Student Sues Princeton Over Learning Disability Accommodations

calmom
Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:48:55 +0000

pizzagirl:

Forgive my ignorance here. My H can’t spell worth a darn (seriously - he misspells extremely common words, like broccoli on the shopping list every week). His handwriting is the true doctor chicken scratch. …
The nature of some of these disabilities is puzzling to those who don’t have a dog in this scenario, because we sometimes have a hard time discerning a “disability” from “something someone is weak in.”



Your H’s spelling and handwriting are symptoms of dyslexia and/or dysgraphia.

That is not the same as a diagnosis. (If you wake up tomorrow with cough and a high fever, those are symptoms of swine flu – but that doesn’t mean that is what you have – it just means that it might be a good idea to find out).

The difference between a diagnosed learning “disability” and being “weak in” something is a matter of the specific pattern of symptoms and the degree of the weakness. A professional evaluator would do some additional forms of testing that would help tease out the weaknesses. For example, to test for dyslexia, an evaluator would probably want to see how well an individual does at tests of “rapid automatic naming” (the ability to rapidly read aloud a sequence of numbers or letters), and “nonword reading” (the ability to read phonetically regular nonsense words, such as “crum” or “teeb”)

“Broccoli” is a commonly-misspelled word, so a mistake in the number of c’s or l’s (brocoli, brocolli) probably wouldn’t be seen as an indication of dyslexia – a dyslexic would more likely make a mistake such as spelling the word brokale. For example, a couple of years ago, my son gave me a shopping list with “cheese” spelled chez, “coffee” spelled kofe.

Dyslexia and other learning disabilities manifest along a spectrum, from very mild to very severe. They also can be influenced by factors such as fatigue or stress, and they can change in apparent severity over time. It is very common for adults with mild to moderate symptoms to be undiagnosed dyslexics – unless they have significant early problems with reading, they are unlikely to have been referred for any sort of evaluation or help as children. Many dyslexics are capable enough at the decoding aspect of reading, but are very slow readers or have difficulty with comprehension – they find themselves reading and re-reading the same material in order to understand it, but they don’t realize that could be connected with dyslexia.

I’d guess from the combination of poor spelling and bad handwriting that your H. probably IS dyslexic - but that’s only a guess. Again – its a spectrum. (Going back to my flu analogy: many cases of swine flu are mild, and there are probably many people with those mild cases who don’t bother to go to the doctor or get tested, so never realize that they have had swine flu).