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I couldn't write a coherent sentence until I was 24 years old. A couple years after high school I discovered reading starting with "Cannery Row" however it stil

I couldn't write a coherent sentence until I was 24 years old. A couple years after high school I discovered reading starting with "Cannery Row" however it still took significant effort to learn to write despite thousands of hours of reading. Once I understood the basic mechanics of grammar, fitting words into meaningful structures became second nature. I still can't spell the word coherent without assistance from a spell checker, nevertheless, I write and communicate the meaning I intend to convey. People are hostile when I say there isn't such a thing as a learning disability but rather only teaching disabilities. Sure teachers especially in public schools are over worked, however, what happened to me is abuse. It was always I who failed and never the teachers or my parents who strangely both have PhDs. The onus to understand how to learn was the responsibility of a child and not the adults. We expect children who fail to understand pedagogy? They told me to think harder, to work harder. What does it mean to think harder? I suffered anxiety attacks and mental breakdowns trying to keep up. They ushered me along through graduation because I never had antisocial behavioral problems. I taught myself a trade so I could survive. Then taught myself how to write. Then taught myself a second trade for fun and a third. At some point, I'll change my focus to educational software. There have been several individuals, groups, and initiatives over the past few decades since I graduated who have developed amazing tools I wish existed when I was in school with the Khan Academy at the top of that list. Nonetheless, the people at the Khan Academy who designed their course on grammar also happen to be people who are naturally talented at grammar, the fundamental crux teaching. I have one paradoxical advantage: my disadvantage which plagues every working moment gives me a perspective nobody has, er, correction, 46% of people who also happen to be the people doing the teaching with higher education degrees don't have. One thing is for sure, I would be an idiot to expect a child to solve pedagogy for her or his self. When children fall behind they give up, they don't contemplate the philosophy of how they learn.

travisjungroth 5y ago
> People are hostile when I say there isn't such a thing as a learning disability but rather only teaching disabilities. People are probably hostile because you're going against scientific consensus and saying a range of disabilities that affects millions of people doesn't exist.
- dataviz1000 5y ago
  > scientific consensus We should be very careful with scientific consensus of a social science. Maybe we should say if you lead a horse to water, it doesn't drink, and you need that horse to work on the farm to grow food to feed your family, you are going to have a very bad time instead of what teachers told me time and time again, "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink." What type of person gives up on a horse that doesn't drink instead of figuring out what is wrong with the horse or understanding animal behavior to train the horse to drink and pull plows and stuff?
  - travisjungroth 5y ago
    > What type of person... Ones who aren't good at what they're doing. I'm sorry you had a bad experience with school. I think some of the aversion to the "doesn't exist" claim is it seems to leave a hole. There are two ways of saying something doesn't exist / isn't real. You can say the cause isn't there or the effect isn't there. Take malaria. As you might know, the name means "bad air". People used to think bad air from swamps and jungles made you sick. If I didn't believe this I could say "swamp air can't make you sick, malaria doesn't exist". Which, sure, the disease doesn't come from the gas. But people do seem to get sick in a similar way at swamps that they don't get sick in dry areas. Isn't that real? Another reason people will react to you with hostility is you're pattern matching people who have been hostile to them. People with depression get told "it's all in your head". Sure, that's where the brain is. "No, it's just the way you look at things". Sure, yeah, bad at looking at things. Still depressed. I don't think that "gently scolding" people has show up as effective treatment. But the point isn't to help. It's to dismiss and degrade. You're also still only half way to looking at things holistically. You want to zoom out (based on what you've said about yourself and the horse example). But instead of looking at the system all together, you're pulling the blame from 100% on the student (something you got as a painful message) and putting it 100% on the teachers. Neither is representative of reality. Is someone disabled if they can't see well enough to drive? What if they don't want to drive? What if they can drive with glasses? What if there aren't glasses good enough for them, is it that optometrists are disabled? What if they can't afford them? These are all really interesting social questions and there are no perfect answers. But if I get the sense that someone is trying to ignore the reality that some people can see fine and some people see poorly and suffer for it, and that any of this suffering is at all localized on the person who can't see, I'm going to think they're trying to pull one over on me.
atian 5y ago
This is pretty common. We usually do not need to write correct sentences to each other. I am only now learning how to write well. The gist is that it probably doesn't matter. Culture does a lot of work in letting us communicate in fragments.
jeroenhd 5y ago
> People are hostile when I say there isn't such a thing as a learning disability but rather only teaching disabilities There is such a thing as dyslexia, and that cannot be fixed by teaching better. You can still form sentences, apply grammar and tell stories without writing, but the reading+writing part is a major problem for some people. Your story of beating the challenges of your bad early education can't and won't apply to all others who struggle. Having said that, I do believe that some lazy teachers like to mark failing students as disabled more often than necessary because that way the student's failings aren't a result of the teachers' lacking abilities, but rather an inherent flaw in the students themselves that they have no control over. The general knowledge of the existence of learning disabilities has helped many kids get the resources they need, but has also to them being used by the lazy or incompetent to completely write off children that couldn't keep up. This, combined with the utter disconnect between the way many words are spelled and pronounced in English, is a recipe for disaster that will likely continue to ripple through the education system for years.
- google234123 5y ago
  Except that most diagnoses of dyslexia in the US are highly questionable. Basically anyone with any difficulty is assigned it. I'm not questioning the 1% of people that actually have trouble with decoding tex,t but if our education system is so bad that only 54% of adults in the United States get to the 6th grade level than it's not surprising that a significant portion of those poeple will get diagnosed with some disability.
- adolph 5y ago
  > There is such a thing as dyslexia, and that cannot be fixed by teaching better. Can you support this assertion? My understanding of the topic, having a person close to me with a dyslexia dx, is that the appropriate educational intervention is training the brain to use alternate pathways for different parts of the reading process. This isn’t “teaching better” but is “teaching.” http://www.dyslexia.yale.edu/ http://www.dyslexia.yale.edu/ http://dyslexia.yale.edu/research-science/ycdc-research/paying-attention-to-reading-the-neurobiology-of-reading-and-dyslexia/ http://dyslexia.yale.edu/research-science/ycdc-research/payi...
thebigjewbowski 5y ago
I definitely get what you mean. I was always able to do math to a satisfactory level but it didn’t come quite as easily until I learned how to think about it properly. Only my calculus teacher in college’s methods really clicked with me and then I magically got it.
sleepycatgirl 5y ago
> People are hostile when I say there isn't such a thing as a learning disability but rather only teaching disabilities. Well, because it is wrong. Nonetheless, those are not mutually exclusive. The fact that there are bad teachers that do not know how to teach, does not mean that there are no people that legitimately do have learning disabilities.
beebeepka 5y ago
I used to have a math teacher who would mock me for not doing particularly great. It was very obvious that he derived great pleasure from putting down kids not knowing the material in advance. I had to deal with this psycho from grades 5 to 8. It still blows my mind that a person whose job was to teach did his best to praise those who came already prepared and vigorously kick everyone else.
yeetaccount4 5y ago
> Cannery Row Good choice of reading there.
Elof 5y ago
Have you ever looked into Dyslexia? I was diagnosed around thirty and it explained a lot and helped me figure out how to operate in a society that isn’t designed for my brain type
heresathinf99 5y ago

travisjungroth 5y ago

> People are hostile when I say there isn't such a thing as a learning disability but rather only teaching disabilities. People are probably hostile because you're going against scientific consensus and saying a range of disabilities that affects millions of people doesn't exist.

dataviz1000 5y ago
> scientific consensus We should be very careful with scientific consensus of a social science. Maybe we should say if you lead a horse to water, it doesn't drink, and you need that horse to work on the farm to grow food to feed your family, you are going to have a very bad time instead of what teachers told me time and time again, "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink." What type of person gives up on a horse that doesn't drink instead of figuring out what is wrong with the horse or understanding animal behavior to train the horse to drink and pull plows and stuff?
- travisjungroth 5y ago
  > What type of person... Ones who aren't good at what they're doing. I'm sorry you had a bad experience with school. I think some of the aversion to the "doesn't exist" claim is it seems to leave a hole. There are two ways of saying something doesn't exist / isn't real. You can say the cause isn't there or the effect isn't there. Take malaria. As you might know, the name means "bad air". People used to think bad air from swamps and jungles made you sick. If I didn't believe this I could say "swamp air can't make you sick, malaria doesn't exist". Which, sure, the disease doesn't come from the gas. But people do seem to get sick in a similar way at swamps that they don't get sick in dry areas. Isn't that real? Another reason people will react to you with hostility is you're pattern matching people who have been hostile to them. People with depression get told "it's all in your head". Sure, that's where the brain is. "No, it's just the way you look at things". Sure, yeah, bad at looking at things. Still depressed. I don't think that "gently scolding" people has show up as effective treatment. But the point isn't to help. It's to dismiss and degrade. You're also still only half way to looking at things holistically. You want to zoom out (based on what you've said about yourself and the horse example). But instead of looking at the system all together, you're pulling the blame from 100% on the student (something you got as a painful message) and putting it 100% on the teachers. Neither is representative of reality. Is someone disabled if they can't see well enough to drive? What if they don't want to drive? What if they can drive with glasses? What if there aren't glasses good enough for them, is it that optometrists are disabled? What if they can't afford them? These are all really interesting social questions and there are no perfect answers. But if I get the sense that someone is trying to ignore the reality that some people can see fine and some people see poorly and suffer for it, and that any of this suffering is at all localized on the person who can't see, I'm going to think they're trying to pull one over on me.

atian 5y ago

This is pretty common. We usually do not need to write correct sentences to each other. I am only now learning how to write well. The gist is that it probably doesn't matter. Culture does a lot of work in letting us communicate in fragments.

jeroenhd 5y ago

> People are hostile when I say there isn't such a thing as a learning disability but rather only teaching disabilities There is such a thing as dyslexia, and that cannot be fixed by teaching better. You can still form sentences, apply grammar and tell stories without writing, but the reading+writing part is a major problem for some people. Your story of beating the challenges of your bad early education can't and won't apply to all others who struggle. Having said that, I do believe that some lazy teachers like to mark failing students as disabled more often than necessary because that way the student's failings aren't a result of the teachers' lacking abilities, but rather an inherent flaw in the students themselves that they have no control over. The general knowledge of the existence of learning disabilities has helped many kids get the resources they need, but has also to them being used by the lazy or incompetent to completely write off children that couldn't keep up. This, combined with the utter disconnect between the way many words are spelled and pronounced in English, is a recipe for disaster that will likely continue to ripple through the education system for years.

google234123 5y ago
Except that most diagnoses of dyslexia in the US are highly questionable. Basically anyone with any difficulty is assigned it. I'm not questioning the 1% of people that actually have trouble with decoding tex,t but if our education system is so bad that only 54% of adults in the United States get to the 6th grade level than it's not surprising that a significant portion of those poeple will get diagnosed with some disability.
adolph 5y ago
> There is such a thing as dyslexia, and that cannot be fixed by teaching better. Can you support this assertion? My understanding of the topic, having a person close to me with a dyslexia dx, is that the appropriate educational intervention is training the brain to use alternate pathways for different parts of the reading process. This isn’t “teaching better” but is “teaching.” http://www.dyslexia.yale.edu/ http://www.dyslexia.yale.edu/ http://dyslexia.yale.edu/research-science/ycdc-research/paying-attention-to-reading-the-neurobiology-of-reading-and-dyslexia/ http://dyslexia.yale.edu/research-science/ycdc-research/payi...

thebigjewbowski 5y ago

I definitely get what you mean. I was always able to do math to a satisfactory level but it didn’t come quite as easily until I learned how to think about it properly. Only my calculus teacher in college’s methods really clicked with me and then I magically got it.

sleepycatgirl 5y ago

> People are hostile when I say there isn't such a thing as a learning disability but rather only teaching disabilities. Well, because it is wrong. Nonetheless, those are not mutually exclusive. The fact that there are bad teachers that do not know how to teach, does not mean that there are no people that legitimately do have learning disabilities.

beebeepka 5y ago

I used to have a math teacher who would mock me for not doing particularly great. It was very obvious that he derived great pleasure from putting down kids not knowing the material in advance. I had to deal with this psycho from grades 5 to 8. It still blows my mind that a person whose job was to teach did his best to praise those who came already prepared and vigorously kick everyone else.

yeetaccount4 5y ago

> Cannery Row Good choice of reading there.

Elof 5y ago

Have you ever looked into Dyslexia? I was diagnosed around thirty and it explained a lot and helped me figure out how to operate in a society that isn’t designed for my brain type

heresathinf99 5y ago