This week is the “th” sound and he has words like there, then, than, think, bath, both. The workbook has exercises in it and he does those instead of the other classroom spelling work.

His spelling is improving……although it is still pretty sad.

I think I was extra sensitive to this because of my experience in fifth grade. They ungraded the school that year and spelling was done independently. You could go through as many levels as you could. I was a hard worker and had a good memory. I was doing several lists a week. But I didn’t retain a thing. I didn’t want my son going through the motions. He couldn’t afford to miss a year, considering that he already is several years behind.

Beth

You are absolutely right; they just want to fit in.

Here is the problem I see. They will not fit in, contrary to what “inclusion-ists” believe, until we change the current trend of the learning environment.

When you put a struggling or learning disabled student in a gen ed classroom under the direction of ONE teacher who may or most likely not have special ed (or remediation) experience, you have a recipe for failure.

Current trend is to put children of all ability levels (gifted through LD) into one classroom and hope for the best. The thought is the higher achievers will rub off on the lower achievers. In my experience, I find the opposite to be true. The strugglers stand out like a sore thumb and as they get older, they become more aware of the pecking order in the classroom. Who would argue that this does not affect a child’s developing self-esteem.

The gifted students require specialized instruction in order to be challenged, the special needs children each have their own IEP (and needs) and the average and struggling children are left to their own devices simply because there is not enough time and man power in the school day. So, no one is really getting what they need from this one teacher who is trying to accomodate everyone’s learning style and needs.

Inclusion has been taken to the extreme (way off track from what it was intended to accomplish) and children are being ignored because of it. If we got back to the basics and realized that grouping by ability in the early years is a much more effective, appropriate learning environment for children AND teachers, we could make some progress. We accept it for middle school, high school and college after these kids have been tortured by being forced into the mold of the current trends of grammar school instead of addressing the fact that they all learn differently from the beginning. Not just the identified kids, but ALL kids.

If we put a child in a more comfortable learning environment (one of their ABILITY), one he/she is able to swim in instead of sink in, self confidence would blossom as they grew instead of fading. They might actually enter high school believing in themselves and without an LD label.

Your child, like mine, has probably seen the harassment a struggling student gets when he/she cannot keep up with the class. I have seen it and am speaking from my own experience. If I was the struggling student in today’s classroom, I would keep my mouth shut too and take the bad grade. The ridicule from reading too slow or inaccurately is enough to keep me quiet, that’s for sure.

We really need to take control of this and do what is right for the kids.

Is your son on an iep? As far as math goes, I have been through several difficult years with math with my daughter (she is currently taking Algebra 1 in 8th grade honors class). The school district just adopted a “social bases—word problem based” math curriculum that sends my kid into failure, due to her disabilities.
I would take either one of two approaches: 1. Ask for a different curriculum for your child (through an iep) that makes math a concrete learning experience.
2. Ask the teacher for the standards in math for the grade level, and get your own curriculum that covers those parts of math and teach it to him yourself—and just ignore the grades, etc. When my daughter does do a work problem, I have her make a list of all the assumptions in the problems and then write out exactly what they are asking. This is still hard for her and she needs help—though she gets 99% on math on standardized tests.
Good luck. I have also had to break math down into the smallest steps for her. The only way she learned traditional long division, was to start every 4 digit divisor—by only letting her start with the first two numbers—so she could estimate something close. So, if you were dividing 3456 by 456, I would cover up numbers and have her divide 34 by 4—that is the starting point for the rest of the answer. It really helped.

He’s on an IEP for written language. Math can be added but I would really like him to stay in the classroom if at all possible. The problem is that the district is using a spiraling curriculum. They never really concentrate on anything, but touch on an area and then move on to something completely different. Yesterday they were learning to multiply using variables, then today they’ve moved onto graphs. Next year he will have to completely relearn the things they have already introduced. I don’t know what was wrong with waiting until they had mastered basic math before introducing algebra concepts. It worked for my older kids.

Just because you add math goals or social studies goals or whatever, these do not necessarily dictate placement. My daughter has goals in writing, in math, in organization and homework, in science, and in behavior and she only has an aide for PE, and is pulled from her regular honors classes one hour a week for speech.
The child’s learning style can dictate how and where and what they are taught—if the curriculum is inappropriate—they need to consider something else. We are on the downward trend, I think, in current math fads. When all the kids fail with these non-concrete methods, the pendulum will swing back.

My son’s school is using Harcourt spelling and it is very pattern based as well. For example all the words in this week’s test ended with “el.” And the exercises in the workbook go over recognizing this pattern.

I’m surprisingly pleased with the books, but just wish the teacher would be more consistent in having the children go through the work book. Although I guess I shouldn’t complain since I heard that one of the other 3rd grade teachers has their class do “multiple choise” spelling tests!

OOOOHHH, the math and spiraling!!!!! MY Favorite!!!! NOT!!!!!!

I have ranted about this on the teaching an adhd child, we are going through heck with 8th grade math. I won’t repeat myself but boy do I join you on this.

And she’s teaching spelling… gee, how much do you want to bet what kind of instruction *she* had!

I seriously question the evaluation that your son had that said he has no learning disabilities. Sometimes very bright children score fairly well on the testing, but they have trouble learning in the classroom. Their disabilities are more subtle. They need small group instruction and strategies for learning. Rather than learning lists of words for spelling, which requires short term memory, he needs to focus on rules and patterns, use multisensory input to help retain (tracing, dictating, saying sounds and letters as he traces on a rough surface, putting the words into small chunks to learn, and practice to over-learn. A tutor or a peer tutor (study buddy) might help, too.

In math, he may need something called scaffolding. Its a series of steps, usually in question format that guide the student throught the problem-solving process. Good number crunchers frequently see the numbers in a problem, pick an operation out of thin air and come up with an answer. Your child may need to have this scaffold written out in check list format so he can go through it step by step to solve the problem.

I am a special education teacher, the parent of a gifted child with learning disabilities, and I also design materials for students with learning difficulties. I have a spelling series that he could use at home or in school that would help him become an independent speller. Check out my website @ www.gwhizresources.com if you like.