Learning Simulations

1.  What did you experience and how did you feel as you tried the simulations? What insights did the simulations give you into the experiences of students with learning disabilities in that particular area (e.g. attention, reading, writing, or mathematics)?

     I found getting through the simulations rather difficult and was rather amused how accurately they were able to emulate the actual disabilities. PBS has done an excellent job creating the same sense of frustration felt by students affected by learning problems -- at least for me. Having worked with kids with learning disabilities while student teaching and substitute teaching, I can understand why many of them -- without proper support -- fail to perform very well and, more often than not, opt out of participation in class and school in general. Their condition hardly improves as they go further into their academic careers.
    As a kid, if I were affected by such problems, I would do the same as most of them. It was incredibly difficult to hear the teacher give instructions in the auditory activity for attention disabilities, and its certainly even more frustrating when the activity is confusing and uninteresting. It's not a far leap from there to asking oneself 'What's the point of all this? I can't even understand anyways.'  I was close enough to doing it myself in the simulation. Reading, writing, and mathematics were very much the same thing. I can easily see a child with a reading disability being humiliated in front of the class because is unable to recall what he just spent a half-hour reading or because he got every single question on his math test wrong (because he spent too much time trying to figure out the sequence of the multi-step problems -- not that he would tell that to anyone else in class, because it would be embarrassing as well). To me, another aspect of learning disabilities that the simulations and video clips highlighted was not only the incredible difficulty of these students to perform normally, but the social effects as well.

2. What implications for teaching do the simulations have?
    Teachers of students with learning disabilities, more than anything else, must be patient with their LD students and extend to them the extra time, more attention, and adjustments to teaching which they need (this, of course, varies by student and disability). Rather than scolding students for constantly performing poorly, teachers should see inadequate performance as a sign of a potential problem. All students are not equal, and that is always something important for all teachers to keep in mind. It is our job as educators to facilitate learning no matter what -- and if that means going the extra mile for students with learning disabilities, it is something which must be done.

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