Frustration
Anxiety
Tension
The F.A.T. City Workshop

We must remember to put ourselves in the place of our students in order to gain their perspective.

"One of the most common misconceptions about learning disabilities is that it's a school problem, when in actuality it affects every waking moment of the child's day." -Richard Lavoie

Processing

What Do I Need to Know?

• Learning disabled children have a hard time processing language.
• The non-LD students can process and answer a question, while the LD students have to process the question.
• This gives them twice the processing load than the other students, which makes the class seem too fast.

What Do I Need to Know?

• Do not "blame the victim" for their inability to understand a concept.
• Has little to do with motivation and more to do with perception.
• There is a difference between distractability and attention span.

Oral Expression

Dysnomia

• A learning disability in which an individual has problems recalling words.
• If a word is on "the tip of your tongue so to speak"

What Can I do to Help?

• Be patient.
• Give students more time to put their words in order.
• Do something to distract the other students (such as erasing the board while the student gets their thoughts together).

Visual Perception

How we, as individuals, see the world.

• Everyone's perception is unique.
• One may see something that another cannot or vice versa.
• We as teachers must allow ourselves to see different perspectives as to better relate and understand all of our students, even more so with those who have a learning disability.

Reading Comprehension

It Depends on the Individual

• Has more to do with background and training rather than vocabulary.
• Don't make assumptions about a student because you don't know their background.
• How can we expect students to understand content in which they have no context?

Reading and Decoding

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• Reading and understanding the material is much different than decoding it.
• Learning disabled students might have so much difficulty decoding that they lose its understanding.

Dyslexia

• So much effort is put forth to decode the words, that dyslexic students may have problems comprehending what they have just read.

Dyslexia

• Teachers must give these students the time and resources to succeed.
• Some examples may include: large font on worksheets, use more visuals, simplify directions, or even provide recordings of lectures for these students.

Anxiety

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• Anytime a teacher uses sarcasm as a response to a child, they've created a victim.
• The first human reaction to anxiety is to look away from the source of the anxiety.
• Why do we make our students look at us when we're yelling at them? This goes against our nature as humans.

Risk Taking

The most common problem in learning disabled adults is that they won't take chances. This is because all of the risk taking was knocked out of them in their early years.

How do we build up these students?

Excentuate the positive. Don't dwell on what they cannot do, rather dwell on that which they can do and encourage them to do it even better!

Fairness

Fairness does not mean everyone is the same; fairness means everyone gets what he or she needs.

In order to be fair, we've got to treat them differently.