Welcome to the World of Carolyn Lampman

L.D. From the Inside Out: A Survival Guide For Parents

L.D. From the Inside Out:
A Survival Guide For Parents
by Carolyn Lampman Brubaker
(Forward)

“It’s difficult to predict this early, but I’m afraid he’s going to have trouble in school.” The Kindergarten teacher’s words played over and over in my head as I walked out the door after parent teacher conferences. I could feel hot tears pressing against my eyelids; tears I knew were going to spill over any minute and embarrass me. The teacher had been talking about my youngest son, our final hope for a normal child. Fifteen minutes before I’d heard almost exactly the same thing, in stronger words from my daughter’s second grade teacher.

It wasn’t like I’d never heard it before. School personnel had been saying it about my two older sons for eight years. Suddenly the years stretched before me with unbearable heart-ache as I realized I had another thirteen years of negative conferences ahead of me, in all twenty-one years in which I would never hear a positive word about any of my children.

I know many of you reading this book have similar stories. I was lucky. After nineteen years of teaching children with learning disabilities, I knew my own would be all right. I’ve met adults with learning disabilities in all walks of life including doctors, lawyers, artists, writers, truck drivers, actors, mechanics, and most recently a dyslexic literary agent. Some of my former students have gone on to become business owners, store managers, clerks, secretaries, and even special ed teachers.

On a more personal level, I was born with several learning disabilities of my own. But it doesn’t stop there. My husband, our four children, all three of my brothers and an assortment of nieces and nephews on both sides also have learning disabilities. We even have an obese goldfish that swims upside down. In our house L.D. is normal. Because we are aware of it, we have learned how to cope with it.

Yet, even with all that background and the deep down conviction that my children would eventually become productive adults, my feelings at the end of that parent-teacher conference could only be described as broken-hearted. How much worse for a parent without my experience. The utter hopelessness must be nearly overwhelming.

Thus the idea for this book was born. It is exactly what the title implies, a survival guide. But it is more than that. I hope to change the way you think about learning disabilities, to help you see your child as the unique and intelligent being that they are.

It’s not necessary to read this book cover to cover. Use it as handbook to guide you in helping your child learn to cope in an unsympathetic world. Use it to reassure yourself that learning disabilities are not fatal. Most importantly, use it to give yourself back the hope of a bright future for your child.

With tender loving care,
All flowers will bloom,
Each with their own beauty.
Marge Clark (parent)

Chapter 1
Learning Disabilities: The Hidden Gift

In my opinion, the term Learning Disabled is a misnomer. It implies that people with L.D. are unable to learn. Nothing could be further from the truth. By definition, someone with L.D. has average or above intelligence. In other words they’re smart! So why do they have trouble in school? Quite simply, they learn differently. Of course, that also means they’re divergent thinkers, and the world sees that as a positive. It’s the reason so many L.D. people are creative, and the reason I refer to L.D. as the hidden gift.

Several years ago my husband attended a meeting for parents of kids with disabilities. The speaker, an ‘expert’ on learning disabilities, described the L.D. child as a battery with one dead cell. My husband took instant exception. “No, no,” he said, “you have it all wrong. An L.D. child is like a high performance race car that you don’t have tuned just right. Once you find the right combination it will take off and beat all the rest.” Truer words were never spoken.

I recently visited an Internet web site for L.D. teenagers. While there, I discovered a list of eighty-five famous people the media has identified as L.D. at one time or another. It is an amazing list of world leaders, inventors, entrepreneurs, athletes, actors, actresses, artists, musicians, generals, comedians, race car drivers, and authors. Personally, I believe the people on that list may well have accomplished their greatness because of their learning disabilities, not in spite of them.

Albert Einstein, one of those on the list, said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” He might well have been talking about L.D. Knowledge is important, of course. It’s what man has learned over thousands of years, and almost entirely what we teach in schools. However, all the knowledge in the world can’t create anything new. For that you need imagination and divergent thinking, qualities people with learning disabilities tend to have in abundance. That’s why I think L.D. should stand for learns differently not learning disabled.

Most L.D. kids walk to the beat of a different drum. Some, like my youngest son Paul, walk to the beat of a different orchestra. Paul is the type of child who gets a building set for Christmas, throws away the directions because he can’t read them, then proceeds to build a far more complex and imaginative model on his own. As a parent, it is vital that you realize how important your L.D. child’s unique perspective of the world is. You may not understand it, but you will likely be called upon to nurture and protect that creativity from those who think different is somehow bad.

Interestingly enough, if you compare the adult lives of people who were identified either as L.D. or gifted in school you may discover a strange paradox. As a group, the L.D. population tends to be far more productive and successful in their adult lives than the gifted group.

How could such a thing be true? At first it may seem impossible, but actually the explanation is simple. Our public schools, unfortunately, do not challenge our gifted children. Since everything comes easily to them, they don’t know how to handle a challenge and tend to back away from something they can’t immediately conquer. L.D. kids, on the other hand, are challenged every day of their lives. When they run into something new or unusual, they attack it with the same dogged determination that they approach everything else in their lives. Add to that the ability to think differently than the rest of the world, and you have a recipe for success.

No one would dare suggest George Washington, Michelangelo, Charles Darwin, Winston Churchill, Mark Twain, or Napoleon were handicapped. They obviously weren’t, and yet each of them appears on the list of famous people with learning disabilities. As an L.D. adult, it has been my personal experience that a learning disability is more of an inconvenience than a handicap. Only when you say, “I can’t because I’m L.D.” does it become a handicap.

When I gave this particular bit of wisdom to some of my students last year, a third grader immediately challenged me. “But, Mrs. Bru,” she said, “You always say you can’t draw or do sports.”

“That’s right,” I agreed, “But maybe if I put my mind to it and really, really tried I could. After all, it took me until the end of third grade to learn to read, but I finally managed to figure it out. Reading was much harder for me than drawing or sports, but I wanted to learn to read more than anything. Drawing and sports are things I really don’t care much about so I never bothered to learn how. The only thing stopping me from drawing pictures or playing baseball is me.”

Though my third graders were quite surprised that a teacher actually had trouble learning to read, I am by no means unique. Researchers followed a group of L.D. youngsters all the way through school and into adulthood. In almost every case, the adults had managed to overcome their disability in one way or another. To anyone with experience in L.D., this doesn’t come as much of a surprise. The amazing thing is that in over 90% of the cases the very thing that had been their disability as a child was now either their job or their hobby! Why? Because they’d worked so hard to ‘beat’ their difficulties, they felt a deep sense of satisfaction every time they proved to themselves they’d won.

Anna was unable to read as a child. Now she’s a literary agent who reads for a living. Robert had a terrible time with math as a youngster. Today, he runs a small business and keeps his own books with little difficulty. My own particular disability is in the realm of written language and visual motor. I had an even harder time learning to write and spell than learning to read. Yet, I have half a dozen books, both fiction and nonfiction, in print.

Does this mean Anna, Robert and I are cured? Not even close. I can’t speak for Anna or Robert, but I deal with my own learning disabilities every day of my life. I take an unbelievable amount of razzing for my handwriting, which sometimes even I can’t read. I know three phone numbers, my social security number, and my zip code. Everything else I have to write down including the combination to my mailbox. I can’t tell if my clothes match. Handicrafts and needlework are a study in frustration for me. I don’t do anything even remotely athletic except exercises that take little or no coordination. Although I’m in fairly good shape, aerobics are an embarrassment; I don’t know right from left without thinking about it. My short term memory is nonexistent, and if I write a note to myself, I lose it.

In spite of all that, people are shocked when I tell them I have a learning disability. Why? Because over the years I have built so many compensations for my difficulties that others aren’t even aware of it. Every L.D. adult I know not only has dozens of compensation skills, each one seems to have a special gift that helps them over come the worst of their learning disabilities.

Anna, for instance, says because she reads word by word she picks up nuances of the language others miss. When I told my brother Rush that, he not only knew what she meant, he said he did exactly the same thing. As far as he’s concerned, those of us who read whole paragraphs are missing the true beauty and cadence of the words. In fact, he says that’s the reason writing poetry comes easily to him.

Michael is a truck driver with a reading disability who spends most of his time making deliveries in unfamiliar towns and cities. Though he can read, he does it too slowly to decipher street signs when he’s driving. His salvation is a collection of detailed maps. He stops just before he enters the city, memorizes the map and then drives straight to his delivery point. Michael says he simply pictures the map in his head as he goes through the city. He’s one of the few drivers from his company who rarely gets lost!

Had reading come easily for Anna, Rush or Michael, it’s doubtful whether they would have developed their special ‘gift’; they’d have had no need to. I could give you a hundred other examples to illustrate my point, but I think you get the idea. Once L.D. children become aware of how they learn, they usually begin to compensate. They often catch up with their peers and sometimes even surpass them.

The hidden gifts and compensations may show up at any time in an L.D. child’s life. Some kids ‘click’ while still in elementary school while others take longer. The important thing to remember is that the more support and understanding you give your child, the easier it will be for them to conquer their own L.D. monster.

Now that you have my personal explanation of learning disabilities, it’s time to take a look at how the rest of the world views them. If you are reading this book, chances are you or someone close to you has been diagnosed as learning disabled or L.D.. So what exactly is L.D.? The actual definition of L.D. varies from state to state, as do the regulations that determine whether a child qualifies for special education services. Your local school district or the State Department of Education can provide you with that information.

In most states, to be labeled L.D. a child must have an average or above IQ and show a severe discrepancy between ability and achievement. Translated, that means they have normal intelligence but are way behind their peers in reading, math, written language or oral expression.

Actually, L.D. is a bit more complicated than that. Not all L.D. students fit the criteria, nor do the tests always show the true story. For one thing, a child will often function differently and score much higher in a quiet room with a single adult tester than in a noisy classroom. Another problem with testing happens when the learning disability hides a high IQ or a high IQ hides the learning disability.

Jonathan had problems from first grade on. By fifth grade, he was struggling in math to the point his parents and teacher felt a referral to special ed. was necessary. After the testing was finished, his parents and teacher met with the diagnostician and resource teacher who had done the testing. According to the intelligence test, Jonathan’s IQ came out 80 which is 20 points below what is considered average and is in the “slow” range. His math scores were third grade level, which is consistent with the 80 IQ. He didn’t qualify for special education because there was no discrepancy between his ability (IQ) and his achievement (third grade math.) In other words, the tests said he was doing the best he could be expected to.

Anyone who worked with Jonathan knew he wasn’t a “slow learner”. In fact, his reading was two years above grade level. Clearly, the test was not an accurate measure of Jonathan’s intelligence. A learning disability was quite probably hiding his true IQ. Unfortunately, many students who are truly L.D. slip through the cracks because the numbers on the tests don’t fit the criteria. According to the law, if a student doesn’t qualify within the criteria, they can not receive services. If you feel your child is one of these, there are some options open to you which are discussed at length in chapter 14.


You may have heard terms like Dyslexia, Dyscalculia, and Dysgraphia used in reference to L.D. All three are names for different groups of learning disabilities. Generally, Dyslexia refers to problems with reading, spelling and understanding the written word. Dyscalculia involves difficulty with numbers and math concepts. Dysgraphia pertains to the physical act of writing and other visual motor tasks as well as problems with spelling and producing written language. All three may include long and short term memory problems and difficulty understanding oral directions as well as a variety of other hindrances to learning.

Unfortunately, people with L.D. don’t fit into such neat little categories. Rarely will you find a person who has all the symptoms of one and none of the others. Every learning disability is as different and unique as the people who have them. Say you have two L.D. third graders with dyslexic type reading problems. One learns best through phonics and couldn’t do flash cards if his life depended on it. The other can’t sound words out worth spit, but really shines when presented with whole words. If you have five children who have trouble reading, chances are good they will have five different sets of problems.

Each child has his or her own strengths and weaknesses and has to be taught accordingly. For that reason, this book won’t generally use terms like dyslexia. Instead, it focuses on different areas of difficulty like reading or math. No child has every learning disability, and the same methods won’t work for all.

Once you accept learns differently as the definition of L.D., you begin to understand why your bright, creative child has difficulty in school. What may be obvious to teachers and other students isn’t always that way for the child with a learning disability.

When I was doing my student teaching, I developed a unit on telling time. I taught the usual ‘big hand’ and ‘little hand’ concepts and everything seemed to be going well except for one little girl who absolutely couldn’t get it. Beth’s answers weren’t just slightly off, they were so totally wrong they didn’t even make sense. When the clock said 3:00, for instance, she’d read it as 6:15, and 8:15 would be 9:40. Nothing I did seemed to help. Finally, in utter frustration, Beth asked me, “Which little hand do you mean?”

Thinking she didn’t know which was the minute hand and which was the hour hand, I used the terms long and short instead. “But which set of hands?” she wanted to know. As we went through it one more time, her friend suddenly spoke up.

“Oh, I get it,” she said. “Beth’s looking at the other little hands.”

Now I was confused. “What other little hands?”

“You know, the really little hands.” It took several minutes and a pointer stick to make me understand what they were talking about. The hands on the classroom clock were attached to the face with a pin. About 1/2 an inch of each hand stuck out beyond the pin. It was those 1/2 inches that Beth thought I meant when I said the ‘little hands’. I’d never even noticed them. Once Beth understood which ‘hands’ I was talking about, she had no further trouble.

Frequently, an L.D. student will come up with his or her own ‘way’ of doing something. Quite often those methods don’t make sense to teachers or parents. My husband is a classic example. He claims the only math teacher he ever learned from was the one who left him alone and let him work problems his own way. I never realized how different my husband’s ‘own way’ of doing math was until I heard him explain multiplication by fives to our youngest son. I had always told Paul to count on his fingers by five, but he had difficulty remembering how to do that. My husband told him to divide the number in half and move the decimal point. (i.e. ½ of 6 is 3.0 so 5 X 6=30). It seemed convoluted and far more difficult to me, but it made sense to my son. Suddenly he could multiply by fives and get it right every time! I guarantee no teacher ever taught my husband that little trick. In fact, I’ll bet he had to hide it so his teachers wouldn’t make him do the work over the “right” way. If your child comes up with something that works, encourage them to use it instead of insisting they try a “simpler” way.

Sometimes your child may need academic crutches to get beyond a certain point in their learning. It may be the only way they can learn what they need to know. Take, Trixie, for instance. Trixie came to me as a fourth grader. Because she didn’t qualify for Special ed. early on, her parents had provided her with a math tutor. She could do addition and subtraction using touch points including borrowing and carrying. It was clearly time to start her on multiplication. We went through the manipulative stage and she gained a fair understanding of what multiplication was, then began memorizing her multiplication facts. That’s when we hit a brick wall. No matter what method I used, she just couldn’t seem to memorize those facts. By the end of the first quarter of fifth grade, she still didn’t even know her 2’s. I finally called it quits and gave her a multiplication table to use.

With the table we progressed on through double digit multiplication and division without too much trouble. She didn’t know the facts but was able to grasp the concepts of what we were doing. Then we came to fractions. Given her difficulties learning the facts, I expected Trixie to have a tough time. I couldn’t have been more wrong. For some reason she took to fractions like a duck to water. Even the most difficult fifth grade fraction problem was a snap for her. If I asked what 3/4 of 12 was, she’d get a far off look in her eye, think for a minute and then say “nine”.

Needless to say, I asked her how she did it. She said she just pictured a stack of 12 hay bales, split them into groups of four then, counted up three groups. Suddenly, I had a way to teach her multiplication facts. It took me a while to make her understand that what she was doing with fractions was actually multiplication, but gradually she began depending less and less on her multiplication table. By the time she hit 7th grade, she no longer needed it at all.

If I hadn’t given Trixie that multiplication table for a crutch, she might never have progressed beyond that point in math. When she no longer needed it, she threw it away.

A parent recently told me she thought it was wrong to give a child a crutch like that. Not only was it unfair to the other kids, the child might well become dependent on it. I told her it was much like she and I both wearing glasses. I only have to wear mine when I drive. She, on the other hand, is practically blind without hers. When I pointed out that she was completely dependent on her glasses and still managed to pull a 4.0 in college, she finally understood. How fair would it be for me to deny her the use of her glasses in a classroom just because I don’t need mine?

So what if your child counts on his fingers or uses a spell checker? Plenty of adults do both. Personally, I never write anything that I want someone to be able to read without a computer. Denying your child the use of the tools he needs is only throwing unnecessary roadblocks in his way. L.D. students, have enough problems to deal with without that.

As you progress through this book, you will find long lists of strategies to try with your child. Not all of them will be successful. Use them as starting points to help your child find his own way. As you and your child work through the process and experiment, you will very likely come up with your own strategies. Remember, no matter how thick your battering ram, some doors can not be broken through. Sometimes it’s better to back off, rethink the method of attack, and then tunnel under the gate.

There is no cure for L.D., but the prognosis for your child is good. I can’t promise they will become ‘normal’ or that they will always be successful. What I can promise is that your child has as good a chance for a happy successful life as any other.