Working with adults is a joy. Adults know what they want, which means they have their own motivation to change their communication. Â Have a learning based disability and failed a professional licensing exam, have high functioning autism and struggling to maintain your job after difficulty with social language, or a non-native English speaker having difficulty …
Category Archives: Learning to Learn
Turnaround….
After working in several charter schools I have been left feeling ambivalent about their role because of some of the current practices. Because many Charter schools serve under-served communities that do not use language in the way that is need for success at the high school or college level they often have a very structured …
Severe Tantrums 101: Targeting Skills
Severe tantrums in kids can be the result of a variety of reasons from lack of bonding to inadequate communication often seen in kids with poor communication skills like those with many forms of autism or severe langauge disabilities. There are a number of resources to work from and if your child has autism or …
Is My Child Learning?
Language is an integral part of education, but so often we become focused on the task and forget the underlying foundation.  Buckminster Fuller in his book,  “Critical Path”  written in 1982 presents the “knowledge doubling theory doubling approximately every 18 months, now in 2015 some are stating that it is occurring ever 12 months. With such …
Conveying Ideas
Schools sometimes make parents believe that speech and language issues disappear by 4th or 5th grade when they no longer want to provide specialized speech and language services; however, that is not true. Language needs increase and change in complexity over time, so in fourth and fifth grade the increase in complex language demands are …
Lazy is sometimes a strategy
Working with people that have had traumatic brain injury and/or stroke was my first work experience as a speech pathologist. I feel lucky to have acute rehabilitation as my foundation because it helped me understand that there are many reasons why people do not perform, and many times it is not because they do not want …
Communicating Acceptance
“What is it like to make mistakes at your old school,” I ask my daughter. she states, “in class when you made a mistake kids would snicker and laugh. I hate that,” she states emphatically. then I asked her, “What is it like when you make a mistake at your new school?” She states in …
Skip the 2nd Language: Language impairments and 2nd languages
I have wondered about the practice of saying that language disabled students cannot learn a foreign language. Middle schools and high schools routinely release language disabled students from the requirements of a second language which is a prerequisite for admission to many colleges. Although I have been a part of  the teams that have dismissed …
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Reading words or learning to read? Part I
My daughter’s reading instruction at school has been frustrating this year. She is a fluent reader, but when you ask her what she has read. Her answer is sometimes, “I don’t know!” Her comprehension is not equal to her fluency level. Is this normal? Yes, she has been working on learning to read the words, …
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What’s language gotta do wit it? Language and Racism:
Being African American, statistics that document the fact that African American children are disciplined more harshly than their white peers is no surprise. The statistic just points out what every parent of color in the US already knows. Our kids are treated more harshly than their white peers. If you are a parent of color with a child in kindergarten, but certainly …
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