Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Post-Reading: Race, Education, and Disability Week 8


I think diagnosing students, especially younger children, with a disability is really tricky. There can be a lot of misdiagnosing disabilities because it doesn't depend on a single factor. While we are young, we are growing everyday and are constantly changing. When we diagnose things such as learning disabilities we usually do it at an early stage in their lives. A teacher notices that one of their students isn't processing information as fast or even at all like the other students in her class so he/she assumes that it is because of a learning disability. It is possible that the child just learns better when taught in a different way or environment. Teachers should think more about how they can help the child adjust better than passing the student on to someone else right away. It is unfair to the child to be penalized for something that could have been addressed in a way where both the teacher and student were satisfied. Another way we can misdiagnose disabilities such as a language disability does not know enough about the student. I think background information is key for situations like these. I think this ties back to "whiteness" being normal. People always just assume that if you are in America then you automatically speak English with no problem when really language in America is very diverse because their are so many people here from different backgrounds. A child may have been born in America, but that doesn't mean their parents taught them English from the start. The parents could have decided to teach them the language from their culture first before teaching them English. There is also the possibility that the parents do not know English leaving the child to have to learn on their own. In most situations, they will learn by listening to English speaking people and don't really learn how to write it. This can affect the child's ability to write. Most of the time teachers will not look at the child's background to understand why they have trouble writing in class and will often just classify it as a learning disability. Gender can also play a role in diagnosing learning disabilities. Most of the time we stereotype males as being the ones who cause trouble and aren't able to sit still when really females can be just as rowdy as males. This means that it is common that teachers will often overlook girls who actually have learning disabilities and most of the time pin a learning disability on a boy. 
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