Education Today
Early warning signs of learning problems
By James Olsen, Ph.D.

In any school population, some 15 to 20 percent of any class of children will have some form of learning disability. That means in a class of 30 kids, four to six kids will need some kind of long- or short-term help to succeed in school. Traditionally, most schools have not been set up to accommodate this group, with the result that they constitute a significant part of the elementary, high school and college dropout and prison populations. 

These kids are not stupid. Many, many of them are very bright indeed, but they do have learning problems. The earlier these problems are addressed, the better off the students are. The longer the wait, the longer it takes to fix them. Too long a delay can be devastating.

If you are tuned into your child, you can spot the early warning signs of learning problems long before a teacher does. We noticed that our grandchild still holds a book upside down at the age of five, mixes up and has trouble writing her letters, is hyperactive and has difficulty organizing her thoughts. Like many disabled children, she is also very bright, has great interpersonal skills and is highly articulate. If there is early intervention now, she will be able to manage those problems and exploit her natural advantages probably after a year of help. If her parents wait, then there will be a crisis point probably sometime during the third or fourth grade. Assuming she will receive help at that time, it may take two to three years of help to reverse her problems.

It’s not her fault. In a recent course my wife and I took via satellite from USC, the clinician held up a strand of DNA, which is like a multicolored piece of yarn, and pointed to the specific gene that causes the problem. That gene creates behaviors that teachers can easily observe. Some academic symptoms are reversals in reading and writing, poor performance on group tests, difficulty with tasks requiring sequencing, not completing work, working very slowly and often being confused by instructions. The child is also often overactive, easily distractible and may have mixed dominance (sometimes uses the right hand and at other times the left).

No one child will display all of these symptoms but will show enough of them to warrant diagnostic testing. All kids can have two or three of these problems, like number and letter reversal to some extent, but learning-disabled kids will have them in clusters and they will be chronic. Without treatment, many children learn elaborate scams to conceal them and will have a very negative school experience. What do you do when you can’t follow the steps of the teacher’s instructions or when you can’t get your writing or numbers straight on a test?

Someday, probably in a few decades, doctors will simply remove the troublesome gene on the DNA strand and replace it with another. In the meantime, we are stuck with the expensive, time-consuming teaching methodologies we have. We hope our granddaughter receives the help she needs sooner rather than later. In that way, she won’t have to suffer the stress and conflict so many learning-disabled children bring to our door.

The Olsens have worked in the field of education for 95 collective years. They can be contacted at 154-4374 or email sml 154-4374@prodigy.net.mx.