So, You Think You Need Extended Time?

Sometimes, when he doesn’t do as well as he should have, Jeff wonders whether he has a learning disability.

The Diagnosis

I was diagnosed with a learning disability in kindergarten. It was the discrepancy between my verbal and performance IQ that ultimately sealed the deal, one significant enough to raise eyebrows even among the professionals conducting the evaluation—mine was the largest the team had yet encountered. When I think about that diagnosis, about the IQ assigned to me, I am reminded of how crude educators often sound in their attempts to explain a condition as complex as LD.

The cleanest definitions are often the most misleading. I have a visual-perceptual learning disability, that’s often how I start people off. That means I have trouble recognizing, reproducing and manipulating visual patterns. So there are certain puzzles, for instance, that I couldn’t put together to save my life. “That doesn’t sound like such a big deal,” a common response, and why not? The chances of being forced to assemble a puzzle at gunpoint are slim. But there are other things that go along with it.

I also have something called dyscalculia. That means I’m bad with numbers. “Oh yeah, me too.” And I have problems with executive function, in other words, staying organized. At this point in the exposition people often wonder if they too have a learning disability. Then begins the salivation over extended time.

All these designations I find myself running through, the attempts to delineate what a learning-disabled person can and can’t do, ultimately obfuscate the lived reality of being learning disabled. This, in itself, is nothing remarkable. Knowing the pathology of a condition doesn’t begin to capture what living with the condition is like. But as far as learning disabilities are concerned, I think the gap—between what people think they know, and what is actually the case—is especially wide.

When somebody says, “I have dyscalculia,” people don’t wonder if they have difficulty opening a combination locker. The paltriness of the traditional nomenclature is such that I often find myself resorting to an anecdotal account of what it means to be smart and yet inept, helpless at countless things to which most people never give a second thought.

THE STORY

The outline I prepared for this essay is telling. Elementary school is the first heading. Under it I have written some thirty bullet points, each indicating an area of difficulty, things like “copying from the board” for instance. Then comes the next header, high school, twenty bullet points, then college, ten. My story is ultimately one of success, as I suspect it may not have been for those who didn’t get the kind of support I did, or were saddled with a severer disability than my own. But this success was earned through effort, often with help, but more often without it, through sheer force of will.

Elementary School

In elementary school academic success was virtually unknown to me. I couldn’t write, or at least, not legibly. The words crowded together until there was no distinguishing one from the next. My mother would sit beside me as I did my homework chanting, “leave a space Daniel, remember to leave a space,” every damn sentence. Eventually I learned to put two fingers down after each word, writing the next one on the other side.

This was to say nothing of my letters, many of which were utterly unrecognizable. I confused bs for ds, because to me, they looked the same. Fitting everything into the lines was also a challenge. And because writing on the back of the paper was forbidden, more often than not, when I got to the meat of my answer, I was forced into the margins. I would end up breaking single words into three or four lines, bre on the first line of the margin, then aki under that, and finally, ng. The test would return in red: “I can’t read this!”

Script only made matters worse. I knew the letter was supposed to curve in some direction, but I could never tell which. Then came the persistent reminder, “go this way, go this way,” my mother intoned. She bought stencils of each letter, and eventually, the plastic grooves forced my fingers into submission. Hours and hours of those stencils. In middle school, after two years of occupational therapy, script more or less disappeared forever.

When I was copying from the board I copied two, three words at a time. When I looked up to continue I had lost my place, another few seconds to find it, another few words, another few seconds, another few words. Usually the board was erased before I had gotten down anything of value. Sometimes, I was lucky enough to have someone in the classroom who knew something about LD, an LDTC who copied what was on the board and put it on my desk for me to copy in turn. Those times were rare.

Reading presented similar difficulty. I would lose my place in a sentence or a paragraph constantly. Then I would reread and it would start all over. For awhile, I had to cover the line below the one I was reading to make any headway.

The 2007 study included 171 respondents. 53% were male; 47% were female. The mean age was 22  and 75% of respondents were Caucasian.

Math was easily my worst subject. I had the benefit of supplemental instruction until middle school, but I was often  close to failing. There just seemed to be a wall there. I spent much of my time thrashing against it, bored, frustrated and ashamed. When I finally did make some headway everyone else had already moved on. I remember stepping back periodically to observe my glacial progress: every five years or so I had a minor breakthrough.

At first, I couldn’t count. I would point to an object, say a number and then, without moving my finger, say the next number. It wasn’t a matter of counting the same object twice; it was a matter of grasping the one-to-one correspondence between an object and a move on the number line. With this as my point of departure, being able to add two-digit numbers in my head (middle school) or understanding that one quarter meant one of four pieces (high school), really were breakthroughs, even if they only came once every five years.

Then there were the puzzles, the conventional ones I did at home and the ones in school that were puzzles in disguise. At home, the trick was finding the edge pieces so that I could begin with a coherent frame. The problem was, I couldn’t tell the difference between an edge piece and the rest. Even when an edge piece was pointed out to me I couldn’t extrapolate.

My mother bought a “game,” to help, not with puzzles per se but with puzzle-type tasks that cropped up in school. The rubber-band game, as I called it, involved a pegboard over which one could stretch rubber bands to mimic designs in a book. The trick was to count the number of pegs in the design and match them against the number of pegs on the board, something it took me a long time to master. For a time, I did three to four of those puzzles a night.

In history we did different kinds of puzzles: maps, maps of the Fertile Crescent, maps of the United States. Every era was accompanied by a mess of black lines and white spaces. I couldn’t tell which part of the world was being profiled, or even, which part was water and which part was land. Telling time was another puzzle, a mess of black lines and hands that were hard to distinguish. Clocks were everywhere it seemed, and so were adults ready to drill you on where the big and little hands were pointing.

I was chronically disorganized. I discovered tests on the day I was to take them. I called someone every night to find out what the homework was—every night. Then there were the supplies to keep track of: notebooks, folders, pencils. Ms. Stinson wanted a red pen in addition to a black one so you could correct your homework. Ms. Caspe never allowed pen of any kind. I remember borrowing pens constantly. Mine were usually gone two weeks after being replenished. In fact, I lost most of the things that were removable. Mitten clips—those things that keep your mittens dangling from your jacket—I wore those till I was ten.

High School

In high school things got better. I wasn’t better, but I got better at compensating, and the world got better at offering alternatives. Instead of scribbling incoherently into a notebook I began taking notes on a Palm Pilot, three Palm Pilots actually, in startlingly quick succession. In elementary school I would break calculators when, after setting them up on my desk, I lifted the desk’s lid to get at something inside. In high school I broke Palm Pilots.

On a Palm Pilot, my typing could keep pace with the lecture, but I often didn’t know what to take down. When test time came around I found myself scrambling for the neatly written notes from the front row. I spent many of my free periods photocopying them. But even with Ms. Perfect’s notes in hand I managed to screw something up. I couldn’t keep the copies in order, or I’d missed the backside of a page.

Essay writing was now less of a bother; I could backspace instead of erasing. (In the past I had tore up the page rubbing out errors—there were often several a sentence— and after a few pages like this I was in tears.) But I would spend ages on just two or three sentences, agonizing. Two-page essays that should have taken a couple of hours to write required the entire evening. Even in-class essays were like this. I would freeze, obsessing over what should come next, and knowing that the more I did the less it mattered. I always took the full amount of extended time, which, without a better system in place, meant missing class.

In high school I was able to move to the less-advanced classes for math and science while remaining in the more-advanced ones for English and history. This was a mixed blessing. My math and science classes were like something out of a teen comedy; pandemonium reigned. It was the same cohort from year to year so that, by the time we graduated, four of our six teachers had left. Needless to say, I wasn’t able to glean much.

College

In college I hit my stride. For the first time I was able to take the classes I wanted. I worked harder than I ever had before, for a lot of reasons, but chief among them was my interest in everything being taught. Suddenly I was Ms. Perfect. Of course I still had a learning disability, and college didn’t let me forget it. I read and wrote slower than everyone I knew. I took only one quantitative class and I took it pass/fail.

Juggling a full course load and tending to all of life’s little necessities was also a lot, in a way that it wasn’t for my peers. I was the only one carrying around iCal printouts of where I had to be and when. I set myself alarms constantly: pick up laundry, go shopping, send an e-mail. Things like mechanical assembly were beyond me, so my roommate put together all my furniture. I didn’t start cooking until my senior year. Again, my roommate.

I had to learn to try things my diagnosis suggested I might not be good at, like philosophy, which derives much of its methodology from logic. Or film, which requires a highly sensitive eye, something I feared I would have to do without. After all, the term visual-perceptual learning disability did not bode well.

These Days

These days my learning disability is more relevant than it has been for some time. Many of the entry-level jobs I come across are secretarial in nature, demanding precisely the kinds of skills I don’t have: making photocopies, organizing spreadsheets, scheduling appointments. I have been fortunate enough to find a writing position that doesn’t require such things. But that could change.

I started this essay by musing over the impossibility of writing it. And it is written. But it’s not often that I have the luxury of expressing myself in essay form. And it’s even less often that people take the time to listen. Academia could do a lot better for people like me.

When I was in kindergarten an administrator assured my mom that I might still go to college because there were some out there “for people like me.” When I was in high school I was accused of plagiarism because my Spanish teacher didn’t think anyone who wrote poorly in a foreign language could write well in English. Even in college I had a professor refuse to let me take notes on my laptop lest it distract me from lecture. These were all people who had devoted their lives to education, precisely those people who should have known better.

The Seed for This: My Learning Disability- A (Digressive) Essay

– D. Schwartz

Modern Orthodox Education Attack!

Jeff just wants his Talmud teacher to shoot straight for once.

As summer draws to a close, a thought experiment for Jewish educators:

You are the principal of a Jewish high school in the NY/NJ metro area with a student population of 200. The hashkafa (religious outlook) of your institution is firmly Modern Orthodox (MO), based 100% in traditional Jewish legal and philosophical texts. A staunch believer in Modern Orthodoxy as the Jewish ideal, you envision a sustainable 100% Modern Orthodox graduation rate as your school’s optimal output. You have two pedagogical options: A and B.

Option A will produce 100 law-abiding, philosophically aligned students and 100 unengaged, soon-to-be-unaffiliated graduates.

Option B will produce 200 students of varying religious observance, along a sliding spectrum ranging from “Ultra-Orthodox” to “unaffiliated.” 40 identify as “Modern Orthodox” and only 10 reject or lose their Jewish identity. The rest become proud Jews of all stripes – Haredi, Egalitarian, Conservative, Traditional, Reform, Reconstructionist, Humanist, Messianist, Spiritual, etc…distributed evenly across the spectrum.

Which one do you choose?

Option A clearly has some kind of polarizing effect. It pulls many students towards its absolute ideal, but it also repels many students to the opposite extreme. Option B only yields a 20% success rate in churning out its ideal student, yet it produces a more even distribution of “Jewishness” in its graduating population and a 95% “Jewish identity rate.”

I don’t know if there is a good answer to this crude dilemma – and crude it is. To take option A is to sacrifice half of the Jewish population (potentially, to intermarriage) in order to maintain a robust Orthodox core. Jewish attrition is high and fast in this case, but a perceived “ideal” is preserved. Option B may substantially slow the rate of attrition, but it does so while shifting the locus of power and influence away from Modern Orthodoxy.

The above scenario may seem simplistic. Indeed, it is a hypothetical binary that ignores the many complexities of educational practice and modern Jewish life. It presumes that Jewish educators have uniform expectations of their students and that they strive to produce any kind of ideal graduate. But I do think that the methods we use today in Modern Orthodox education roughly fall into two categories, necessarily producing something that approaches one of the two above results.

My skepticism of the current state of affairs in Orthodox Jewish education is based on a very simple fact: Our educational institutions have only adopted two methods of conveying educational material – preaching and teaching. Human beings, on the other hand – especially teenagers – are diverse and unpredictably reactive.

The well-meaning preachers of our schools use Modern Orthodoxy as a blunt weapon. They lob dogma at students in the classroom, failing to address many of the assumptions underlying religious practice, and impose religious strictures in the hallway. Talmud instructors dive into Shakla V’Taria (the “back and forth” in Talmudic argumentation) on day one without defending the legitimacy of Talmudic logic. Chumash teachers ask “What’s bothering Rashi?” before explaining the relationship between Drash (homiletics) and Pshat (plain meaning) in his commentary. Tzitzit police (or the Jewish TSA) pat down un-fringed male students. Dress czars keep their eyes peeled for exposed thighs and midriffs. Administrators drown their students in a sea of blue and white on Yom Ha’atzmaut, soaking their spongy skulls in the Zionist narrative. All this in the name of maintaining a thick “Modern Orthodox atmosphere” sure to capture the minds and souls of the student body.

Unlike the preachers, the teachers in Modern Orthodox schools treat Torah like a college discipline. Afraid of threatening students with frankness about the rigors and demands of Modern Orthodoxy, they invite their students to approach the biblical and legal canon in their own manner. They guide discussion, offering legitimate feedback on form, but refusing to offer final judgments on substance. The Chumash teacher accepts the most imaginative readings of the text in the name of shiv’im panim, and the Talmud instructor treats the gemara like a primary source document in a Western Civ course. The dress code welcomes individuality and eccentricity and frames the rules of religious wear in terms of “respect for the norms of the institution.” Israel education loses its Zionist fervor and joins the greater narrative of Near Eastern history. The school remains nominally “Modern Orthodox,” and its openness and tolerance of opinion, assumes the teacher, will make MO an attractive option for the graduating student.

But both methods are flawed, and both have unintended consequences. Preaching is akin to fishing with explosives. Its goals may be admirable, but its methods are harmful to many. At the end of the day, the preachers will capture lots of Modern Orthodox “fish,” but they will also blow some to unsalvageable pieces.

That teenagers question organized religion should come as a surprise to no one. But when we force Jewish students to consume the ideas, practices, and learning methods of a minority sect of a minority religion without addressing our assumptions, can we really be surprised when many students reject Modern Orthodoxy outright?

Is there a fish metaphor for “teaching” methods? Teaching, I suppose, is similar to laying out a fishing net with no bait to actively entice the fish. Some fish are bound to swim in the direction of the net, but most fish will swim every which way in seemingly random fashion. By simply presenting information and giving students free reign to do with it what they will, MO educators risk letting their students, unchained from ideology, choose their own religious paths. Considering the natural diversity of human character, this will inevitably lead to a colorful mixture of sectarian identifications at graduation.

Clearly, options A and B from our thought experiment represent the “preaching” method and the “teaching” method, respectively. And, in case my skepticism hasn’t bled through the page, I think both methods stink. Many people will argue that a balance must be struck in educating our high schoolers about Judaism, that we must push, but not too hard. Many will claim that preaching works as long as we stress the “modernity” in Modern Orthodoxy, as long as we prove that “Jews can have fun too!” Some say we don’t push hard enough, that the lack of emphasis on halacha and machshava leaves students painfully unaware of the foundations and strictures of our religion. And the few defeatists will surrender the fight, bowing to the magnetic strength of a soulless modern world.

But the attitude underlying all of these approaches fundamentally undermines the thankless project of religious education. Both the preacher and the teacher treat their students like laboratory mice, like fickle, manipulable experimental subjects. MO education has become a study in manipulation, in the art of presentation. We spend our efforts on the advertisement of Modern Orthodoxy, and we have lost our focus on the product itself. We have become so concerned with religious retention and rejection rates that we keep asking the wrong questions about religious education. Instead of asking, “how can we keep our children religious,” we should be asking “why are we religious in the first place?” When our teachers are able to answer that question with absolute confidence and integrity, our students will follow suit. High schoolers are not stupid. They can see through the smoke and mirrors that so often cloud the pathetic attempts at keeping them religious.

So how do we approach 100% success? How do we attract students to Modern Orthodoxy? The answer isn’t to make MO attractive, but to defend its inherent attractiveness. Let the philosophy and practice of Modern Orthodoxy speak for itself. Let it stand, on its own, against Ultra-Orthodoxy, Conservatism, Reformism, and cultural Judaism. And, finally, trust that it is worthy of widespread acceptance.

We need integrity, apology, and transparency in our school systems. Without integrity, Modern Orthodoxy seems porous and inconsistent. How often do MO schools employ Judaic studies teachers who preach, but do not represent (and often reject), the tenets of Modern Orthodoxy? How often do they simplify programming on Zionism and Israeli-Arab relations to almost comical levels? Schools need to be honest about the wrinkles and warts in our history and beliefs, and they need to practice exactly what it is they preach.

Without apology, we leave our worldview open to attack from others. The best offense in MO education is a staunch defense of our beliefs coupled with critical, but charitable analysis of competing philosophies. How many mechanchim are capable of answering tough theological questions with intellectual honesty and substantive knowledge of Jewish thought? How often do students finish high school, only to be exposed to fresh and exciting strains of Judaism in college that shake their former commitment to Orthodoxy? We need to address these issues in high school by hiring instructors who are not only Torah scholars, but reliable champions of the creed. We need to start offering courses in contemporary Jewish thought and in Modern Orthodoxy itself. And we need to paint a complete picture of Israel’s history, explaining why the Zionist narrative is the best interpretation of the facts. We cannot simply preach our creed. We must defend it tooth and nail.

Finally, we need transparency. We need to be open and honest about the goals of our institutions. As I’ve said before, students can see through the fog. They know when back-room religious politicking pollutes the halls and classrooms, and they can smell an attempt at kiruv from miles away.

As you ponder the thought experiment, don’t fall prey to the framing trap. Consider whether all the discussion in modern academia about “method” in religious education ignores the most important question of all: Is Modern Orthodox the best?

If we can answer that, the rest will follow.

 

– Winch