The LD Advantage
Common Learning Differences:
Auditory Processing Disorder - People with auditory processing disorders have a hard time understanding sounds. Their hearing might be perfect but they will only pick up fragments of a word or sentence and have trouble comprehending the words they do hear.
Dyspraxia - Having difficulties with large movements and/or small motor units.
Dyscalculia - A learning difference in mathematics. It involves difficulty in grasping mathematical concepts and calculating numbers.
Sensory Processing Disorder - A neurological disorder that causes difficulties with processing information of one/or more of the five senses. This disorder causes stress and confusion due to the fact that people are processing information differently.
Dyslexia - A condition that affects a person's phonemic awareness, rapid naming, working memory, and ability to decode words. People with dyslexia often have trouble with reading, spelling, writing, speaking, and/or listening.
ADHD - Is short for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. It is classified as a behavior disorder but is responsible for impairing school and social performance. ADHD causes a person to have impulsive and hyperactive behavior which can make it hard for a person to focus, sit still, and concentrate.
How the Government Defines It?
Specific learning disability means a disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or in using language, spoken or written, that may manifest itself in an imperfect ability to listen, think, speak, read, write, spell, or to do mathematical calculations, including conditions such as perceptual disabilities, brain injury, minimal brain dysfunction, dyslexia, and developmental aphasia. Specific learning disability does not include learning problems that are primarily the result of visual, hearing, or motor disabilities, of mental retardation, of emotional disturbance or of environmental, cultural, or economic disadvantage.
Teen Translation:
Having a learning difference means that a person can struggle with reading, speaking, writing, spelling, math, decoding, and/or listening because their brains learn a different way. Having a learning difference doesn't mean we are stupid we just learn differently. - Anonymous
How non LD people think of LD's
We asked the Drew student body what they thought a learning difference was. These were some of the responses we received from non LD teens.
- Learning something different from the conventional way.
- anonymous
- Excuses. Sometimes genuine but I feel that they are often taken advantage of to get unfair advantages over others. Some kids may think they have an LD but in actuality, they just either don't care about school work so they blame it on an LD, they are lazy, or they really think that they have an LD when they actually just don't know how to work hard and focus. - Anonymous
- People who learn a different way from most people. It's not that they have a problem, it's just they have a different way of looking at things. - Anonymous
- Not being able to function normally. - Anonymous
- A factor that makes some people different from others, in both good ways and bad ways. - Anonymous
- Someone who is unable to do things for themselves. -Anonymous
- A person must have an average or above average IQ in order to qualify for a learning disability.