Archive for October 3rd, 2005

Magic solutions for LD

Published by JohnL on 3 October 2005 in Comments. 0 Comments

In a post to her blog, J. Bailey describes the time when her son learned to write his name. According to her account, it happened suddenly and involved them going to a store to purchase a large quantity of shaving cream.

When we got home, I told him that I needed him to cover the table in shaving cream.

Of course he had a blast making sure that not only the table, but both of us were covered in that dang shaving cream.

We began drawing things in the shaving cream.

Pretty soon I showed him how easy it was to DRAW his name in it and erase it as often as he wanted….

About 90 minutes into it, my son could DRAW his name, both first and last.

I’m very glad that Ms. Bailey’s son learned to write his name. I have reservations, however, about the role of the shaving cream incident in causing it. Only those who invest great faith in magic are likely to believe it was responsible for the learning. To believe so requires that one ignore the boy’s previous learning.

I am concerned about the misdirection that these sorts of explanations provide. They encourage us to reach for the odd, the atypical, the exotic technique. Special education is rarely, if ever, accomplished by odd, atypical, exotic, or magical means; it requires dogged persistence. Naomi Zigmond put this quite well; in a chapter she described special education this way: “It is carefully planned. It is intensive, urgent, relentless, and goal directed. It is empirically supported practice, drawn from research.” (Zigmond, 1997, p.385)

Furthermore, lurking just under the surface of Ms. Bailey’s account is the misperception that some especially motivating activity will bring substantial improvements in children’s learning. Not. The L in LD does not stand for lazy.

Link to Ms. Bailey’s blog entry. Reference for Naomi’s wonderful chapter:
Zigmond, N. (1997). Educating students with disabilities: The future of special education. In J. W. Lloyd, E. J. Kameenui, & D. Chard (Eds.), Issues in educating students with disabilities (pp. 377-390). Mahwah, NJ:   Lawrence Erlbaum.