Working With Children With Learning Disabilities

I learned a lot from the video that we watched in class called, How Difficult Can This Be? I think that Rick used a great deal of effective techniques to demonstrate how it feels to be a child with a learning disability. After watching this video I also realized that one of the biggest problems in education is that parents, students, and teachers don’t know what a child with a learning disability goes through or how to help them. It is extremely important to understand what the child is going through in order to help them. I thought that the exercises that Rick had the workshop do were very effective in demonstrating what some students go through and had a lasting effect. Some of the people that commented on the workshop at the end of the video made comments that expressed that they felt confused and stupid during many of the activities. That feeling stays with most people for a long time, and I cannot even begin to imagine how a child with a learning disability gets through school feeling like that all the time.

            I found the video extremely enlightening because I had never really thought to look at the perspective of a child with a learning disability. Now that I am thinking this way, I think it is important to think this way as a teacher. I also found the definition of fair very interesting. I hadn’t thought about the actual definition, and now that I know it, it is something else I can think about in my classroom. I thought the video gave me a lot to think about for my future career as a teacher. I will be encountering students with different learning disabilities and I think it is important to know what they are going through to be able to effectively help them.