Jude Not….

Wes came home today and told me he was not allowed to use his electronic dictionary in class. The teacher told him that he should use his brain.
I wonder if this same teacher would tell a student in a wheelchair that he should use his legs.
As a country we have come a long way in our tolerance of others’ physical disabilities. When I went to school, there were no physically handicapped children in our classrooms. I don’t even remember knowing any physically handicapped children. We were taught not to look at these people out in public, let alone talk to them, as if they were contagious.
Now, Wes has several friends who have siblings with handicaps.
Wes is careful and considerate with these children and they add to our lives in the gifts they bring us with their smiles and spirits.
We know twin boys, one in a wheelchair and one in a walker. The boys are able to move around quite well, and we are always ready to help when the walker won’t fit through the doorway or the wheelchair can’t go up a steep hill. We would never dream of telling the boys that they need to try harder.
We know a deaf girl who has implants and wears a hearing device as well as reads lips. We would never dream of telling this girl to put away her machine and use her ears. Or turn our backs on her while talking so she can listen without relying on strategies the rest of us don’t use.
Yet, my dyslexic child who needs the aid of an electronic device to read is openly criticized, actually cajoled into trying to accomplish a task with little hope of success because that’s how the other children are doing it and they are successful.
We are learning more and more about how the brain works. We are learning more and more about what strategies and techniques help people with learning disabilities. Yet, the prejudice is still rampant among us.
Because learning disabilities are not physically manifested, it is difficult to recognize them. Children with these challenges do not have strangely shaped heads, or limbs which never developed. They do not have odd behaviors which would suggest a disability such as humming and rocking or swaying heads and vacant eyes. As a matter of a fact, most people who meet Wes find him to be extremely articulate and bright. And that is where the disconnect occurs.
Dyslexia becomes most apparent when a person is reading, writing or talking about something new. Since in most social interactions, dyslexics are not regularly required to read, write or talk about something new, most people don’t recognize that a person has this disability. But years of hiding it can create some unusual personality traits.
When able to articulate an idea or opinion, Wes is very forceful with it, to the point of being overbearing. He wants to be heard.
This is how Wes’s disability affects him in social situations. As a teacher, I see my students with disabilities hide behind other personality traits. A student who has poor fine motor skills, bad penmanship, pretends to be writing everything down, but isn’t. One teacher called him lazy. Another student who has horrible spelling skills, a processing problem, refuses to turn in any written class work. He will complete fill in the blanks or multiple choice and do his written work at home on the computer. One of his teachers called him defiant for refusing to do work. He was protecting himself from the humiliation of poor spelling at his age.
Recognizing these disabilities and the accommodations needed can be difficult for people in the education profession. Imagine if you have no training in education or how the brain works.
One time I was at the store with Wes and his grandmother. Wes was counting out his money for the cashier and his grandmother tried to intervene because Wes was taking awhile. Wes became visibly upset by the intervention, telling his grandmother, “I can do it” in a nasty tone.
The woman in line behind us told Wes that he was a “rude boy”. Now, Wes was not only humiliated in front of the cashier who witnessed someone trying to help him do a simple task like count money, but also by this stranger who felt obliged to comment on his behavior.
Often as adults we criticize children thinking that we are helping them. The assumption is that the poor child’s parents must be doing a horrible job and therefore it is our duty to help. Wes has his speech correctly regularly. Sometimes I would like to look at this well-meaning person and say, “Hello. I’m his mother, an English teacher, a published writer and he knows the rule and has had his speech corrected by someone who knows and loves him. He even gets speech therapy. We don’t need your help.” Instead Wes looks at me and I smile at him helplessly, trying to let him know that the correction doesn’t matter.
Children are the cruelest. Why is this? Many will tell you it’s because “kids will be kids”. Yeah, at my kid’s expense. Children learn how to treat others from the example set to them by their parents and other adults. If adults feel it is their place to label others without fully understanding the unique person, feel it is their place to criticize and correct others, or feel it is their place to comment on behavior that doesn’t involve them, then, of course, kids will be cruel.
Learning disabilities may be the last frontier of social awareness. Obviously, being sensitive to physically handicapped people, to other races and religions, to the other gender still has a ways to go, but being sensitive and kind to those people with learning disabilities hasn’t even been thought of. Instead people complain about having to be politically correct and not being able to speak their minds. How can we expect these same people to broach the subject with their children?
I invited my brother-in-law to the house to cook for my friends. He is a talented cook and was happy to share his gift with all of us. He had posted a menu on a kitchen cupboard, with several misspellings. One guest took it upon herself to ridicule him in front of others for his poor spelling. When I got her alone and called her on it she told me she was “only kidding”. Besides, she thought she was making fun of my husband, not someone she didn’t know, as if that made it better. For the rest of the evening, I kept a wary eye on her child with mine. If this woman could be so insensitive, to the point of cruelty, how would her child act around my child?