Facing a Learning Disability

My parents watched me blossom both physically and intellectually. Until I was on a heavy dose of medicine, I excelled in all that I did. A learning disability did not occur to my parents.  

I was initially evaluated as a first grader in the regular education program. At the time I was only receiving remediation with the reading specialist and attended chapter I reading (small group reading instruction). I was considered “at risk” academically, but overall I did well like the other kids in the classroom.

As I got older the seizures became more frequent and more severe, it made retaining information difficult. Not only di the seizures have an impact on my learning, but the heavy dose of medications didn’t help much either. I was at a point in life that I could not do my own work independently without teacher support. At this time, cognitive problems started to occur that it caused me to have slow responses.

When I entered the fourth grade, I was given a psychological test to see where I stood overall on grade level. As a result, it was determined that I was qualified for specially designed instruction also known as Special Education.

Although, I was functioning in the average range of cognition I just had a weaker processing speed than my peers. My greatest difficulties at this time were reading comprehension and putting my thoughts together into a written form. This meant that I only got pulled out of the classroom for extra help with language arts, test taking and study skills. All the other subjects I would be in the regular education classroom with my peers.

While I was continually getting tests done for my seizure disorder, MRI findings and results of psychological testing found that the cyst had altered my ability to understanding reading comprehension and complex language processing skills. This area acts as a convergence where a high degree of specificity in perceptual recognition and associative processing is managed by the nervous system.  This would require teachers to identify strategies for organizing assignments, breaking them down into component parts, setting up regular visual and auditory vocabulary review cards, and strategies on how to read through several pages of test.

Elementary school did not seem to be too difficult for me. When it came time to going to middle school my parents did not only have concerns about my reading comprehension and language processing, but concerns about my self-esteem. As a child, I was extremely shy, but adventurous and a hard worker. However, I was starting to realize that I was somewhat different. At this age, people thought it was cool to make fun of others, and as a result, I was an easy target. Also, at this age people realized there were different groups to be apart of and I was not apart of any of those groups.

I had a good sense of self when apart from the family, especially when surrounded by others who were knowledgeable about me and accepted me for my epilepsy. Some of my friends I enjoyed spending time with were the girls on my soccer team and others that had similar learning situations like me. As I look back now, I wonder did the girls on my soccer team accept me because they had to since I was part of that team or did they genuinely like me? That is something I will never know. Sometimes I also wonder if I scared others because of my seizures that occurred.

Since I was shy and felt different from others, having friendships with others was difficult. Did I not have as many friends because of my shyness, or was it simply that they did not want to be seen with someone who could suddenly start climbing and pulling at their clothing. This is again something I will never know. Due to my feelings of being different I felt more comfortable seeking out and receiving help from the adults at school.

Feeling different was hard enough, that I worked hard at being an A student. With the homework that I would receive in middle school, it would take me 3 hours/night just to complete my work for the next day. Also, if retaining information wasn’t as hard for me like my peers I would be lucky if I did not have a seizure that day because if a seizure happened there was a good chance that I did not remember the information that was just taught to me. In order to keep things in my short-term memory, I had to implement many strategies to compensate for it. More accommodations and modifications were needed as I learned harder material. Extra time on test was not enough. Since, remembering material was difficult I was given the ability to use open book test just so I could be successful.

As part of being eligible for learning support, they had to test you every 3 years, and when I was tested in 7^th grade scores had shown that verbal IQ, Performance IQ and Full scale IQ had dropped since previous testing. This was proof that my seizures were beginning to take over my life as I was not recalling information that I was being taught.