Paraphrasing the Hydrocephalus Teacher's Guide: Learning Disabilites (Part 1)

 

I've been paraphrasing the Hydrocephalus Teacher's guide section by section. I was lacking motivation to do it after the first post, but I'm fairly confident that I'm ready to start posting every other week, or every week depending on my days off, or if I need a break. The next section I'm going to focus on is learning disabilities, and I'm going to be splitting it between multiple posts. I'll be focusing on mostly nonverbal learning disability. There a 4 different specific learning disabilities that's the most common. The first is Nonverbal learning Disability. The others are difficulties in understanding both complex and abstract concepts, and retrieving stored information. The last one is spatial/perceptual disorders, 

 

When children with hydrocephalus have learning disabilities it usually doesn't become apparent until the 3rd or 4th grade when the learning material becomes more complex and abstract. Children with hydrocephalus are likely to have learning disabilities involving processing information as well, and this also becomes more common around the 3rd or 4th grade as well. 

 

People with Nonverbal learning disability have problems processing nonverbal information. They struggle with learning new concepts, which definitely isn't limited to school work. It causes them to need to have the new concepts multiple times, and it takes them longer to pick up the pace if needed. Same with picking up social cues. Children with nonverbal learning disabilities tend to do well in early Elementary school with a few exceptions including fine motor skills. It becomes far more apparent later,  possibly as late as the beginning of Middle School when they are left to handle tasks on their own. The Teacher's Guide lists a lot of common things that happen at least during these years that may appear to be laziness, but isn't necessarily, These include not being prepared for class, missing assignments/homework, having trouble understanding texts, Social Studies specifically. Other common things are misunderstanding directions and their teachers and peers.  Again these behaviors may seem like bad behavior, but it's actually the result of child struggling. When it comes to verbal abilities usually have a easy time learning words and pronunciations, but have trouble understanding the meanings via text. 

 

Two other things that were mentioned was children with nonverbal learning disability often being in denial or their learning disabilities, or even their Parents. Also it mentioned that they are commonly anxious in public, and angry at home. 

 

Coming from my own experience I started falling behind in the 4th grade. I might have in the 3rd grade, but I had a great teacher who helped me a lot more than the last 2 teachers I had in Elementary School. I was failing almost all of my classes in the 6th grade mostly because of the sudden work load. I worked what I definitely felt was a lot harder that some of the kids in my friend circle, and ended up only getting C's. My biggest issue was not remember what I would read in my textbooks. Then retaining that information until I took my test, and needing to do the same thing again for the next text. So in a sense I gave up, and put very little effort into until my junior year. Somehow I managed to only be one semester behind, and half a credit from graduating on time.