by Susan Kramer

Adults with learning disabilities face challenges on many levels of daily living. I see dealing with one or more learning disabilities as an adult, a process of finding the avenues that work to get the task done.

What first comes to mind is knowing what the limitations are. After all, when we know what we can't do we are more motivated to find what we can do to compensate.

I'll use myself as an example. I have a 30 decibel hearing loss in one ear. That is the good news. The bad news is that at age five I completely lost my hearing in both ears due to complications of the long measles and chickenpox. For a month in 1st grade I could not hear. Gradually over the years my hearing returned to the degree mentioned.

This hearing loss led to not being able to learn to sound out words in 1st and 2nd grade. Forget phonics. Unfortunately, my teachers and family thought I had my full hearing back and I didn't so my lack of hearing caused the academic problem. I compensated by learning to memorize how to spell words by looking at them very hard and writing them out.

Memorizing rather than sounding out words is still my primary way of learning to spell a new word.

Looking back to when we were kids and thinking about any area we may have had trouble with then and still have trouble with now gives us a clue in what area or areas to seek advice and assistance if a solution doesn't easily come to mind.

Also, does your child have a learning disability? Perhaps you had or have the same issues. When I was growing up and going through the elementary school system in the 50s there wasn't a mention of learning disabilities except that a student was below average, average or above average.

I am glad that by the time my kids were in the elementary school system in the 70s that the specific learning disabilities were being identified and help provided.

If you are an adult and had trouble with academics in school and suspect you have a learning disability it is not too late to find out and get help. Community colleges will do testing for you as an adult reentry student. It is worth a go to find out what your learning disability may be and get help with learning alternate ways of doing that task you may have thought too hard - when what you really need is to find a different approach.

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