Among the annual burst of human interest stories about the triumphs of students with Learning Disabilities, I found one about Zane Vogel, a young man who a graduated early from high school at least a year ago and is now “taking a break” from college. The story, by Lynn Taylor Rick in the Rapid City Journal (SD, US), is chockful of connections for LD Blog. Because there many of them, I’ll forego embedding an extended quote and list a few here.
- Mr. Vogel “didn’t realize that the way he reversed letters or the way he equated words with pictures was typical of a dyslexic.”—Ooopsie! Too bad that someone passed the reversals myth along to Mr. Vogel and too bad that Ms. Rick perpetuated it here.
- Mr. Vogel’s mother “suspected dyslexia. But when she asked her son’s various teachers, they dismissed the idea.”—I continue to be distressed by the way educators too often dismiss Learning Disabilities; I cannot, of course, say what actually happened between Mr. Vogel’s mother and teachers, but I’ve heard lots of stories like this. We educators have to understand that students with these problems do not simply outgrow them, parents’ concerns are worthy of careful consideration, and inaction is mistake.
- “Finally having a name for his struggles and some help meant Vogel began seeing a future for himself. ‘To see accomplished people with it (dyslexia) got me excited about school again,’ he said”—Labeling isn’t so terrible, and here is the good side of celebrity LD, a topic we’ve covered off and on here.
- “Although Vogel has come out on top in his struggle with a learning disability, he still deals with it daily.”—Learning Disabilities do not go away when formal schooling ends.
Link to Ms. Rick’s article. Take a couple of minutes to read it.
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