Re: pleas tell me or has someone else had a similar problem

[Anonymous]

Bryon,

I was reading through your post and it brought up a couple of questions for me. You mention being diagnosed ADD 3 times and that you have seen a psychiatrist and a psychologist. What kinds of testing has been done? (Psychiatrists don’t usually do ‘psych’ testing in the sense that I’m thinking about right now.) Have you ever had psycho-educational testing done? It’s the kind of testing that pinpoints weaknesses in the processing ‘software’ programs of the brain, so to speak. (verbal, language, mathematical)

Yes, I’m one of those horrible teachers that everyone around here seems to complain about (yeah, it’s been a tough week at school so I’m crabby right now) but a couple of your comments made my ears perk up. You mentioned that you only seem to read a few pages in an hour (maybe it seems like an hour 😉 ) and that you can only remember what you’ve read for just a few sentences. Perhaps you’ve got some of those processing issues going on or some memory ‘issues’.

Some students/people who deal with similar issues are often dealing with memory issues. Some of those ‘lucky’ people have a brain that with long-term memory issues (can’t remember things from the distant past) and then there are those who’ve got short-term memory issues (can’t remember what happened in the recent past, last week, yesterday, earlier today, 5 minutes ago).

Then again, there are a gazillion and one other language processing issues that can also affect one’s ability to decode/read/comprehend and store the text being read.

What I’m saying is please don’t be so hard on yourself! When my ‘kids’ are struggling with the actual reading process and/or making sense of what they’ve just read, I start demanding that ‘the pros’ be called in to make some recommendations.

Yes, but before that happens we teachers have to do a complicated song and dance routine to prove we’ve tried everything under the sun to help the kid read/make sense of the printed word before admin will even consider putting the child’s name on the list for psych-ed testing by the psychologist. (It all boils down to budget $$$ and how loudly parents scream and stamp their feet, too.)

What am I saying? It’s not that you’re not trying hard enough and that you’re not applying yourself. You have ADD and quite possibly other things going on in your brain. ADD people frequently have what the pros refer to as co-morbidities. (Horrible word- the root word being ‘morbid’!!) Really, it’s not the end of the world once a person knows what they’re dealing with.

Knowledge is power in this case. There is a ton of great software now that will ‘read’ material aloud for you. If someone has good auditory processing, they’re off to the races. If it’s another kind of issue, there are other answers or ways to slay the dragon. The key is finding out what is causing your issues IF (the big IF) you are really trying.

I didn’t mean for this to be a full length novel but I hate when I hear of others feeling so defeated because of ‘learning’ issues. On Tuesday, when I’m back to work after the long weekend, I face the ‘gauntlet’ at school. I have a stack of files/assessments/student work to take to an 8:30 meeting to plead my students’ cases. They are all deserving of extra support/testing but I’ll probably only get “we’ll monitor them for another year.” *sigh* Never give up ’cause I won’t! Some of us teachers are on your side!

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