Here’s an entry from another widget for OS X. This one’s called “RapidMetaBlog,” and it’s from Nigel Kirsten. Like the others, it’s pretty straightforward.
Kirsten’s widget is at this link.
Monthly Archive for August, 2005
Sphere: Related Content
As many parents know, the search for appropriate Learning Disability services can be arduous. Donecia Pea documents one mother’s search in a story in The Shreveport (LA, US) Times. Ms. Pea describes Linda Boyd’s efforts to to find help for her daughter Bailey:
For nearly five years, Linda Boyd of Haughton has worked tirelessly to find the best help for her youngest child.
She remembers when she first realized Bailey was struggling in class.
“She was having trouble in kindergarten and we questioned it, but not a whole lot because she wasn’t having that much trouble. Then, when she went to the first grade, they kept saying ‘She’s immature, she’s immature’ and we finally got her tested in the first grade and they said she needed speech therapy, which was a big problem,” Boyd said.
Later, Bailey was diagnosed with dyslexia, a learning disability that affects a person’s ability to process words and letters.
Ms. Pea’s coverage includes a sidebar of “facts” and interviews with both some local private providers and school officials. Although there are minor misrepresentations and such, it’s good to get coverage that’s mostly accurate.
The beginning of the school year often brings coverage of disabilities by news sources. I remember appearing on a radio segment about disabilities at this time of year over a decade ago. What’s appeared in other papers, radio, or TV sources? If you’ve seen or heard a story, add a comment.
Link for Ms. Pea’s story.
I’ve been busy with other duties of late and, thus, not much of a contributor. Yes, the semester’s started, and I’ve also moved my physical office (not quite complete). I hope to return soon to scouring various sources for news and information about Learning Disabilities so that I can provide content here.
As soon as I get the chance, I’ll be making selected materials for U.Va.’s course—Characteristics of Individuals with Learning Disabilities—available to the public. Link for those materials.
This is from another of those Mac Widgets (tiny programs that permit easy switching from one function to another). This is DashBlog from June Tate and it predates WordPressDash by a few months, but development appears to be dormant at this time.
I work from Macs and LDBlog is served from one, too. I’m testing a new Widget that allows posting via a different interface. It’s “WordPressDash” from http://www.paniris.com/wordpressdash/.
Carolyne Bates, parent of a child with Learning Disabilities, started a job-training program aimed at students with LD in Selma (AL, USA), according to a story in the Selma Times-Journal by Valerie Ashmon. Ms. Ashton reports that the program is called “Supported Employment Training Transition and that it is a aprt of the Selma Disabilities Advocacy Program.”The SETT project, which runs through the summer, includes academic instruction as well as opportunities to learn clerical, landscaping, and other skills.
“The SETT program was founded in 1999,” Bates said. “It was founded because children with special needs were left out of a lot of programs.”
“I’m a special needs person myself,” she said. “I knew the struggle that I had to go through years ago.”
“The Mental Health (center) addressed adults and the Rehabilitation Center basically addressed handicapped kids,” Bates said. “There was a need for a program for children with learning disabilities.”
Link to Ms. Ashton’s story. Also, Ms. Ashmon’s story has been picked up by “I Just Heard” (an echo service that scrapes stories from Google and Yahoo): 12 August and 13 August.
On National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, Ketzel Levine reported about a family that has opened a company to promote vision therapy. Although the angle for the story is “people reinventing themselves,” there is a pretty strong undertone endorsing vision therapy.
Last time I checked, those who advocated vision therapy as a means of helping people learn to read did not have a strong scientific base. Before I challenge the basis for this story, I have to go to the library and determine whether there is new evidence supporting it and overturning earlier evidence. For example, there is the possibility that the practices used in vision therapy have changed and those who employ these newer methods are, in fact, helping children, youth, and adults learn to read.
Even without formally reviewing the literature, I know that trustworthy sources such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, and American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO), and American Association for Pediatric Ophthalmology and Strabismus have issued policy statements dismissing optometric training for Learning Disabilities and including “Optometric vision training” in a list of “methods [that] have not been proven to work in scientific studies” for ADHD. Also, optometrists such a Russell Worrall have strongly criticized optometric training.
One thing that I’ll bet happens is that advocates will refer to individual cases where they can show success, claiming those successes as evidence. For those of us who say “hooray for the patient,” but are not willing to accept anecdotal evidence as providing a scientific base for a practice, this will be yet another challenge. It is very difficult to get people to put aside personal experience in deference to strong research, a point that—ironically—was made 2 August in an NPR story by Allison Aubrey on dietary supplements.
Links:
- Link to Ms. Levin’s story.
- American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement, “Learning Disabilities, Dyslexia, and Vision: A Subject Review” and “ADHD — Unproven Treatments“
- R. Worrall’s Web page about “eye-related quackery.”
- Link to Ms. Aubrey’s story.
The Division for Learning Disabilities is holding its annual conference, Briding the Gap between Research and Practice, in Charleston (SC; US) in November and I’m encouraging attendance. Yes, it is true that I had something to do with it. And, yes, I’ll be presenting a session there, too. That’s why this entry has the title it has. But, no, I don’t make any $$, £, ¢, ¥, or other ¤ (aren’t entities fun?) from the conference.
As in the past, this year’s sessions are jammed with top-flight presenters who will provide the most up-to-date content about practices that have strong evidenciary bases and are ready for prime-time use with individuals who have Learning Disabilities. The setting is wonderful. The conference is intimate and intensive.
Link to learn more about the conference and register on line.
I often find it informative to listen to people’s experiences about disabilities. Though the evidence is anecdotal at best, not scientific, it helps me to stay grounded, to keep perspective. On The Age (Australian news site) Imogene Stubbs provided a first person view of having a son with Learning Disabilities that served just this function.
Here’s her lead:
My nine-year-old son was excited when I asked him to help me with this article. But he didn’t want to have to write anything. After 30 agonising minutes and the promise of a baseball glove, this is what he produced:
“when I do riting and pariigrafs my brayn is uncunferdbl and herts and i get the writ word but wen it travls down my arm it disapeeurs befour it coms out of my hand and sumtymes im chrying.”
Ms. Stubbs touches on many topics—causes, characteristics, prevalence, educational practices—and other wonderful tidbids, sadly mixed in with some misinformation (e.g., focusing educational efforts on self-esteem), that make this article worth reading. Here’s a particularly sage observation:
What else have we done? We have leapt on every bandwagon going. We have chucked fish oils down his gullet; we have had him focusing on light-beams in dark rooms; we have encouraged him to walk backwards down a line, counting plastic frogs; we have watched him balancing on boards while catching bean-bags, occasionally between his teeth. It all merges into a slightly lunatic blur.
Maybe some things help, but then maybe so does changing the breakfast cereal. It is so hard to tell what is real improvement and what is part of natural development or simply your desperation to believe. Yet every new “solution” demands an expensive and time-consuming commitment.
Read this one. Hurry, though. The Age only keeps articles live for 10 days. Link.
Correcting misrepresentations of LD
Liz Ditz, about whose blog we’ve commented previously, posted about misrepresentations of dyslexia 29 August. Ms. Ditz expressed well-founded concern about a San Fransisco journalist who fell for fascile characterizations of dyslexia.
Ms. Ditz has got it right here. Learning Disabilities such as dyslexia are too often characterized in ways that are probably well-intentioned but are simply wrong. Scotopic Sensitivity Syndrome (SSS), reversals, learning styles, and many other misrepresentations of LD are perpetuated by journalists and even educators. Peggy and I opined about a whole host of them in a recent editorial for TeachingLD.org.
I’m very glad Ms. Ditz devoted time to refuting these misrepresentations. Getting the general public and even some professionals concerned with individuals with LD to a attend to and employ effective practices is complicated by the perpetuation of myths such as SSS (and Irlen lenses, colored overlays, etc.) and strephosymbolia (reversals). I’m sending Ms. Ditz a note of thanks for her work.
Link to Ms. Ditz’s entry aptly entitled “Educating Education Writers,” a self-referential link to our previous post about Ms. Ditz’s blog, a link to our editorial on TLD, and a link to a page developed by some students in my class on characteristics of LD in the mid 1990s.