New Insights Into Learning Disabilities

“I always knew I was smarter than my grades indicated. My teachers didn’t tell me that: They said I wasn’t trying, that I was sloppy. When I couldn’t spell something, they told me to go look it up. But how can you look it up if you can’t spell it?”

Beverly Gold, professor of English at Community College of Baltimore and co-author of three texts on children with learning problems, is learning-disabled. It is not, she says, something you outgrow or cure. Learning-disabled children have normal intelligence, but are unable to learn the way other children do. That does not, however, mean they cannot learn at all.

“There are fantastic alternative ways of teaching,” says Frona Roth, associate professor in the department of hearing and speech sciences at the University of Maryland, College Park. “What the good schools do is identify the particular learning pattern and style of the individual child, and work toward that.”

Boys are more likely than girls to have learning disabilities; the difficulty sometimes seems to run in families. But why it happens is not known. Whether all instances of learning deficits are “learning disabilities” is also unclear.

Dr. Alan Davick, a privately practicing pediatrician with a strong interest in learning disabilities, says it’s useful to think of a learning disability as “a wiring abnormality in the brain that affects the way they process information.”

In some children, the abnormality is so subtle it is unrecognized: The child struggles but gets through school and goes into a career that emphasizes talent in an area other than the disability.

In others, there is a constellation of deficits: The child might be slow to speak, might not fully understand when spoken to, might not remember what he or she knew just a short time ago.

School can be a maze. Learning-disabled children might see d where others see b ; read was instead of saw; recite a cockeyed alphabet; forget how to finish a word or letter they’ve started to write. They might not even be able to control the fingers that hold the pencil, might not be able to organize notebooks, start compositions, finish assignments. Math might defeat them; foreign language is Greek to them.

Some are also unable to pay attention: They have “attention deficit disorder” in addition to their other problems. Some are unable to sit still: They’re “hyperactive.”

In the bad old days, they would have been the dumb kids in class, the troublemakers, the failures.

Now, learning-disabled children are often recognized very early.