Can all LDs be completely remediated?

Here’s my view.

The earlier the intervention or good teaching the better. The longer one waits the harder it is to remediate. I’m sure the results can not be generalized to say “ALL can be fixed.”

I’d say that decoding can be remediated in many cases. While IQ is not a factor on who can read or not read, it does play a role for some kids who might not be able to remember code. For example, I have a boy whose mom just had a baby. It took him about 4 days to remember the baby’s name. Compared to all my other “LD” kids, he is having the most trouble remembering the code. He can do the skills of segmenting, blending, and phoneme manipulation though just fine. He is also an Enlish Language Learner. It seems to me thought that that shouldn’t be a factor in remembering his new sister’s name. There is more going on and I don’t see myself fixing that anytime soon.

My guess is, the longer one waits to have an intervention when not grasping reading the worse off a child is. All those years of not reading equates to little vocabulary development entering into the brain via the visual entry. I don’t know of great ways to remediate vocabualry development. I do teach it but, it goes s-l-ow. I doubt this can be fully remediated.

Comprehension can greatly be enhanced once a child can decode. Sometimes this gets up to speed quickly. Sometimes, when there are bigger issues, it doesn’t happen. Even with Visualizing / Verbalizing it may or may not ‘click’.

Fluency can be helped with programs such as Great Leaps, or Read Natuarally. But it may or may not be compelely automatic.

So, we teachers have recipis we use to help us. We have tools in our teacher toolbox. We can make great gains. But, meanwhile, while we are working our magic, the kids in general ed are moving quickly forward. Some at amazing speed.

I have these brick strips of bulletin board strips on my wall. I have the 1st grade state standards written on the lowest strip of bricks. Next, I have 2nd grade, 3rd grade, and so forth. I tell my kids quite frankly that they are all missing bricks. I tell them I will do some initial testing to see which bricks are missing. Some are missing them for different reasons. Some attention, some processing issues, some couldn’t keep up etc… I go on to say, if you miss too many, the foundation will fall. We must hurry and fill the bricks. I am a brick filler. They totally understand this analogy. I tell them when they don’t do their homework they miss bricks. We talk about bricks. WHen I see the “lightbulb” facet I announce, so and so just got a brick back. Yada, yada, yada.

The truth is, I have taught general ed too. Yes, we can move these kids forward. Some can catch up some of them will never catch up. But they have to work extra hard. They have to do more work. It just doesn’t come easy. With so many kids it is hard. I have kids from broken homes, drug homes, group homes etc… Do I fix them all? No. Do I try my best?You bet ya. Do I give up? NO WAY. Are there quick fixes. NO. Can we use the best researched tools and give them the best shot possible. Yes. Do these tools increase our effectiveness? YES, YES, and Yes.

I had one great sucess last year. The child had LIPS and then PG. He is a success. He was also in the highest math group. His mom and dad are amazing. They help him. They check on him. He is an exception. He is out of special ed now and I just got an email and he is doing well.

If kids are truly LD we can help but fully remediate, I’m not sure. They might always have to work hard but surely can be completely functional adults. Those kiddos with dysteachia who just weren’t shown how to read might just be able to have a quick fix becasue they just needed to be shown the mystery of unraveling the code. SOme kids just need to be shown with explicit exposure.

Remediation takes work. We give it our best shot. We have high expectations. Many reach it.

Michelle AZ

Michelle AZ

“Complete” remediation is something to work for — there’s no reason to impose an arbitrary limit on somebody for somtehting like an LD.

But no, not every LD can be completely remediated.

Sue and Michelle,
(for some reason, I can’t log on which happens to me frequently so I’ll just sign on as a guest)
Thank you so much for your responses. Success and independence remain my goals for the students with whom I work as well as for my son. The importance of remediation combined with accommodations can not be emphasized enough.

I just recently worked with a sixth grade student who is receiving the Wilson Reading program as his remediation program. He is very bright (performance IQ of 130) but he just can’t read grade level materials although he can comprehend the material when it is presented to him. Input and output issues remain so we are working on accommodations in conjunction with the remediation.

Remediated for the purpose of no longer needing accomodations in school or remediated for the purpose of getting along in life?

In my experience, only a few LDs can be remediated to the point of no longer needing accomodations in school. Of course, many students and adults have LDs of which they’re fairly unaware and with which they cope successfully. But if we’re speaking of the ones that are noticed and diagnosed in school, I wouldn’t say they’re ‘remediated away’.

I do think schools like to operate under the guise though that LDs can be remediated.

In my experience, good, intensive remediation helps these students immensely. Getting more fluent with receptive and expressive language — to a level commensurate with their abilities is a reasonable and viable goal. Everybody can’t be good at everything, but too many very bright students are academically crippled by poor skills.
Of course, just given that performance IQ I can’t even guess at how much he has to overcome. It makes me cringe when someone says “well, take the higher IQ [performance or verbal] as the measure of their “true” ability.” Yes, it’s an attempt to measure true ability… of performance-type tasks. It doesn’t indicate that with remediation or without it the verbal type tasks can be done to that level. Would be like expecting me to swim as well as I bicycle with enough intensive work — except when you’ve got THunder Thighs and toothpick arms… ain’t gonna happen :)

I watch my son’s football team with interest. My son with the form motor coordination issues can do some of these steps quite well (after tons of therapy.) Many can’t do this, I know that some who can’t are not labeled sped.
I had one mom of a regular kid tell me that her son is just not coordinated enough to play lacrosse. So my son plays lacrosse and he has the motor deficits. Her son is not labeled with anything.

It is all a continuum. What is normal? Are all the kids in the regular class normal? Not by a long shot.

I teach religion and have had the same group of kids for years. We read from the bible and the kids volunteer to read. The girl who was one of the first to develop reading skills now mixes up her long and short vowels, repeatedly. Some lose their place repeatedly. My son who had the very slow start reads as well as any of them.
It is fourth grade a time when many hit a wall in reading.

My son does not receive accomodations in a regular class. He is looked upon by many of my friends as the kid who can do anything. Some don’t believe me when I mention the struggles we have had and still continue to have. Their regular kids couldn’t keep his schedule, or be as flexible. I guess I seem patronizing when they complain about their spacy kids and I tell them I know where they are coming from.

I told him that I would ask the teacher if he could sit in the front of the room because he still has some visual problems. He told me, “All those spaces are taken by the kids who really need it.”

So, there are plenty in a regular class who need some accomodations even more than my former sped child.

Sped or not just move them along the continuum and never give up.

That reminds me of a comment my son’s teacher made earlier this year. My son is now in a rather demanding parochial school after being classified since he was 3 in the public school system. I asked her if she realized that my son was LD. She made a comment to the effect that he may be the only one identified but she was sure he wasn’t the only one LD in the class.

Will he ever be completely remediated? I am not holding my breath but I will tell you that the child whose first grade teacher told me could not learn just got all the states, abbreviations, and capitals in the Southeast correct on his social studies test. It is like night and day.

I also spoke to my son’s long time therapist yesterday about her LD son. She helped him all through school, like we do for our son. She ignored all the dismal forecasts of his future. He is now doing a master’s program and is talking about a Phd. Is this complete remediation? He has to be much more structured in his work than a nonLD adult so maybe not. BUT he is succeeding.

It is all we can ever ask for our kids, no matter what their abilities and what they decide to do.

Beth

I dunno. My kid hasn’t been receiving accomodations since first grade, and she definitely had multiple learning disorders; CAPD, visual processing disorder, ADD, sequencing issue, and quite an expressive language defect. She’s a young thirteen now, and in seventh grade in a demanding preparatory school who has not been informed about past history. I still see weaknesses although I also see strengths. Her English spelling and grammar is still weak, although she can make good use of a spell and grammar checker and has no trouble learning spelling and vocabulary words for the tests. She still has time management and organizational difficulty, and her analytical writing is frankly, vile. Her creative writing on the other hand, is pretty good, and she now enjoys rhyme. (She was clueless about it in third grade.) Incidentally, her Latin and Spanish grammar/spelling are also okay. Spanish is an easy language, but since Latin with its six declensions for nouns, more complex verb forms, and completely different grammar is really more complex than English, I do feel that a lot of the English trouble is a bad habit laid down back when she couldn’t spell or construct a sentence to save her life. She is doing Elementary Algebra, and the text used is a standard Algebra I textbook, and she isn’t having trouble with it. She does geometry problems for fun now, whereas not long ago, she couldn’t figure out how many sides a square had. SOOO, I do think you can get to the point where the impairments are not disabilities in most settings. On the other hand, I’m not sure that she would ever be well advised to pick law as a career. Med school, on the other hand is not out of the question, and engineering should be very possible. She is thinking about aircraft design, but it still changes from week to week.