<p>Really Pizzagrl? Does he have ‘trouble’ making a living like so many people on this thread worry about? I bet not. Neither did my father, who couldn’t even read until he was 60. But, wow, by then he’d already been RETIRED for ten years and sailing around the world.</p>
<p>Yes, really, poetgrl, he was. I don’t get what you’re driving at. Is he really dyslexic, or is he just a really poor speller who doesn’t have the “spelling gene” I do?</p>
<p>annieroses and others</p>
<p>Do you know if these famous folk had any accommodations, and if so, what kind?</p>
<p>I don’t know where I stand on this, but I DO know the DSM, the book of Psychiatric diagnosis , is moving toward a continuum, rather than an all or none approach to diagnosis. This suggests the cut off between LD and not, is not nearly as clear as some would like to think. And if insurance coverage “has” to cover a two or three thousand dollar evaluation to clarify who and what accommodation will be granted to anyone along the continuum ( not where I practice), how will a “universal” health care model cover this? Ooops! Is that off topic?</p>
<p>I find post 154 very suspect IF you have a husband who is dyslexic. IF.</p>
<p>Thank you Shrinkrap. That’s a fantastic post. Really. </p>
<p>Do you people realize that kids who have learning disabilities read this message board? High school kids? Do you get accomodations out in the world for your idiocy? I mean, my god! Use your brain.</p>
<p>Things don’t quite add up. There must be more going on than what was released to the press. </p>
<p>The stated number of students getting LD accomodations at P, seems far too low. Typically at elite colleges it’s about 1-3%. Princeton can’t be excluding applicants with LDs because they don’t have to identify themselves on application. So why aren’t the 1-3% getting accomodations? It also seems unusual not to give a time accomodation as a matter of course for ADD. I had not heard this to be an issue for an ADD student I know who was offered a place there.</p>
<p>Approaching this discussion from another angle, if an educational institution’s goal and purpose is to educate all who enroll, why can’t what are now defined as “accomodations” be offered as a matter of course to any and all students who might better learn with these techniques? What is good for LD students may also be good for non-identified, regular education students who may have slight learning issues. Isn’t it to society’s benefit to have the best educated workforce possible?</p>
<p>The talk of “leveling the playing field” presumes that education is a game with winners and losers. But we as a society benefit most when all students “win” or succeed in learning and go on to become productive contributors. The alternative wastes human potential. </p>
<p>I also recall an article in the NYT a few years back that criticized the quality of education that Princeton’s athletes received. I wonder if this has any bearing on this current case.</p>
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<p>Wow. I truly believe you are playing at this. (And with bystanders emotions too).</p>
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<p>I didn’t say he was dyslexic today. He was diagnosed as dyslexia way back when in the 1970’s. As far as I can tell, it just means he’s a poor speller, which isn’t a “disability,” just something he has to work harder at and it doesn’t come naturally to him the way it does to me. But science doesn’t come naturally to me the way it does to him, so again, I’m asking, what is the difference between a disability and simply being bad at something?</p>
<p>If you threw me a ball, I’d probably miss it. If you expected me to hit a ball with a bat, I’d swing at it and miss. I have no physical issues or limitations, I walk and run just fine, I’m just not athletically coordinated. Is that a disability, or something that I’m simply bad at / not naturally strong at? I’m asking a sincere question here. I can easily “get” that the blind kid can’t see, the deaf kid can’t hear, the kid with cerebral palsy can’t move his hands. I’m asking about these other areas and where they cross the line from disability that require accommodation versus just not being good at something.</p>
<p>The testing for dyslexia and dysgraphia (I don’t know how they test for ADD) involves oral testing vs. written testing and a battery of other intelligence tests, as well. If there is a certain statistical difference between what a child can do intellectually vs what they can do in a written context (remember, we rarely USE a written context IRL), then it is considered a learning difference. In this case it means that the intellectual capacity of the child, also what the child has learned (which assessing this is the ONLY reason for a test, btw), cannot be demonstrated by the same means as the other students. It says nothing at all about intellectual capacity, simply about the ability to produce a certain type of “proof” of learning. So that a child will be given “orals” instead of an essay test. Or a child will be allowed to use a computer, instead of a blue book for an inclass essay. That is what an accomodation is.</p>
<p>In the case of the girl from princeton, she seems to be asking for modification in the actual material she is being asked to master. That is not something I’ve ever heard of.</p>
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<p>Well, it’s already covered everywhere but not necessarily through health insurance, rather through our educational system. If parents believe their child to have a disability, schools have to investigate that which usually means they test. Around here, health insurance won’t cover testing because they consider it “educational.”</p>
<p>poetgrl wrote: </p>
<p>“In the case of the girl from princeton, she seems to be asking for modification in the actual material she is being asked to master. That is not something I’ve ever heard of.”</p>
<p>Where did you read that she is asking for the actual material to be modified? All I recall is that she’s asking for extended time on her tests-- probably the most common accommodation given for any one of her disabilities.</p>
<p>"Wow. I truly believe you are playing at this. (And with bystanders emotions too). "</p>
<p>If you hand me 5 $1 bills and ask me to count them, I will get a different number each time. I cannot subtract a single number greater than 1, though sometimes can utilize fingers if I have a minute to try it a couple times and make sure I’ve got it right. I cannot differentiate between left and right adequately, when it comes to > < or sometimes even when it comes to finding my way around my hometown, where I’ve lived for 20 years. It all looks the same to me. I can solve the quadratic formula, do geometric proofs, trig (with some review-- I have learned it to mastery at least five times but dyscalculia makes it impossible to retain longterm), and a whole battery of statistics tests. I’ve been taught, I worked hard, and I learned. But I cannot count, I cannot calculate in my head or on paper no matter how basic, and I cannot correctly write down +/-, or I read/write 119 as 611, or 161, or I mess up that two negative numbers gives you a positive, etc and so forth, and I can get 75% of a math test or problem set wrong JUST for mistakes like that, no matter how much care and attention goes into it. I don’t know if it’s my brain or my eyes or my brain telling my eyes or what, but I just see everything wrong and cannot differentiate properly even if I KNOW in my head exactly what I should be seeing. I spent over 30 hours a week JUST doing math homework and those were still almost exclusively my errors. It isn’t as if I don’t know how to count, read, or write. I know it’s 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and so on, but I can’t actually DO it. My brain just doesn’t let me do it the way that I know how to do. And I have never requested a waiver of math requirements or a substitution, I slaved through it even with my extremely mild accommodations because I WANTED to learn the material, and I did learn it even if I was unable to show it on my tests without accommodations. So no, I am not playing at this, I imagine most college educated folks can count out 5 dollars or find the grocery store where they’ve lived the past 20 years without even having to think about it. And I am pretty insulted you think you know me better than I do, and better than my doctor does. How do you ever expect to consider yourself educated enough on the matter to argue about it when you just assume people who try to prove you wrong-- people who have much more experience with the matter than you do-- must just be toying with you? Give me a break!</p>
<p>ETA: Pizzagirl, I hope this answers your question as well. I’ve actually found I am fairly good at algebra now that I understand that I have dyscalculia and how the disability works. I’m just horrifically bad at math classes. Even at the 12th percentile I think I could probably get to a higher level math than I’ve taken in college thus far were it not for the strict constraints in a class, (ie you must solve a problem in this way, you have this much time to solve the problem, you must have mastered this topic by this time, etc) though many would probably disagree, and I could very well be wrong. Stats not so much, though. One of the symptoms of dyscalculia is a difficulty or inability to retain math concepts-- it would not be surprising that I can’t remember, for example, y=mx+b when in my mind it immediately turns into q=43-23i4jsadarnrotna;oart once I stop staring at that section of the paper. I only learned algebra because I realized most of the formulas don’t need to be known anyway and I was allowed unlimited access to at least a basic functions calculator. I have no idea how I remembered the different formulas for the various hypothesis tests, they are sure as hell gone forever now.</p>
<p>Some of you may be interested to know that my oldest son is/was classified autistic. Thankfully he is very high functioning and graduated HS (with a regular diploma not an IEP diploma). He had some accommodations in school and spent much of his early years at a school specifically for autistic children. He’s 24 now and cannot get through college. In addition to his autism he is LD in Math. Cannot “do” numbers and our cc will not allow a calculator for his remedial math class. So that’s the end of the road. It has been a bumpy ride but a great one also! He’s grown in his capabilities and at this stage refuses to take any assistance based on his autism. He’s held a job at the local movie theater for nearly 5 years now. It’s ok at 24 but I don’t see him progressing from there. He refuses vesid intervention and so- he does what he can be successful at. I don’t want anyone to think I am not sympathetic to the plight of LD kids/adults. I just wonder where the road ends for those who are more capable then my son but not as capable as the majority of other applicants for a given position.</p>
<p>2collegewego-- I was under the impression, based on what is being said, that others knew more about the case, and that she was asking to have the material to digest in smaller amounts than the rest of the class. If nobody knows more than the article, I just think it ought to be an interesting test of the new, stronger ADA laws. I also believe Princeton will lose, if it really is only a matter of extra time.</p>
<p>Hayze, I don’t have any answer for you. I hope your son is able to find a way to have some joy in his life and also that he finds things which are fulfilling for him to do, outside work.</p>
<p>TwistedxKiss -</p>
<p>Thanks for the clear description of your dyscalculia and related issues. I’m stashing it in my files.</p>
<p>Hayze, I don’t know if this is relevant for your son, but I know, from personal experience in our family, that many kids with the more severe disabilities, that have haunted them since childhood, would prefer to be “normal” than accept accommodations. Many can be quite fierce in REFUSING accommodations, even when they are set up. </p>
<p>This issue can be even harder when the “disability” goes to the heart of identity, as opposed to some specific academic functioning issue.</p>
<p>However, I wonder if it could be explained to your son that accommodations are the real way to be “normal” in functioning. It seems a shame that he is not continuing in Community College simply because he does not want some simple accommodations (like that calculator).</p>
<p>I am not totally familiar with his situation, of course, but that was my thought when I read your post. Does it really have to be the “end of the line?”</p>
<p>p.s. Twisted, along with her health problems, my daughter also has prosopagnosia, por facial blindness. She cannot see faces properly: she sees parts but not the whole. She cannot recognize people if she doesn’t see them frequently, cannot tell if someone is attractive, and cannot read facial expressions. She remembers people with a sort of encyclopedia of tiny details, such as a sharp chin, or one eye bigger, or hairstyle, which has become automatic but takes a lot of energy mentally. Noone would ever know: she even mimics looking into people’s eyes, even though eyes are meaningless to her. She does not have any accommodations for this and is just learning about the ramifications of this disorder, which are wide and deep. Is this similar to your problem with numbers and math? Oops- off topic, sorry guys.</p>
<p>hayze, I too would look at alternate ways of helping your son. He should be able to use a calculator (I no longer need to add up numbers by hand or in my head in the “real world”).</p>
<p>I’m not a litigious guy and I’m not a lawyer but I would suggest looking at the ADA Amendments Act of 2008, which took effect this year. Congress was unhappy with the highly restrictive intepretation the Courts were taking of their intent in the ADA and clarified and broadened in a number of dimensions. It also expands (back to original intent) the situations in which accommodations are required. For one, relating to the Princeton student in question, concentration is deemed to be a major life function that should be accommodated. I suspect that many institutions are either not really aware of the scope of this legislation or are pretending they do not know. For example, we got back from the ACT a letter for my daughter about major life functions, that paraphrases the old act, and ignores the new one, which includes reading, writing and concentration as major life functions. I wouldn’t be surprised if it would apply to your son.</p>
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<p>You really might have some variant of Acalculia for all I, an armchair neuropsychiatric doctor, should know. If you do and patiently worked through your math courses for University, then someone should throw you an ADA complaint bone with your Spanish requirements. In the local paper over where I live, there was a short article about the offices of student disabilities of the public university. The lady who runs it said that one can take a cultural history class instead of a foreign language class depending on the nature of their LD or what have you. This University is also know as UofM, but I think it more humble than your UofM. </p>
<p>I still wish this gal the best. I still am a mite bit of a doubting Thomas with some things which pertain to her situation as a whole, but not with the gal herself.</p>
<p>I apologize up-front for the length of this post. This thread deals with a subject for which I have many oars in the water. I had a fantastic undergraduate experience at Princeton. I am grateful to the university for the options it helped give me and I contribute modest sums of money annually to it and visit every 5 years for reunions. I’ve been professor at an Ivy and know what it takes to be successful at a high academic level. I’ve also worked on Wall Street and have started and run small firms in which I’ve hired kids from Harvard, MIT, Princeton, U Mass Amherst, Bentley, Wesleyan, the Technion, Cornell, … . So, I think I know something about the “real world” of which some posters speak. I also have two kids with LDs, one pretty severe, and a wife and father-in-law (and other relatives) with LD’s, all of whom have high to extremely high IQs. So, I’m going to focus, in part by example, not on all kids with LD’s but the kind of kids who would have a shot at going to a school like Princeton.</p>
<p>A number of the posters seem mean-spirited and/or ignorant but others reasonably argue that the very accommodations that let a student succeed at a high-end institution like Princeton are crutches that won’t or shouldn’t be available to help graduates in the next phase of life (work) and thus are inappropriate in this phase. It is worth noting, however, that the same reasonable argument could be applied to accommodations in high school, and then to middle school and elementary school.</p>
<p>My father-in-law, dyslexic like my wife and son, was told in school that he was stupid and never graduated from college. He was not intellectual but he was anything but stupid. He was a serial entrepreneur who probably earned more money than 99+% of the adults on CC who question whether people with learning disabilities can function in the world of work. And, he used lots of his money to support his extended family and sponsor immigrant relatives. He did not receive accommodations but always had his employees summarize issues in one page documents and relied heavily on meetings and presentations, where he used a well-developed emotional IQ and a strong intellect to assess the thoroughness and commitment of managers as well as of entrepreneurs seeking capital.</p>
<p>As a student, my wife was told, “You have such a high IQ. Why aren’t you trying?” No one ever helped her and she never learned to write effectively. Although she has become a successful fine artist, she says that had she received the support my son has received, she’d likely be a doctor.</p>
<p>My son was told, “You have an extremely high IQ and you are dyslexic, so we are going to give you extra time.” Although he got some remediation, it was not especially effective and he largely learned to read on his own. Slowly and with fatigue, but accurately. His cousin and I largely taught him to write, with some help from school. His writing is slow, but excellent. He got the highest grade in Harvard Summer School’s version of Expo 20, the expository writing class required of all Harvard freshman. His input/output is slow, but he constantly challenges himself. He’s co-authoring a novel. He signed up for Moot Court in HS, which really helped him learn to structure arguments and write efficiently, and he lost in the finals before appeals court judges. Despite the fact that he speaks with something of a speech delay has joined his college debate team.</p>
<p>Here’s what accommodations do. Accommodations enabled him to have a 4.26 weighted GPA. His Honors Chemistry teacher was highly skeptical of his need for double time and watched him on tests and concluded that, although she was a firm believer in timed testing, it just took him longer to get his ideas out and that the accommodation was completely appropriate in his case. He often had the highest grade in his high school courses. His actual complaint in HS was that the pace of his Honors and AP courses was too slow. Without those accommodations, the school system would likely have moved him to lower less challenging courses that still would have had lots of reading and writing, so he would have been both fatigued and bored. One additional thing accommodations did: His brain is rewiring and getting faster. It would not do so if he had gotten bored and dropped out or tuned out.</p>
<p>Without extra time, he used to get in the high 40ish percentiles on standardized tests. With extra time and breaks to deal with fatigue, he moved to 800’s on all math and science tests. Moreover, on his first and only try, as a severely dyslexic kid, he got >99 percentile on both critical reading and writing as well as on a literature SAT subject test. Without extra time, his performance would have been much lower. </p>
<p>So, what about college? Well, some schools are like Princeton. At the most fundamental level, they have a deep belief that they have a curriculum and a system that provides the best education available. In this view, any alterations (waiver of language requirement, extra time, scribe for papers, readers, etc.) are moves to undermine the curriculum. Here’s the attitude: “University attorney Hannah Ross told Metcalf-Leggette that Princeton is not required to offer extended time on exams if doing so would jeopardize the “essence” of a Princeton education, the law journal reported.” The Dean for Disabilities Services really serves as a guard whose job is to block the untoward advances of undergraduates who are trying to circumvent the one and only true education. That’s their way and their view, although I think it is antiquated and quite possibly in violation of the ADA Amendments Act of 2008.</p>
<p>Despite the great experience I had at Princeton, I recommended that my son go to other schools. He chose between an Ivy and a top LAC. At the Ivy, the Dean for Disabilities Services, a nice and thoughtful man, was also a guardian of the curriculum. After examining the incontrovertible data that suggested that foreign languages would be very difficult for my kid, asking for more data and sending the data out to his experts, he told my son that he would recommend a waiver of the language requirement (only the 16th such recommendation he would have made in 3 years or less than 1/2 a percent of each class) if he were to attend and if the university’s rules and policies were not to change and [fill in boilerplate here]. Each request was going to require substantial scrutiny of the data and perhaps more data [for a kid who was diagnosed in 2nd grade and has been tested out the wazoo [a professor even fMRI’d his brain at MIT because she thought it was extraordinary]. In contrast, at the LAC, the Dean for Disabilities Services said to me, “If we admitted your son, we’ll do everything we can to make it work.” </p>
<p>Although my son enjoyed the admitted students’ shindig more at the Ivy, he instantaneously chose the LAC after speaking to its Deans. The school has been helpful, solicitous and responsive and is living up to their end of the bargain. And so is my son. At Parent’s Weekend, I went to a departmental gathering where two of his four professors separately told me that they had been worried when they got the briefing from disabilities services (which of course didn’t tell them about the IQ side, just the LD side) but in one case, he had the highest grade in the course on the midterm and in the other course had the highest grade on the midterm and a 99/100 on the other test. He appears to be doing similarly in the other courses. So, I’m glad he’s not at Princeton, because Princeton would not enable him to be successful. And, had his high school or elementary school treated him the way many of the adult posters here would like to treat him in college, he wouldn’t have been able to learn enough to be performing (and learning) at this level. He is tired and working hard, although he thinks the pace of three of his four college classes is too slow.</p>
<p>Does he have to make adjustments for his LDs? Absolutely. I told him in 2nd grade that he would have to work harder than the other kids for the rest of his life. Fortunately, he is a goal-oriented, disciplined, hard-working kid who is strategic about how to construct success. He will always have fewer ECs than other kids. Moreover, he’ll probably have to choose a major that involves less reading and more math even though in his heart, he’d probably major in a subject whose courses have 400 pages of reading a week each. </p>
<p>My mixed feeling comes from the fact that there is a real world out there. This doesn’t mean, as some of the posters implied, an inability to find career paths in which he can successfully apply his strategic, disciplined mind. It does mean that he’ll have to play to his strengths when choosing grad schools and especially when choosing a career path. He should not become a lawyer or join a consulting firm that requires lots of reading and writing of reports. But, some of the more mean-spirited or ignorant folks are confused. Slow speed in reading/writing would not handicap him as a surgeon (as someone suggested early on), though this won’t be an area of interest. Slow speed in reading/writing does not mean lack of speed in other domains. He is blazingly fast at complex pattern recognition (which in my judgment lies at the heart of much of what we think of as intelligence) and can think 10 rounds ahead in complex games of strategy. </p>
<p>Despite his success thus far at a strong academic institution, do his deficits prevent him from success in the working world as some have suggested? I don’t think so. Where might his capabilities be of value? Well, someone with his set of gifts could be a global macro hedge fund manager, an international mediator, the GM of a professional sports team, a political campaign strategist, a real estate developer, or a professor in a number of fields. I think the toughest job step for him will be the entry level job, where the ability read/write/synthesize would play to his deficits rather than his strengths. But, there are lots of things he shouldn’t be, in which reading and writing speed matter a lot and no amount of accommodations would help. Even there, I have a dyslexic friend who rose to be a widely respected general counsel of a large global company. He said he just worked harder than everyone else at every stage of the game.</p>
<p>And, to all those who seem to imply that lack of processing speed is an insurmountable barrier to success in the working world, I’ll leave you with my favorite example. My father worked with a guy and said that if you asked his co-worker a question, even a relatively simple question, he just could not answer quickly, although he often came back the NEXT DAY with an unusually deep and thoughtful answer. Did his slow processing speed handicap him? Probably from a job as a litigator or as a manager in many organizations. Had the co-worker been judged based solely upon timed tests without accommodations, he would have fared poorly. Was he unintelligent or undeserving of a spot at one of the best schools? By some of your definitions. But, his name was John Bardeen and he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956 for the invention of the transistor, without which we wouldn’t have high speed computers let alone the internet or, heaven forbid, CC, and again in 1972, for a well-developed theory of superconductivity. Extraordinary – one Nobel for a practical device and another for deep theory. </p>
<p>I fear less for the kid with LDs who is bright enough to get into an Ivy (and who could perform at the right level with appropriate accommodations). To get super-high SAT scores when working through the haze of the LD probably implies greater underlying horsepower than a kid without LDs but the same scores. I fear instead for the kid with just average intelligence and LDs. School will be hard. They won’t have the high horsepower to compensate. And, in a world in which mainstream jobs tend to place an increasing reliance on the ability to read (and possibly write) with fluency, their work experience may be more troubled and painful.</p>
<p>Shawbridge, great information, thanks! I sent you a message but your box is full!</p>
<p>Editing to add that this was a response to your first post, about the 2008 ADA amendment.</p>
<p>The description of the disability office as “guard of the curriculum” in your second post- is priceless and an unbelievable, clarifying insight.</p>