by Eva van Loon
An expert in learning disorders posed a question to me: Faced with kids’ learning strengths or weaknesses, do we parents and educators react as rational or irrational beings?
To me, “a strength” refers to something that has been well learned. “A weakness” refers to something that somehow has not been learned although, by a certain time, we all expect it to have been learned.
Then, irrationally indeed, we usually grab for the medical model and blame the patient or learner or kid for being “sick”, “disabled”, or “deficient” or for “having” a disorder. As in the story of diseases like tuberculosis or AIDS, where poets or gays supposedly had only themselves to blame for their illness, the first chapter of the learning-disability story is all about how the student, or maybe the parents, are culpable.
Is medical diagnosis really a rational response to learning weaknesses?
Medical offices often render diagnoses found in the DSM-IV (the “bible” of psychiatry), but ADHD is not a disease or disorder in the true medical sense. It’s order that never happened. Was never learned.
That brain has no hope of learning it, either, until the personal climate of that learner undergoes a change.
In the term “personal climate” I include what’s going on, chemically speaking, inside the bag of water and gunk and electricity, slung on movable sticks, that describes the Earth creatures we are.
Remember GIGO, one of the first anagrammatic rules of computers? “Garbage In; Garbage Out.” Humans are not somehow magically exempt from that rule. (Recall that we created computers in our image, not the other way around.)
Manage the chemistry. Monitor the stuff that goes into the bag of human flesh through the mouth, the nose, the ears, the eyes, the skin. What you see, hear, feel, smell and taste alters your chemistry. (If you’ve ever fallen in love, you know this!) Read more »
by Deb Calderon
Every week, Marian meets Rita for over an hour. Few would guess these two women know each other, much less that their project is making a difference in both lives.
Marian is an adult learner in Powell River, Rita her volunteer tutor, in the CALL program launched last November (Community Adult Literacy & Learning). They get right down to work in a private office at the Community Resource Centre on Joyce Avenue. Marian wants to read well enough to help her kids with their homework. She’s making great progress.
There’s been a Volunteer Tutoring program at Vancouver Island University for years. Last year the CALL program was initiated to let tutors and learners work out in the community as well. Placing the program in community settings, where more people feel comfortable, would make the program more accessible.
Rita signed up for the Volunteer Adult Literacy Tutor (VALT) training course held at VIU last year. VALT and CALL together train all the volunteers. Some might end up tutoring at VIU; some in the community. (Although VIU and CALL collaborate, CALL is administered by a non-profit society.)
At first, Rita was unsure about her ability to help another adult learn a new skill. After all, she wasn’t a teacher. All she could offer was a love of reading and belief in life-long learning.
“I had some reservations at first, but in taking the course, I found that tutoring isn’t teaching; it’s sharing life experiences and interests in support of another adult learner who wants to overcome a literacy barrier.”
Volunteers are the backbone of tutoring programs. The main requirements are comfort with reading English and a desire to help another adult. Powell River’s tutors are a creative bunch, coming up with games, exercises, activities and field trips customised to their learners. Read more »
by Eva van Loon
The coming Huge Stupid Tax may significantly damp down the fires of independent learning in your community.
Tutors, home-schooling and micro-practices like cognition therapy may well simply fizzle out in the white foam of bureaucracy. Parents and students will have fewer choices in their efforts to cope with learning difficulties.
At present, educational services don’t attract PST. If practitioners are well under $30K a year, they don’t attract GST, either. Nice for students and parents. Makes life a little easier for them and gives the small practitioner or tutor a few more clients, a few more dollars.
One can live, more or less, on under $30K, and for the semi-retired, partly disabled, or otherwise marginalised, that makes life bearable.
After HST comes in, however, educational services have to be “approved” by an educational institution to gain exemption from the tax—both taxes.
What “approved by an educational institution” means, nobody knows. Do tutors need to get a stamp of approval on their foreheads from the local School District in order to avoid becoming tax collectors? Would a letter from an ESL school do the job? Who knows?
One thing’s for sure: institutions will be none too pleased to have the job of approving outside services loaded on them—it’s like being conscripted into a volunteer fire department when you already have a full-time job.
In the case of cutting-edge, scientifically based learning modalities like cognition therapy, which are not readily understood by people outside the field, no doubt getting “approved” would be a monumental task.
Will you pay 12% more for a tutor or cognition therapist? In the case of my main program, that works out to a whopping $600! Isn’t life hard enough? How does the government deserve $600 of your money for the little bit of practice I do? Read more »