Attention Deficit Disorder

Dylexia

Language Based Learning Disabilities

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Learning Disabilities: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

A Group of Landmark College student's parent sharing their thoughts

Eagerness, fear, despair, bewilderment, sadness, quilt. These emotions are so strong that we can almost touch them in the group of fifty parents who meet on July morning at Landmark College in the Green Mountains of Vermont. They are strangers to one another, but not to these feelings.

They come from all across the country, from Texas and Florida, from Michigan and Ohio, from Wisconsin and Connecticut. They are African-American, Caucasian, Indian, Latino, Jewish, Christian, Muslim.

There is an attorney, a policeman, a psychiatrist, a secretary, a chemical engineer, an anthropologist, a plumber, a single parent on welfare. Their children have attended struggling inner city schools, suburban pubic and parochical schools, and elite private schools. What these parents have in common is each have a daughter or son with learning disability, and these students are all attending a rigorous summer program at Landmark. With this common bond, the groups diversity in gender, race and class are forgotten. These parents share their stories, each different, yet all in important ways the same.

Mrs.Z, a nurse who works with young cancer patients, relates the saga of her middle child, David, a creative boy caught between two high-achieving sisters. When David is thirteen, his older sister said, "David is going to get lost at the water fountain, "thus giving voice to Mrs.Z.'s growing realization that her son was falling farther and farther behind in his schoolwork. As Mrs.Z recalls. "David was a bright little boy, easy to get along with who had a great imagination. But even as a young child he would escape into a world of fantasy, especially when he faced a task he didn't make sense to him -- or that didn't interest him. Losing himself in daydreams, he often did not hear me or his teachers. We all urgeted him to 'pay attention,' sometimes pretty abrupty and impatiently. It wasn't until his sisters made that observation that I realized that we needed to find out why such a smart boy was having such a hard time in school."