Letters from Lisa

Really enjoying Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic by Tom Holland. In a way, it’s very much like the book I just finished (Conquest of the Incas) except in this case, the battles are mostly between fellow countrymen and not between two separate empires. However, the universal bribery, backstabbing (sometimes literally) and mass pilfering of the common good are exactly the same.

And the plundering of Spain by the Romans for its gold receives a fair bit of attention - which is a better demonstration of karma at work than I’ve ever seen in any religious text.

I wish I’d had this book when I was reading Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, since nothing could have seemed more remote to me at the time than the tale of a long distant Republic-turning-Empire. Now, living in the political climate that we do, in the age of burgeoning executive power and the triumph of propagandic cronyism, the subject of the disintegration of the Roman Republic is timely indeed.

But, as the book warns, you can’t draw parallels to modern times without first appreciating the unique circumstances and culture of the Roman people. For that reason alone I recommend the book, since it seeks to analyze the roots of ambition and power-mongering that ultimately consumed the Republic into several destructive civil wars, which left the people eager for a single, capable leader to steer the country on a firm course.

I seem to be on a history kick these days. This author has another book out about the Persian empire, of which I know precious little. Maybe that would be a good one to try out next. Or I might return to Egyptian history, which I delved into for a while and had set aside.

Luckily this is all connected - because I feel nothing happens in the world that doesn’t somehow, at some point in time, relate to everything else. So I think what I am trying to do is to put things together, one tiny piece at a time. Which is great, because I know I’ll have an endless supply of things to learn about.

For Diversity Day we pretended to “tour” to different countries. Yes, my class already did this - and no, no one remembered that when they were planning today’s fete, even though most of our brochures and photos and journals are still up on the bulletin board. Funny how it took us a month to learn about just a sampling of culture and geography, and yet my kids visited three continents in one day today.

And I’m jet lagged.

Sometimes kids say things that are just absurd - and sometimes it crosses over into the truly hysterical. Today in Colombia, for example, the “tour guide” was explaining that she was going to teach us a song that her mother taught to her as a child. “I didn’t think it was a real song at the time, and my mother was lying to me and had just made it up,” she said. “But then I found the song on the Internet. So my mother wasn’t lying after all!”

To which one girl immediately responded, “My mother lies to ME sometimes.”

To which her classmate piped in with, “Oh yeah? Well, Santa Claus lied to me just last year!”

P.S. Just for the record, all “real songs” were made up by people.

10.
9.
8.
7.
6.
5.
4.
3.
2.
1.

OK, I’m stumped. Any ideas?

Enjoying The Conquest of the Incas by John Hemming, a dramatic and enjoyable read that details the invasion of Peru and Ecuador by Spanish conquistadores and the shifting strategies and alliances of both the invaders and the native tribes, who were undergoing a costly and divisive civil war at the time of the European arrival. It’s rare to find a book about this sort of conflict that doesn’t unrealistically debase or glorify people’s actions and motivations, but relies upon unraveling their motivations and situational factors that led them to make the decisions that they did.

Although I must say that the Spanish don’t come out looking particularly rosy, particularly the ones on the ground in South America who unnecessarily take advantage of the natives out of greed and disregard for human life. There are several instances in which even the population back in Spain is appalled at the excesses…. but, in the end, anxious to receive the gold boiled down from the various conquests and lootings and not all that concerned about stamping out a non-Christian lifestyle. (For once they cannot argue as to their own superiority, considering the advanced level of technology and organization that they find in the cities. Many of their accounts record them being so stunned at the achievements that they feel they cannot adequately describe in words how amazing it is.)

Ironically it is the king who is the most disturbed about the treatment of the Inca nobles, since he clearly sees the implication of allowing any “divinely chosen” monarch to be freely manhandled and abused by lowly commoners. On the other hand, he is depending on the money from these conquests to fuel his empire’s further expansion, and is not anxious to side against the men who are returning home rich and powerful with finely honed fighting abilities. So even divine power turns out to be limited.

It’s futile now to wonder if the Incas would have been able to pull their empire together in a united front if they had known the true designs of the Spanish from the beginning. Several different Inca rulers, in an attempt to grab the throne of the quickly crumbling empire and restore it to its former glory, enter into “strategic” alliances with the Spaniards, only to eventually realize that their allies cannot be trusted. At one point, two Spanish groups are pitted against one another for possession of the Inca capital (Cuzco, where I’ll be this summer) and the puppet Inca leader flip-flops in his alliance when it becomes clear that the Spaniards he’s aligned himself with are about to lose. He has an opportunity to kill the rest of the Spanish leadership, wiping out almost a fourth of all the Spanish soldiers in the country, but fails to act on it. Perhaps it really was a lost cause, once the weight of the Spanish empire began to bear down upon the New World. But who knows, really.

This is all whetting my appetite that much more to go see some of these places in person. It’s a pity I won’t be able to spend more time in Peru than just a few weeks. On the other hand, I’ll be participating on an archaeological dig - not of Inca ruins, but of a pre-Incan civilization - so I will be getting a certain perspective and intimacy with this field.

I’m going to go sit in the bathtub and continue the book.

Feeling a bit scattered, so here you go - a nice scattered post reflecting the overall jumbledness of my existence as of late.

Big packet from Earthwatch came in the mail today - the “expedition briefing” for this summer’s volunteer adventures in Peru. Also today - settled the last details of my hotels. I now have a place to sleep during each night of the trip. Bodes well, doesn’t it?

Today was a day off from running. Time to hone the running soundtrack. The best songs to run along with are early Beatles. Why? Watch A Hard Day’s Night - what are they doing during about 85% of the film? Running! So, A Hard Day’s Night = natural running soundtrack. Other top choices: the Lord of the Rings soundtrack (so you can pretend you’re being chased by orcs), and Simon and Garfunkel in concert (or just Simon). Next time I redo my playlist, I’m going to include some Rolling Stones too.

Bad running choice: Bob Dylan. Only because if you start listening to the lyrics, you’ll get so engrossed and confused that you’ll end up slowing down or tripping over something.

Speaking of lyrics: My class was assigned to sing “My Favorite Things” for the school’s spring concert. Since they were having trouble with the lyrics, I asked them to do an illustration for each favorite thing. What a mess! “Lisa, what’s a kettle?” “What’s a strudel?” “What’s schnitzel?” (How do you explain schnitzel, anyway?) In the end, we ended up rewriting the entire song to reflect all of OUR favorite things. So what started out as a sweet little homage to life’s delicate pleasures is now a glorification of computer games and sports. (Well… we did get some animals and books in there, too.) I’ll have to post the new lyrics - they’re actually pretty funny.

Oh, and the musical takes place one month from yesterday.

!!!

We’ll be ready. Really.

No, really.

Sigh.

OK, time to collect my scattered wits and move on with the evening…

Introducing my newest work-in-progress…

On the road to the New York City marathon…

Officially titled, “Would it help if we ran away more?” for you five readers out there who will get the Monty Python reference.

In a many dark hour
I’ve been thinkin’ about this
That Jesus Christ
Was betrayed by a kiss
But I can’t think for you
You’ll have to decide
Whether Judas Iscariot
Had God on his side.

With God On Our Side - Bob Dylan

The Gospel of Judas seems to think so, anyway.

Forget the Da Vinci Code. This is the real mystery.

Today I finally had enough of the disorganization and clutter in my room. First I attacked the ever-growing pile of papers on my bedroom floor, and then in a fit of absolute madness, I decided to arrange my bookshelves. Which involved pulling out EVERYTHING I had, and piling it up according to category.

This doesn’t look organized, but it actually is.

The very tall pile consists of my “science books” - which are actually a mishmash of neuroscience, linguistics, environmental science, and genetics. Also viewable is the China pile (find the book in red) and one part of the “finished journals and blank books” pile. Which ended up being several large piles. See the next photo for more:

OK, this is more of a “haphazardly stacked danger zone” than a pile. I just thought I’d show you the full picture of what I was faced with, so you’d appreciate my fortitude. Oh, and the fact that I kept the clumsiness in check long enough not to step on or trip over anything on the floor. And the carpet’s blue. Very important to remember that.

If you’re interested in how it all ended up, click away - otherwise feel free to skip my organizational ramblings.
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Many world religions believe that souls cycle through endless lifetimes (at least until achieving enlightenment/perfection) and I am beginning to wonder if this is at least partly wishful thinking. I’m not suggesting that I would necessarily want to come back as, say, a tube worm (though I do slightly envy anything that can successfully live on a hydrothermal vent) but I can certainly think of things that I would do if I had a few more lifetimes on Earth as a human being.

In past centuries, someone with as many scattered and diverse interests as myself might have been called an amateur scientist or a Renaissance woman. (I’m slightly flattering myself here, but that does have a better ring to it than “dilletante”.) When there was less known about each subject, and more time required for communication and investigation of ideas, there were actually people who knew “everything” that there was to know. There, of course, were a significant number of people who didn’t have access to much information at all, and lots of folks who wanted to suppress any information that disagreed with their religious or political beliefs (in other words, not much different than the world today) but there were a significant number of people doing experiments and writing down ideas who weren’t “professionals” of any kind - at least not until AFTER they had done a lot of their significant exploration. Here’s one amusing tidbit about Charles Darwin :

Darwin had been invited to be a naturalist aboard H.M.S. Beagle on its two year survey of South America. The ship was to set sail on 25 September. He immediately accepted the offer, but his father and sisters were totally against the idea. They saw it as a continuation of Darwin’s long line of idle pursuits. Worst of all, such a journey would get in the way of Darwin going into the clergy. However, his father’s refusal was not absolute, telling Darwin that if he could find a man with common sense who thought it was a good idea then he would allow him to go.

(emphasis mine)

The world has always been full of people like Darwin’s father and sisters, who are always asking, “You’re studying _______? What are you going to DO with that?” (I always hated that conversation. How are you supposed to answer such an obviously disdainful question? “What am I going to DO with it? I’m going to eat it for dinner with some fava beans and a nice chianti!”) Where does this attitude come from, that you have to turn everything you do into some kind of career and that you should only study exactly what you need for the particular job you are going to have in that moment? But it’s certainly common. You try telling people that Einstein worked in the Swiss Patent Office and that T.S. Eliot was a bank clerk, and they still don’t get it - to them, unless you’re going to end up successful and famous, you still shouldn’t bother. That attitude is just so pervasive.

The difference between “back then” and today, though, is that today it’s so much harder to get into anything as a beginner. Darwin would have been competing with young Westinghouse winners with internships and long resumes, whose parents sent them to naturalist lessons every Tuesday afterschool and naturalist camp over the summer. And while people jump around in careers more than is generally realized, there still is a certain level of expertise that you must reach in order to truly shine in a field - and whenever you start, you have to go through the stages, which takes time. Most fields have gotten so complex, and so stratified, that there isn’t room to tool around and try out different pursuits. And I think educated people have gotten much more anxious about their children’s futures, and so are more likely to encourage kids to specialize, to stave off the otherwise inevitable financial ruin and despair. Even more, we’re very enamored of work and seeing results. If you’re going to DO anything, then you’ve got to go all the way! Otherwise it just isn’t worth the effort!

Which is why I need five lifetimes. I love so many things and want to be good at them, but I sense when I’m bordering the threshold of expertise and how much work I would need to put in to get really proficient. And I can’t do it. Not without sacrificing other things.

As an example, let’s look at my adventures in flute playing. I first learned how to play the flute the summer before I started high school. I’d decided to join the band but, in order to do that, you kind of need to play an instrument of some kind. I had the piano and the violin (barely), but neither one would help me in concert band. So I chose the flute. And what a learning curve that was. At least when you hit a piano key, a decent sound comes out, even if it’s not exactly right. On the flute, you can blow across it until you’re turning colors, and you might get nothing but an ill-tempered squawk for your troubles. It took me days to get a decent basic sound, and many months before I was playing any actual music. Eventually I did catch on, and by the time I was a senior in high school, I was first chair and came thisclose to making All-County Band.

And considering all that, I would have felt that I was pretty good - except there was this girl named Adi. Adi had one foot in high school with us, and the rest of her body over at Juilliard where she was already studying to become a professional flutist. She was amazing, of course, and so far ahead of any normal high school student in technique that I had absolutely no business comparing myself to her. She knew that the flute was going to be her profession and her life, and was perfectly happy to spend all of her time working toward that goal. The reason I was first chair instead of her was that she didn’t need it. Whereas that was about as good as I was going to ever get.

Now considering the amount of progress I’d made in a short time, it’s reasonable to think that I could have kept going and gotten pretty proficient. Maybe not Juilliard material, but good enough to perform with more advanced groups or even solo flute material with an accompanist. Instead, I went off to college and started to branch out. Today my flute technique is pretty rusty, as is the flute that I used to play.

And that’s fine. I moved on to other interests, and can always come back to that if I want to pursue it again. That is what I did with the piano. I gave it up for years until my senior year of college, when I decided I wanted to take lessons and participate in recitals again. Sometimes I listen to piano recordings and get insanely jealous of how good these people are - not even the classical professionals, but the jazz musicians and rock singers - and then I remind myself that I am not choosing to spend years really getting good at the piano because, again, I want to do other things.

In order to maintain my sanity, I’ve had to learn to be happy with being a perennial “advanced beginner”. I can do a lot of things just a little bit. I always laugh when I see advice about practicing skills for “10 minutes every day”. It’s well intentioned and based on sound learning principles (up to a point) but totally unrealistic once you start adding too many different things to practice. Just imagine how regimented and fragmented your day would get if you really followed that advice solidly. This is why I always have a lot of stuff on my “back burners”. I can really do 2-3 things well at a time, and then everything else gets fuzzy and unfocused if I try to add too much else to it.

So that is why I need five lifetimes - to squeeze in all the early childhood exploration that would lead to early proficiency in career #1, to study abroad everywhere I want to, to devote the kind of time to a career to get really strong in it without having to worry about sacrificing an opportunity to have a family or develop a skill somewhere else. But instead I’ll just have to do some juggling with the one life I have in order to get everything in.

But the article’s mine. Here’s a little something about volunteering in Australia, for the Connecting: Solo Travel Network website.

My first teaching job ever, straight out of college, was at a non-profit behavior-based program for children with severe autism. In college psychology classes, they “cover” autism in the textbook sense - a laundry list of DSM symptoms, historical background on the scientists who first noted it and their sometimes wildly inaccurate conclusions, and a few sentences about autistics and their treatment today - but when I started working with actual autistic people, I had NO idea what to expect. No one tells you what those scientific terms actually mean when you’re faced with a kid in front of you. Hence you have the inevitable first-day-of-teaching confusion. Why is that kid staring off into space and laughing for no reason? If he isn’t supposed to be interested in people, why is he playing with my hair and hugging me? Is it that he doesn’t know his name, or is he just not aware that he’s supposed to walk over to me when I call it? Or does he just not care, since he doesn’t know me and doesn’t see any reason why he should?

The method used at my first job was Applied Behavior Analysis, or ABA. ABA, in the autism world, is both revered and hated, depending upon whose perspective you’re hearing. It’s quite technical, and I’m sure other people can explain the principles and theories much better than I can. All I can talk about are my own experiences with it. Basically, ABA is a highly structured method of training a person to listen to a direction or enter a situation and perform the response you want, in exchange for a desired outcome. You start with teaching the person how to look at you, how to imitate movements, how to respond to simple directions, and how to ask for things (either by words, picture symbols, sign language, computer, or whatever you think is going to work for that person.) I don’t mean to belittle the method or the people using it when I say that it’s more than a little bit like training your puppy. You say “sit!”, the puppy sits, and then you give it a treat. Some of the objections to ABA are centered around this very similarity - as in, “You are treating these kids like animals!” (an objection I’ll come back to later). Eventually, the hope is to fade out the use of reinforcers, first by substituting tokens that can be redeemed at a later time, and then by moving that task out of direct instruction, when you feel it’s sufficiently mastered. I had kids who liked to ask for games, time on the trampoline, and even another task on the list of things to do. THAT was an awesome day in my teaching career, the first time a student asked me to teach her something else as her reward!

The “analysis” part of ABA involves figuring out all the different little steps and conditions that must be taught in order to end up with the right behavior in the right situation - for example, the sequence of steps you have to follow when you’re going to the bathroom. Seriously. Let’s say you have to go to the bathroom. First you have to realize the physical need, then you have to get down the hallway or to wherever the right room is (this was one of the major stumbling blocks for a lot of kids that I worked with back then), find an empty stall or room, open the door, get to the toilet, unbuckle your pants (another difficult step, especially if the pants didn’t have the same closure each time), then pull the pants down and sufficiently out of the way, pull down the underwear, get your body in the right position, release the appropriate muscles, get an appropriate amount of toilet paper, clean yourself sufficiently, pull and fasten everything back up, flush the toilet, get out of the stall, and then go wash your hands. I’m not going to go through the 10 steps that it takes to successfully wash your hands, since I think we’ve all got the idea and it’s time to get this post out of the bathroom, before I’m analyzed by Freudians. The important point is that a lot of what we do is actually unbelievably complicated, and that it’s often easy to spot where the trouble spots are if you know what to look for. For example, it’d be easy enough to wear elastic band pants, if that is going to make the difference between being able to go to the bathroom or having to wear a diaper. Unfortunately, a big problem for a lot of kids with developmental issues is doing a lot of steps in sequence, which could mean that a kid tries to flush the toilet before actually using it or remembers to pull down his underwear after it’s already too late. There really is an incredible amount of monitoring, remembering, and navigating that people do all the time without even realizing it. After you’ve worked with task analysis for a while, you wonder how people ever learn to do anything.

The other part of “analysis” is trying to eliminate behaviors that are not wanted, which can be obvious (like head banging) or just not socially acceptable (like hand flapping). You have to figure out what the behavior’s for, when it happens, what triggers it, what the person can do instead that isn’t going to hurt them or make people stare obnoxiously, and then what to actually do to get the person to stop doing the thing he shouldn’t do and start doing the thing you want him to do instead. Again, people begin to bristle at the thought of trying to shape someone’s behavior - doesn’t it all sound very 1984? - but then again, no one’s had much success in just saying to someone who is hitting his head on the floor or scratching himself until he bleeds, “You know, you should really stop that, it’s hurting your body.” A less violent case was when one of my little ones started saying D—. And I don’t mean occasionally, I mean 78 times in 3 hours (yes, I counted). That’s going to get annoying to even the most tolerant person. Plus he isn’t processing much of anything or practicing any other language if he’s constantly cursing. And, if he does that out on the street, people aren’t going to think he’s expressing himself and how wonderful it is that we live in a country with such advanced human rights that everyone has the right to say whatever they want. (I’m just glad he wasn’t saying the F word - though that would make my point even more obvious.)

So based on the experiences I had with my students, I felt that there was a place for the behavioral methods. But at the time I entered the autism program, I was also just starting graduate school. For reasons I don’t fully understand to this day, I ended up at the most progressive and touchy-feely graduate institution you can imagine, where people were very uncomfortable with the idea of ever “making” a child do something he really didn’t want to do. It was all about politics and human rights and how to avoid oppressing kids inadvertently, not in the least by imposing our own social and cultural values. This school saw kids as geniuses whom we had to try to avoid messing up, if possible. We’d sit in class and discuss how if you fill a room with blocks and dolls and fun experiences to try, kids would figure out what they wanted to explore and then go do it, drawing all kinds of nifty conclusions from it in ways that we adults were just too rigid and fuzzy to imagine. Then I’d raise my hand and say, “Yeah, um, I have this kid in my class who sits in the corner and flicks his fingers in front of his eyes for hours on end unless someone makes him stop,” and my classmates just couldn’t believe it. They’d say, “What if you give him a ball to play with?” as if the reason he’s choosing to sit there and flick his fingers is that he doesn’t have any toys nearby. That would certainly fit in neatly with the politics of deprivation, but is not really all that applicable to people with autism. I had kids who liked toys, kids who were afraid of them (especially toys they’d never seen before) and kids who really would rather be doing what they were doing before they were interrupted.

That time in my career was really Extreme Teacher Training. While I was being trained at work to follow rigid applied behavior analysis procedures, I was simultaneously swimming in an ideological sea of permissiveness and desires to know the “whole child” and let children express themselves. As a result, both approaches seem equally reasonable to me in their useful forms, and equally batty and narrow-minded when taken to illogical extremes. And I began to feel a bit like a split personality as I was planning and setting up the room and interacting with the kids.

Recently I was cleaning out some old files and came across a photo from my days in the ABA program. (I can’t post it here because you can clearly see the kids’ faces.) It shows a little wood-and-plastic stovetop and plastic tea party dishes scattered on top of it, and three little kids crouching in front of it. Two of them are looking at the third, who seems to be trying to cook something. They are smiling, but seem intent and serious. This photo represents the moment that I stepped out into the fuzzy realm of “ABA light”, as my assistants began to call it, and rearranged the room to encourage these three kids to spend as much time interacting naturally as they could. I took away their individual cubicles, turned one into the kitchen/subway station (harnessing the boys’ obsession with subways) and instituted a morning mealtime when they first came in so that they could practice eating together. (The other three kids, who tended to bolt from the table and needed a lot of help eating with utensils, skipped group breakfast and went right into their 1:1 sessions.) Then we would go for bike rides in the hallway, have pretend sessions where I’d try to teach them how to interact, and take walks in the neighborhood so that they could practice interacting with cashiers and pedestrians and learning how to cross the street. I didn’t veer too far to the other extreme - my room was not open-ended, for kids to “explore” whatever they wanted, because I saw that they were very limited in their interests and attentions and that it was part of my job to get them to perceive a wider range. I also didn’t allow them to do any behaviors that I thought were harmful or would attract stigmatization in public.

I was definitely conflicted about what I was doing in the classroom. I wasn’t doing either approach “right”. I was too loose and unstructured for ABA - I didn’t have a 37-step checklist that I could mark whenever the kids were engaged in a play activity — while I was totally directing their experience and telling them what to do, which my progressive training was telling me was impeding their natural exploration process. And while the three higher functioning students were all doing great, the other three kids in the class were still really struggling. One was occasionally participating in our group games and starting to babble a bit and becoming toilet trained, but still wasn’t responding to his name or performing simple requests. And the other two were making bits of progress and then seeming to regress. So I left that job feeling like I wasn’t sure how much good my approach was doing.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was moving into what is now known as Pivotal Response Training, which incorporates direct teaching into more natural social situations and emphasizes attending to multiple cues and flexible responses. I wish I had known about that approach when I was directly in the field. It would have made me trust my instincts much more and allowed me another way to evaluate what I was doing.

So the lesson I take away from all this is that it’s up to you to select what wisdom you think is actually wise, and use it. I borrowed from everything I was exposed to, and tried not to feel guilty that I wasn’t implementing the programs “as they should be”. Now I know better.

I revamped my message board so that members of this summer’s Earthwatch expedition can post messages:

Bulletin Board

Come say hello! Or, if you’re not going to be in Peru with us, come read and be jealous… (-:

It’s that time of year again… everyone is asking me what I am doing this summer. When I was a kid, I dreaded this time. I went to camp, but didn’t like it much. And I didn’t like it for reasons that were too embarrassing to explain to well-meaning neighbors.

“Oh, you’re not going back to camp? Why not?”
“Well, everyone in my bunk ganged up on me last summer and I used to spend all my time in the nurse’s office or hiding in the bunk while everyone else was at activities.”

No, dear. What you say is, “I’d really rather go to South America instead.”

Which is exactly what I’m doing this summer. I’ve accepted the fact that I am going to have to work pretty hard to top myself after last year’s monthlong Australia extravaganza, so this year I’ve decided to do six weeks with the Earthwatch portion crammed into the middle.

It goes a-little-something like this:

Costa Rica
July 3rd Fly from the US into San Jose
July 4-7 Turtle nesting reserve
July 8-10 Rainforest
July 11-13 Sightseeing and travel from Costa Rica to…

Peru
July 13-15 Acclimatize
July 15-29 Earthwatch expedition excavating a Pre-Inca archaeological site
July 29 Travel from Peru to…

Ecuador!
(yes, it keeps going!)
July 30-31 Sightseeing and travel to the Galapagos Islands
Aug 1-6 Galapagos Islands (!!!)
Aug 7-8 Return to mainland and travel to rainforest
Aug 9-12 Rainforest
Aug 13 Indigenous market/return to capital city
Aug 14 Fly home

Yeah, it’s busy, it’s full of flights and transfers and traveling days, and I’m absolutely thrilled with it all. So, go on. Ask me what I’m doing this summer. I’m going to make up for all the years that I didn’t have a good answer!

If you’re wondering why I’m frustrated, check out what happened when I wrote a review on Amazon.com about a book dealing with a family’s experiences with a learning disability.

The book is A Special Education by Dana Buchman - here is an interview with the author if you’d like to learn more about the particulars of the book.

I’ve read a lot of books by parents who’ve dealt with the impact of developmental differences in their children. A few very good ones are Raising Blaze, Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism and The Boy Who Loved Windows, among many others that I’ve come across through my years in the special education field. I didn’t write the review because this was the best or most comprehensive book about living with a learning disabled child that I’ve ever seen. (It wasn’t.) What moved me to write the review was the ignorance of other reviewers who posted comments insinuating that “learning disability” is just a more politically correct name for “mentally retarded”.

There is, as everyone working with children knows, a fine line to walk when using diagnostic labels to describe a child’s functioning. An accurate, thorough evaluation will often turn up a set of characteristics that more or less fits into an existing diagnostic category, such as “autistic” or “ADHD” or “learning disabled”. These categories give us a certain amount of information about a child, though they are only useful up to a point. After that, they cease to provide any new insight and may provide incorrect assumptions that need to be overcome.

For example, let’s say a new child walks into my classroom tomorrow. The file says that the child has ADHD. This tells me a few things: that I will need to monitor this child in my class to ensure that s/he is with the group particularly during transitions, that I should not take it as defiance or bad manners if the child seems distracted or does something impulsive, and that the child’s performance may be inconsistent from day to day or from class to class. This is not everything I need to know about teaching this child, or everything I will know about the child after spending some time observing and interacting in the classroom. It’s just a place to start.

But it’s still important to know what these labels mean, and how to use them. “Mentally retarded” is not used much anymore - the current terms are “cognitively impaired” and “developmentally disabled” - but when you encounter these labels, they indicate that a child’s capacity to process, retain, and use information is significantly reduced, according to the current performance on assessment tasks. I have worked with some children who were not testable at all, and when this occurs, it’s very difficult to come up with an estimate of the child’s intelligence. But let’s take an example - a child I worked with during my first year of teaching, who was four years old and demonstrating the developmental skills of an 18-month old. He probably had some significant cognitive impairment that prevented him from achieving the same developmental milestones as his classmates. I say probably because it’s very hard to draw conclusions from the limited testing you can do with a child at that developmental level. But based on all the available information we had about that child, he seemed to have a significant cognitive impairment.

Classifying a person’s disability as a cognitive impairment means that when that person is functioning at full capacity, with accommodations and available resources appropriately engaged, that person’s achievement will still be limited to some extent. Not limited equally in all areas, and perhaps not limited at all in the areas of that person’s unique gifts, but there would be some significant limitations. I would expect, in the example above of my former student, that that child would probably always need some support in order to function in the community. This is not such a terrible thing, by the way. That little boy was happy and healthy and a loving member of his family and classroom, and hopefully he continues to be so today. I haven’t seen him in many years.

But — here is the problem I had with reading those reviews. A person who has a learning disability is not like that boy in my class from years back. “Learning disability”, according to the law, means that despite adequate intelligence and opportunity, there is some specific impairment that prevents a person from achieving what s/he would otherwise be capable of achieving. This means that, with appropriate remediation and accommodation, a person with learning disabilities can achieve without significant limitations. The disability has nothing to do with general intelligence. I’ve worked with many kids who even tested in the gifted range as far as IQ goes (for whatever that is worth - in today’s test obsessed society, apparently quite a lot) but whose academic skills were not indicative of that intelligence because of specific learning problems. Until they received the appropriate education, of course.

That is what I tried to explain when I posted my review. And a day or so later, when I looked at the page again, someone else had posted a review titled “Reviewer Lisa M. Fischler doesn’t know what she’s talking about”, insisting that in her state, any child not achieving the same milestones as her peers is considered mentally retarded.

Honestly - and I know random people’s opinions on the internet shouldn’t bother me - I was angry. Mainly because this person, and the people who voted her review as “helpful”, seem to want to believe that there is no such thing as a learning disability - that kids are either smart or stupid, and that anyone who isn’t achieving in a regular classroom must be mentally retarded. I don’t know why they would want to insist upon that. Would it threaten their sense of security so much to believe that people could be smart and talented, but still need help?

This goes back to the sense of superiority and judgment that I was talking about in my previous post. Maybe it makes people feel better when they can look at someone else (or someone else’s child) and pity them for being stupid. Or maybe it triggers their sense of resentment when someone asks for an accommodation - because normally functioning people aren’t supposed to need those. You hear this kind of nastiness all the time when it comes to the SATs and other standardized tests. People think it will ruin everything if a child is allowed to take the test untimed. Let me tell you, if they don’t know the information, no amount of time is going to help them. (I speak from experience - we have had to administer reading and math standardized tests recently.) It’d be like me sitting for the New York Bar Exam. I didn’t study law, so no amount of extra time is going to help me pass. But for a child who actually does know the information and just needs a chance to prove it, the accommodation works.

It’s a slippery slope. If you accept that some people have severe impairments, through no fault of their own, then suddenly you have to admit to the possibility that some people might have milder impairments. If you admit that mild impairments exist, you might have to accept that everyone has varying abilities, and that a completely typical child might struggle or need help to achieve at times, despite everyone’s best efforts and through no moral failure or deficit in parenting. And that maybe a good smack on the bottom or another 14 hours of therapy a week won’t solve all a child’s problems.

And if you admit to that, you might have to admit that all this anxiety and hand waving about whose child is achieving more, or whether So-and-So is learning exactly the same thing as his classmates across the country, is overblown. Then - oh no! - you might have to accept that it’s okay when people take longer to find a field that they excel in, or that not everyone will hop on the professional or college track, or that maybe what we define as success in our society is narrow and a bit deluded.

You might have to start treating everyone as an individual.

You might catch yourself understanding things from other people’s point of view.

You might wake up and realize that we are all in this together, and that it benefits no one to shove some people off to the side as unworthy of dignity.

You might realize that, with one illness or accident or through simple aging, you may be in a position to need significant or even total assistance to function in your everyday life. And how will you describe yourself then? What label will be used for you?

And wouldn’t you want people to try and see you as you really are?