The Father of Special Education
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Dr. Samuel Kirk always helped people. He helped the farm workers on his parents farm in Rugby, North Dakota to read. He served in the military and helped other soldiers learn to read and write. His first teaching job was helping defiant students.
Dr. Kirk was born in 1929 where the only option for exceptional children was “mental retardation asylums.”
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Dr. Kirk asked the question, “What if failing students are failing for a reason they cannot control?”
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Dr. Kirk found his answer in “learning disabilities.” He created a future for children that at that time really didn’t have one.
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Kirk founded the head start program, created legislation that created Special Education as we know it today, wrote textbooks to help educators, created new teaching styles for exceptional students, and started a classification system for learning disabilities.
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Dr. Kirks patience and passion helped create what we know as IEP’s and 504’s. The idea that every student has a right to education is one of the battles he fought and won.
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Modifications, accommodations, and differentiated instruction are all three ways to help exceptional students succeed in the classroom.
Dr. Kirk, was known as, “the last of the great generalists” in his field. He spent 60 years of his life in the field of special education. It is no doubt that he was responsible for innovations in diagnosis, training and social policy for exceptional students.
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Learning disabilities are defined as information processing problems. Students with LD have difficulty processing the basic units of symbols, sound, syllables, and words. That means some difficulties encoding or learning them, recalling or remembering them, and producing them.
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A learning disability is not: an intellectual disability, hearing loss, vision problems, behavior or emotional disturbance, attention deficit disorder, or autism. The main types of learning disabilities are reading, written language, math, and executive function disabilities.
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Learning disabilities are assessed by a series of different performance or IQ tests. There is no medical treatment for learning disabilities. Educational strategies can be used in the classroom or students can be put on IEP‘s, or 504‘s to accommodate their specific learning challenges.
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Reading disorders are often referred to as dyslexia. Common signs for dyslexia are: “difficulty associating or recognizing sounds that go with letters and separating the sound within words, difficulty sounding out words, trouble rhyming, problems understanding and using words and grammar , and poor spelling,”
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Writing disabilities are often called dysgraphia. Some common signs include: “awkward or tight grip on a pencil, illegible handwriting, speaking the words out loud while writing, omitting words and sentences, difficulty with grammar and syntax structure, avoidance of writing task, and difficulty organizing thoughts when writing,” (Bailey, 2019).
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The broad term for mathematics disabilities is dyscalculia. Common signs include: “slow to develop counting in math problem-solving skills, difficulty recalling number sequences, computing problems, problems with time concepts, poor sense of direction, and difficulty completing mental math,” (Bailey, 2019).
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Another warning sign for a math learning disability is having a student be able to complete math problems one day, but seem totally lost and confused doing the same type of problem the next day.
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Finally, executive function disabilities are used to describe deficits in the, “mental processes needed for organization, planning, strategizing, remembering details, and managing time,” (Bailey, 2019). Signals for executive function problems can also include: “indecisiveness, trouble with multi step tasks, difficulty setting goals, forgetting detail soon after reading is finished, and time management problems,” (Bailey, 2019).
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Students with Learning Disabilities should benefit from organized/sequence instruction and help with organization in multi sensory teaching techniques.
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Thanks to Dr. Kirks passion, hard work, patience, and commitment to special education every student has a chance to be supported in their pursuit of an education.
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