Having learning disablities

[Redhawk]

I know it's a hard thing to talk about, and most people would rather talk about their
sexual preference or having a drug problem. But do you have a learning problems? How did you overcome it? Did kids tease you in school? Do your brothers or sisters have it?
Are you ashamed to talk about it?

[tapestrybabe]

my brother has dyslexia...
you could say he was a pretty popular person in high school... and despite his popularity... he kept his disability undercover and pretty well hidden... in fact, i dont think any of his friends knew that he was placed in special ed classes...

[John0101]

My friend has ADD and dyslexia, it was kinda of obvious that he had ADD, and he pretty much told everybody he had learning disabilities. He sort of made fun of his learning disabilties and took pride in it, so no one made fun of him and he hung out in the "in crowd". He's fine IMO, goes to a pretty good college majoring in computer science and he's doing fairly well for himself.

[Green_Jade]

I'm kinda at an odd position in terms of learning disability... I was never diagonosed, and really didn't have problems during secondary school. I had some now that I think about it in high school, but never recognized it as potential LD signs.

I started having problems in college..but coped... I got screened for common LDs and I was told that I probably had attention deficit. ...along with the oh, it'll be 400 bucks to be officially diagonosed and receive support from school...

I think with in the Asian community, there's a lack of knowledge in terms of recognizing early signs of learning disability... Esp. wih the parents..That's was probably the case with me, I'm 'predisposed' to having LD...I have about 50% - 60% chance of some type of LD. I kinda ignored it myself..even knowing I had higher chance of having LD. I kinda figured something wasn't right when 2nd year in college, I just could not keep up in lecture classes that had lots of written material to digest. It's absolutly maddening when I sit down to read a chapter on something and I can barely go through few pages before realizing I had just spend past 20 minutes day dreamining about something else. I also have some sort of auditory issue, if there's bit too much of background noise, I can't understand speech too well... No one can tell me what's causing it..since tests haven't found anything wrong.. I remember as a child having trouble during vocab test, b/c I couldn't hear teh teacher and scoring far below my abilities..

I'm kinda lucky in that even though my major did have lots of material to learn, a lot of it was also 'hands-on', so I could get by with out getting learning support, therapy, meds..ect. I don't really talk about it much to friends, not because I'm ashamed, but I know they can't understand what I go through... they are the type of people who sit through a lecture once and understand and remember everything..while I'll need multiple exposures of the same material...

mm long rant-ish. fin.

[LiMing]

I have a friend who didn't do very well at school, but then got a technical apprenticeship and worked very well as a testing engineer and then went on to installation and training the clients, while studying some technical-related courses part-time at local community college. He didn't do the degree, but achieved an almost degree equivalent technical qualification through that.

He then gave up his job and went to study full time for an MSc in Computer Science, he's now a full time programer. But I read something he'd written and noticed that his spelling is absolutely atrocious. He used to send me cute cards or letters and his bad spelling wasn't consistent, i.e. it wasn't that he didn't know how to spell a particular word, he would spell the same word a variety of ways.

I had a friend at high school who was dyslexic and I immediately recognized this in him. While my high school friend was sent down to the remedial class and given extra assistance, this friend was never diagnosed he just really struggled through high school and just assumed he was dumber than the other kids, which is a great shame, because even though he's incredibly bright, it's had a profound impact on his confidence.