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I had a friend who used to be a teacher. He was all in on virtually every neoliberal shibboleth of teaching. Against school choice because it took resources away from public schools. Always making snide comments about what will happen to special needs kids if schools got fully privatized.
Naturally, his sons all have some non-specific emotional/behavioral problems that lets him game the system for them to have personalized education plans and extra resources. He's always been good at gaming the system like that.
We're currently struggling with some shitty behavior our daughter is tracking home from school. My wife is adamant that it's something the school should be "fixing", and I keep asserting it's not their job. It's our job. So our daughter is currently grounded.
I donno man. I guess there is some theoretical intellectually in tact individual that needs extra resources either because of a physical disability or idiosyncratic mental problem (like dyslexia) that if gotten over the hump of not being able to help themselves, can go on to utilize their education for the betterment of society. Personally, I've never seen one. I mostly only see parents pushing their parenting duties onto teachers through fake special needs, or fake special needs students becoming fake special needs employees, expecting all the same accommodations around their emotional needs and learned helplessness.
I do expect lots of malicious compliance around this though. Totally normal shit like just wanting to have a conversation with a teacher about how to help your child in an area they are struggling with becomes "Sorry, Trump said I'm not allowed to."
I've worked with the disabled in vocational rehab in the past. The young adults I worked with here moderate-function, too disabled for things like extra time on tests to ever really be a thing in their lives. Both of these types do exist; there really are a lot of people that just need a bit of extra help and can find gainful, independent imployment. There really are a lot of parents ruthlessly gaming the system as well. Sometimes these happen at the same time with the same person. Of note with the populations I worked with, there was never really a question about if these people were disabled or not; they were all obviously developmentally disabled to even an untrained observer. One thing I that has stuck with me over the years though was that even some of the more profoundly disabled ones had been coached by their parent to ether exagerate or hide their disablilty depending on the audience. Since I was an authority figure to them at first, one of my biggest challenges was to get them to stop exaggerating.
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My sister wouldn't have graduated college without the extra time provided by disability accommodations for dyslexia and dyscalculia. I spent an entire semester of her undergrad with her on video calls (as emotional support, and as someone she could trust would get the right final answer), watching her torturously dragging herself through mandatory remidial physics and algebra classes that have never once been relevant to her professional endeavors, and I had a front-row seat to the frustration and exhaustion induced by learning disabilities on otherwise exceptional people. It takes her minutes to do problems I can do in my head - not because I'm any smarter, but because she literally can't read what the problem is asking without making symbol transposition/translation errors, and has to redo every problem about five times to arbitrate the inevitable failed attempts.
That extra time let her squeak through the remedial courses with a passing grade. Years later, she's now a successful practicing psychiatrist, and I'm confident that several of her needs-based clients would say she has utilized her education for the betterment of society.
I also don't think this had anything to do with our parents pushing parenting duties onto teachers. For all their other flaws, not once did they ever abdicate any parental responsibilities. They pushed for disability accommodations because they wanted my sister to be given a chance to prove herself, and spent years researching and trying different approaches, alongside private tutors and disability specialists, at great personal cost, to help my sister over her hump. And it worked! And if the schools didn't give her extra time on her tests, she would have flunked out of college and it would have all been for naught.
I agree that the disability accommodation system is full of parents making their children someone else's problem, and this is probably the majority of its use now. There's a level-headed argument to be made that the cost to society of exploiting that system is way more than the benefit for the handful of people like my sister. I just want to point out that there are people benefitting from disability accommodations in a way that doesn't encourage learned helplessness later in life.
A lot of people are jumping on this so I'll give my two cents as a diagnosed dyslexic. Only being privy to the one experience I cannot be totally sure if dyslexia is a real thing or not as I can't directly experience how others interact with words. I will say that I find reading long texts difficult and tedious, frequently needing to reread sections and losing my position while doing so. I never actually used my diagnosis besides getting some side lessons in elementary and middle school. I took the ACT without any help and my lowest section was actually science because I only completed about half of the questions within the time frame despite getting them all right. This probably resulted in getting less scholarships/into less prestigious colleges than I would have otherwise.
I think @blooblyblobl 's sister is probably fine as a doctor, it's not like you literally cannot focus and interpret text or that big proper nouns will get confused with each other. It's that as you try to read faster text gets kind of jumbled and you need to slow down and reread sections. There are plenty of coping mechanisms.
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I find it unsurprising and troubling that your sister went into psychiatry, the wooliest field of medicine which is least amenable to objective oversight (ie a bad psych can go unmolested for a long time in a way that a bad anæsthesiologist can not)
From the description you've provided it's... A bit horrifying that your sister is actually practicing as a doctor. I'm sure she says she "can do it", but look - there were plenty of conmen throughout the twentieth century who practiced as doctors, successfully, without any medical training. Even surgeons! And I'm sure plenty of their colleagues would have said they were fine doctors, not knowing about their absent/fraudulent qualifications. Many conmen did this for years and years!
The fact that your sister has not yet run into a situation where her incapacity causes some public disaster is meh.
If the description you've provided is accurate, she doesn't have the requisite mental equipment to be a doctor, and it's a serious indictment of whatever country's medical school she graduated from that she's practicing as one. Horrifying tbh
Without commenting on the sister in particular, I do find these sorts of stories ironically depressing.
"I suffer from severe [performance inhibiting condition], and yet through incredible perseverance, added efforts from friends, family, etc., a few convenient accommodations, and some really painful medical interventions, I was able to become a mediocre practitioner in [Career Field]!"
Like man, you had to ignore a lot of incentives, advice, and straight up warning signs to push through to become, at best, approximately as good as the average person who doesn't have your condition. When you might have ended up a lot happier just following the economic signals and going down a path that didn't require 5x the resources to produce 2/3 of the optimal outcome.
Like, imagine a 5'2" dude REALLY wanted to play in the NBA. So he does severe training regimens, he gets leg lengthening surgery, he has extensive coaching from ex-NBA stars, and finally, he manages to convince the NBA to let him wear stilts on the Court as an accommodation. And After all this, he makes it to the NBA and performs at a slightly below average level overall. Which is impressive for him! But that's a lot of resources spent to get the guy up to merely 'adequate' performance, which is to say he's not contributing much to the overall success, despite all the inputs required to get him there.
When the guy with that sort of willpower and drive could have found his true calling as a Horse Jockey at a much lower price for everyone.
Well, does our hypothetical manlet want to be a horse jockey? Would he find it fulfilling, compared to his strongly indicated preference of merely playing professional basketball?
I'm getting a takeaway of "if you don't have a realistic chance of being the best, or at least above average in your chosen field, you're doing the wrong thing pursuing it." I don't agree with this, even though I think we'd agree on a close converse of "if you could be the best, or above average at an occupation, it's not wrong to pursue it."
Is "contributing to the overall success [of the NBA]" as you put it expressed solely by players at the peak of natural talent and aptitude, or is there room for people doing "just OK, slightly below average, could've been amazing at something else" to keep the show going on? Like, sure it's not optimal, is it actually wrong in your estimation?
(Not to get totally sidetracked by the analogy, I think my line of questioning still tracks to the original topic at least.)
"Field Fillers" and Jobbers are a thing in the more entertainment-oriented sports, at least.
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I think, again, as matter of politics, of giving these kinds of helps when you could simply bend to the path that doesn’t require so many resources, I think there’s a point at which the public is not served by giving basketball lessons to short people. Lots of people don’t get to do the jobs they want, either from lack of ability, or poverty, or being born in the wrong region, or family culture. I think this is an immensely unreasonable approach to finding a career for a whole host of reasons starting with ability and leading through technological advancement, pay for the work, demand, and so on. If I want to be a dog walker, I can do so, but given the low wage, low demand, and the fact that a person can probably build a dog walking robot would make offering this as a job training program rather stupid — especially if the student is sitting in a wheelchair.
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I mean, if you know you’ll be quite bad at an important field lots of people want to go into, it seems quite selfish to insist on going in anyways.
It is probably better if everyone gets a living; that is not equal to everyone fulfilling their hopes and dreams. Sometimes your hopes and dreams are stupid.
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"If it will cost you 5000 hours of time and $200,000+ in 'extra' efforts to get to a particular position, it behooves you to figure out if the payoff is worthwhile." I can 'believe' that the extra utils the manlet gets from becoming an NBA player might pay off for him.
BUT... its not clear that he'll really be happier/better off/wealthier than he would have been going for a more directly attainable goal.
I don't want to imply that his only alternate choice is horse jockey. Flyweight MMA Champion of the World is absolutely on the table, for example. But if he decides he'd like to instead be the Heavyweight champion, should we celebrate his decision to on a massive regimen of steroids, get risky surgeries, and bulk himself up at the expense of his mental and physical wellbeing just so he can get outclassed by the 'natural' heavyweights?
What's the point?
Part of the secret to a happy/content life, I think, is 'setting realistic goals'. And in situations where your skill at a given job has other people's lives hanging in the balance, then yes, you really DO need to be especially good at it.
The nice thing about playing in the NBA is that individual screwups will almost never be fatal. We can 'afford' to indulge somebody's fantasies there without much collateral 'damage.'
But I wouldn't want an epileptic to become an airline pilot, even if they 'overcame the odds' to get through flight school and have hundreds of hours of successful flight time under their belts. (note, if a proven 'cure' for epilepsy existed, this would be a different situation). For the love of God just do not choose a career where a single incident can kill a hundred people!
That's fair and I think we're on the same page. Thank you for the elaboration. :)
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This seems clearly true for tournament professions, where only the best get a high payoff. If you have no chance of making it out of the NBA G-league, basketball probably isn't the field for you. If you have no chance of making it IN to the NBA G-league, it definitely isn't.
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Children take algebra in middle school. If we want our doctors to be the best, or even good, then we simply cannot have anyone who struggles with middle school mathematics as an adult. Questionable that someone who struggles with remedial algebra is in college, much less med school. How did she get in? Don't you have to take like the MCAT? Are you overselling here disability? You're describing a woman who can barely read...
oh god, she can't even read and shes a doctor prescribing medication. What if she needed to read it six times instead of five, would she even know? You're telling us she is incapable of deciphering words.
A disabled doctor. I'm glad your sister got to prove herself at the expense of the health of her patients. Good for her, I'm sure she is really self actualized.
I know this sounds really rude, but I don't know your sister. I know her through your words. And you have told me she is someone who can barely read, struggles with basic math, and also prescribes extremely vulnerable patients powerful medication. If what you're telling us is accurate, its just evil. Its your sister putting her aspirations over the health of her patients. No, your sister who can't read shouldn't be a doctor. How did she get through med school? Can she really not read?
I think it's far more likely that the person you're replying to is overstating or accidentally exaggerating the degree of disability here.
I have a hard time imagining someone who can't read becoming a doctor. Maths? The most that average doctors do is basic arithmetic or algebra that's middle school level.
I'm talking figuring out what x should be when when trying to divide doses or transform one unit of measurement to another. With a calculator at hand, and a willingness to redo sums multiple times, even someone with severe impairment would probably manage. These days, you can just look up doses for just about every drug under the sun online.
I struggle to think of any occasion I'd run into in clinical practise where I'd be expected to do more, if I was conducting a study or analyzing a research paper, I'd probably have to brush up my stats and maybe learn something that school or med school didn't teach me.
Funnily enough, I'm in psych training, and also have what could loosely be described as a learning difficulty in the form of ADHD. I never asked for nor received extra time or additional adjustments on the exams I had to clear, as far as the standardized tests in India were concerned, you had to be missing an arm or something to qualify for that. Google tells me that people with dysgraphia could get extra time, but I'll be damned if I heard of that ever happening, or anyone I ran into in my career who fit the bill.
Knowledge, both procedural and arcane, matter the most in med school. I'd hope that this lady had that, and had coping mechanisms that let her circumvent her issues. If she's made it this far, without being sued into oblivion, she can probably handle herself.
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Maybe she just has really low ability in maths but has otherwise fine working memory and similar.
Some people are like that.
And she can just use AI for maths.
Bad take, dude. AI makes lots of mistakes. How is she supposed to discover them?
Deepseek R1 is surely better at maths than most people on this forum and doubtless far superior to this doctor: https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1i5r85h/deepseekr1_scored_100_on_a_2023_a_levels/
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I have a general concern about people who "literally can't read what the problem is asking without making symbol transposition/translation errors" doing work that requires understanding complex medical literature and prescribing minute quantities of similarly named drugs where there's no check on their work (other than the dispensing pharmacist perhaps noticing something looks weird). I feel for your sister's difficulty in school and I'm glad she's been successful, but it makes me wonder if it is wise for us to provide these accommodations for academic testing when the job is going to require those skills to function at a certain level, and the only thing anyone has to go by for hiring is the credential.
(This generalizes to a lot of other problems with credentialing and affirmative action and so forth, but the subject of your post brought it into sharp relief for me.)
His sister is a psychiatrist not pharmacist
Whoops, I guess this is what happens when I post when sleep deprived
TBF those two words are very similar and easily confused if your brain happens to like... swap some letters around.
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To whom would you rather trust your well-being:
I think you are significantly overestimating the scope of the problem - her failure mode was losing points for questions she did not have time to answer, as opposed to answering questions wrongly, on a timed test with pencil and paper. This is demonstrably not a representative model of the real world, in which computers, colleagues, and the spoken word exist, variables may be named at one's pleasure, operators correspond to explicit and distinct positions on the keyboard, and you get at least half a decade of extra practice before they let you loose on the unsuspecting populace. Today, her learning disabilities are effectively non-issues; in fact, her meticulousness means she tends to catch mistakes made by others as well (which has made for some colorful stories).
It is precisely this kind of tractable problem, which only really exists in a pedagogical spherical-cow setting, that requires accommodations, as opposed to nebulous claims of racial or mental victimhood from the lazy, the conniving, or the otherwise unqualified comprising the median. The challenge, as it has always been, is telling them apart. Again, there's an argument to be made that it's not worth it to try, and it may even be a good one. But it's not open-and-shut.
I'm genuinely very curious, being also a medical professional, how a person who "literally can't read [text] without making symbol transposition/translation errors" could read medical histories and patient documentation, or keep up with new literature. I could not do my job if I was dyslexic to that level, or at least I would be performing much more inefficiently.
If there's some sort of intervention that "cures" the dyslexia so much so that word and sentence recognition and parsing becomes "native" or at the very least second nature, that would make sense -- but I am to understand that dyslexia isn't really "curable". Or if psychiatrists to read very little medical documentation, which...seems incorrect to me in experience.
Open to be wrong, I don't have any experience with this personally.
One of my coworkers is a PhD in computer science with dyslexia. When he reads academic papers he puts them on a screen using a plugin which colors every word a different color. His output is pretty good, so it must work for him. But he also is in the top 5% of extroversion for software engineers, presumably making up for some of that tough paper reading with social connections.
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There are lots of ways to read and write text other than the default font by unaided eye. There are laptops and stuff. If you have access to windows, check out the Ease of Access Center for the freebies.i
Hm. I was thinking more paper charts, but I suppose if there are fonts in a digital system that works.
I was also under the impression that dyslexic fonts don’t have a great track record, but if it works for someone…
Now I wonder if there is a difference in difficulty reading for dyslexics when they have to read from an alphabet or syllabary vs when they read from a logographic script.
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Weighted fonts are one method by which things can be made easier on dyslexics. Notably, Comic Sans is surprisingly useful as one in a pinch, though still beaten out by purpose-built fonts.
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Yes, the whole theoretical point of academic tests is to be an objective measure of the capacity of students. Because when you go out and get a real job, you have to actually be able to do that job. If these remedial courses aren't necessary for being a psychiatrist, then there should be a path to becoming a practicing psychiatrist that doesn't require them. If they ARE necessary, then lightening the requirements because, gosh, you can't satisfy the requirements but really want to graduate ends up causing harm later on in life.
I mean, these classes are far from the only example of things you don’t need. We make doctors get bachelors degrees that require literature and history classes for essentially class reasons.
I do always think of the local-ish story of the Native American law student forced to take math classes at ASU. Now, sure, depending on the specific field of law, math may actually prove to be a useful skill to have, but I could probably imagine some areas of law where it's not really necessary.
Hard to properly and believably inflate your billable hours when you can't do math.
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Other peer countries (culturally and economically) don’t, though, it’s solely a peculiarity of the American college system.
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I've seen a few of these in my life (both personally and as a treating physician) and have a few coworkers who meet this description. The classic example is boys who are a little too male for our current teaching paradigms. Think poor behavioral regulation or ADHD. If they have a supportive home environment and intellectual reserve it is very possible they'll stay out of just enough trouble/troubling behavioral patterns for their frontal lobe to develop and adequate coping skills/treatment to come into play.
Then they end up being productive members of society.
The American problem is the lack of sufficient home support for this to gracefully happen, then they fall out of society. School alone is pretty ineffective at covering that but you do need both.
I had all the classic traits of childhood ADHD : Loud mouth yapper, easily distracted and stress-driven ultra focus. Home support alone could not have saved me. My parents had no idea what they were dealing with. The problem wasn't caused by them either. I got the same standard strict-south-Asian upbringing that turned my peers & cousins turned into compliant adults.
School should provide initial resources to help students understand their quirks. The 0->1 step can be huge, and that's where schools have the most impact. Additionally, schools see 100s of kids a year. They're best equipped to pattern match the student to their unique quirks.
Some kids can't be a fixed by parents alone.
I suspect the same. My dad was a know-it-all Tarzan incarnate. He was always outdoors and would spend his summer in forests (literally) collecting dead butterflies & hunting rabbits. ADHD is passed down dad-to-son, and I suspect he had it too. But back in his day, he could could get all his physical energy out. I grew up in a school without a yard. Sports were banned. The contrast couldn't be starker.
I've recently found drums to be the best way to exhaust ADHD energy. Strongly recommend. That's a couple of positive anecdotes towards - "ADHD people need something to exhaust their physical energy on".
Agreed. As much as school can help equip parents and do the 101, the rest of the struggle is on the parents & the child. The school can't be handholding the child through 12 years of special education. It's not sustainable. (I can feel a suburban-sprawl / car-culture / death of community rant welling up in me. Imma shut up)
With all that being said, ADHD meds are a game changer and should be viewed as complementary to behavioral interventions.
The first time I took Vyvanse, I was bewildered by new abilities that my siblings & friends insisted all normal people are able to do without extra meds. Most importantly, the meds got my life in order so that I could spare time for learning good habits. The meds helped me follow routines, and my body started learning discipline meds-or-not. Nowadays, I skip my meds on the regular and can still salvage 70% day in a way that I never could before. I wish I'd gotten started 20 years ago. Even if I'd weaned off them, school and college would've been manageable. I would've had fewer struggles with bullying, basic orderliness and studying subjects that my ADHD brain had deemed uninteresting.
Yes!
People with a good enough "life" (genetics, money, family support, intellectual reserve, whatever) can often do well or age out with enough time to establish "normal" life patterns and for some general brain development.
Even anti-socials often age out of a lot of the bad behavior.
Institutions that help with this can work! ...but are not always worth the costs.
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I was one of those who made it. My snappy way of putting it is that I don't have to thank a teacher for being able to read but I do have to thank a Head Start speech therapist for being able to talk.
I wound up back in special ed as a Kindergartener for bad behavior/ADHD. There were IEPs, some of them were farcical. At some point they had me IQ tested and decided that I was "talented and gifted" (I have a severe loathing for that term, because my sister wasn't, and our mother wrecked her for failing to match that.). Supportive home environment? Not really, though my grandparents were great. It was a lot like Hillbilly Elegy with the characters and dysfunctions shuffled, maybe a bit worse. I did have the intellectual reserve to get away with being a terribly lazy/inefficient student. Even in the worst of times, there was this weird dichotomy where I was this awful pain in the ass kid, but also the kid who could and was glad to fix their computers (mostly dumb issues like "this isn't plugged in", but I wound up working as an assistant for the computer lab in place of study hall and was pretty good at basic PC troubleshooting and repair). I'm not proud of this in retrospect, but the elementary teachers got variable results out of me. The ones who were able to elicit my affection/desire to please instead of resentment through failed attempts to intimidate generally got along fine with me. Odd as it may seem given how much I hated school, I remember all of them fondly.
If I have to credit anyone for my successful reform, it was my middle school and in particular grades 6-8 teachers. They were a bunch of veterans who more or less ran their own show independent of the office, and were thus able/willing to strike their own bargain without involving the office or my mother. They were tough and strict, but fair, and never took anything personally. The bargain was simple: "We catch you breaking the rules, you suffer the punishment.". I liked leaning back in my chair (against the rules), so I incurred a bunch of glossary pages (to the point that I still remember the page number, 746) and paddlings, but it wasn't personal. I was released from special ed by 7th grade and upon graduating 8th grade the vice principal, my old nemesis, called me his "greatest success story". I was privileged as a high school student (in a "math and science" boarding school) to have the opportunity to go back and help the elementary literacy teacher set up her computers before each school year. I was a pain in the ass student; it was the least I could've done.
Am I a success? Eh...I'm not dead or in jail as I was expected to be. Did I live up to my college education? Also no. I rode an easy gravy train (locally owned food delivery company) after being a crippled alcoholic in my early 20s. The gravy train ended and I'm trying to figure out what's next. I'm not optimistic, but I'm not ready to give up yet.
As for ADHD, I mostly don't notice it as an adult unless I'm badly emotionally regulated (lol where does PTSD end and ADHD begin?) or in an unfamiliar situation where I haven't been able to set up a construct to work around it. At my best (owner's crony/best producer at a food delivery company) I am actually very structured and relentlessly organized/detail oriented.
In my current gig (draft beer repair/service technician) I am lauded for my excellent communication skills because I take the time to document/explain what I'm doing to on-site managers. I don't feel like I'm doing anything special, just explaining to the customer what I'm doing/need to do, and why that is, essentially telling them what they're paying for and why they need this or that thing done.
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I mean, on the one hand, I'm with you 100% about the school system treating young boys like defective girls. But if the problem is a fundamentally matriarchal school system that doesn't understand boys needs for physical activity, hands on learning, and stern discipline, I'm not sure more matriarchal bureaucracy is the answer.
IIRC from my deep dive into ADHD skepticism-
some cases of ADHD diagnosis are actually hearing or vision related issues that will resolve themselves, and these are very common in elementary school aged boys. Experienced elementary teachers tend to have lower rates of ADHD diagnoses in their classes because they deal with these by adjusting the seating chart first, and that’s usually enough to route around the problem.
ADHD diagnoses are much higher in boys born just after the age cutoff than in boys born just before it- that is, cases are concentrated among the youngest boys in a given class.
ADHD as a thing that the system worries about is globally correlated with treating elementary school in a seriously academic way, with grades, homework, etc. The US is a global outlier in both respects.
The medications in use improve focus and make behavior easier at the cost of side effects regardless of ADHD; teachers are strongly incentivized to get kids on them to make their jobs easier, and they deliver higher grades anyways, so parents usually don’t complain. Doctors who always make the diagnosis and write the scrip are known to the school systems and sometimes recommended by them.
Countries which don’t think ADHD is real are doing fine academically.
The TDLR is that there’s a lot of things going into the ADHD overdiagnosis issue beyond ‘why don’t I have a classroom full of girls’ moaning by teachers.
Do you have more info on countries that don't diagnose ADHD? This seems like the kind of thing that is very culture bound in a fascinating way.
I can remember that France was one, I think, but this is all memories from a deep dive several years ago. I concluded that while ADHD probably is real, most cases are some other issue being misdiagnosed and it shouldn’t be considered a possibility before high school. Oh, and I remembered that the diagnosis patterns by ethnicity don’t match any of the usual patterns- blacks get the least but Asians don’t have an elevated rate, it’s a whites and Indians(both kinds) thing.
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I mean I'm just here to say it works SOMETIMES.
I suspect that part of the problem is the refusal to give up on anybody leaving everyone behind, as is common elsewhere.
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I can testify there to the case of one of my own family members, who was sick as a child and benefited from such programs, he teetered on the verge of dropping off society because of difficulties caused by his impairment, but managed to remain on the good side of things and now holds a respectable job that he enjoys and is good at.
His parents' valiant efforts should get most of the credit, but I do think total academic failure would have pushed him over the line, and into drugs and crime.
I can also say that I have seen people exploit the system in sometimes disgusting ways, but people whom these things truly help exist, and I know so.
Fake special needs people exist and are a problem, perhaps too much of a problem for these programs to continue existing as they do, but real special needs people also exist, and dealing with them can sadly be a nightmare for everyone involved if the system is too rigid.
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This is the way. It's absolutely asinine to me that so many parents think it's the schools' job to raise their kids for them. But you're 100% correct, it's your job not theirs. Even the teachers hate it - my wife's family has several teachers in it, and they complain about how students' parents act as though they are supposed to be fixing kids' behavioral issues. They would rather just dump it off on the school rather than, you know, being a parent.
Surely it's both? The schools have control over the children 8h a day, time during which they interact with their peers. This is very likely the most important part of the day for socialisation and a part that the parents can't really influence much.
Of course the parents play an important role but so does the school. It's a collective responsibility.
This makes a lot of sense - if the children are at school most of the day, then the school has to be an ally in making sure they turn out properly. Traditional English schools (Eton, Winchester, Westminster) have always seen it as their responsibility to build character. It does result in a certain level of conformity of course.
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No, and don't call me Shirley.
As a parent your kids are ultimately your responsibility, your investment in the future of humanity. No one else can be expected to care more about thier future/individual well-being than you.
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I'd say that the school's responsibility is subservient to the parents' responsibility. The parents have a sort of "natural" responsibility over the child, in part due to being the ones to voluntarily create the child and to keep the child. As such, it's the parent's responsibility to actually check if the school is doing a decent enough job at raising their child during the 8 hours a day the child is there and, if not, to correct it in some way, whether that be changing schools, changing the way the school treats the child, making up at home for the school's failures, etc. It's like how some company's R&D department might be the responsibility of the vice president in charge of that or whatever, but it's ultimately the CEO's responsibility to make sure that the company has a system in place to hire a competent person for that role and to make sure that that person is performing that role competently, and so any failure of the R&D department is ultimately due to a failure of the CEO.
After all, parents also tend to have much more skin in the game for the child than the school, since the child doesn't stop being their child once they graduate, though the child does stop being the school's student. And generally, the relationship between the child and parent tends to be more sustained in the long term than the relationship between the child and the school he went to when he was a child. So from a purely selfish, narcissistic perspective, a parent would want to consider himself the responsible party, since if the school fails in raising the child right, the negative consequences fall more on the parent than on the school.
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No, when you're a parent the buck stops with you. The school can be your ally in raising your kids, but they are not the responsible party.
There are multiple responsible parties. The parents are the primary responsible party but the school is another.
I disagree. The parents are the only responsible party when it comes to raising the kid. The school is responsible for education, but they don't bear responsibility if the kid turns out to be a drug dealer or something.
To some degree this is cultural, and the vehemence here on both sides can be attributed to cultural assumptions.
In Japan the school is very much (I was going to put a percent on it but that would be pushing it) charged with raising the children. If you see a kid out in the world pulling some jackass stunt, the question "What is your school and who is your home teacher?" is enough to chill their veins. You don't ask "Who's your dad?"
Enculturation in the Japanese sense cannot occur outside the context of the group, so it is within the group (i.e. the school group[s]) that this process occurs, year by year, from a very very young age.
To some degree this is how one can understand the term "bullying" in Japan. There are of course exceptions, but bullying here is largely when you have a kid who for whatever reason just doesn't toe the line after years of having the rules dinned into his or her brain. (There could of course be all sorts of reasons for this.) So you have an entire class, not just one punk, turning against a student. Bullying here is not one monster terrorizing a class, but a class "terrorizing" one individual.
Teachers here, in particular in primary and secondary education, for the most part (of course I am writing generally) take the job of raising the children (子どもを育てる) as an explicit part of their jobs. In the cases of troubled students (think fighting in school, but also just basic withdrawal) meetings are held, and there is a great deal of discussion and handwringing, often in absurd ways and resulting in very odd strategies. If a kid makes up his or her mind to just rebel, schools will eventually go through with expulsion. And compulsory education only lasts through age 15, or the first year or so of high school.
I've probably overwritten this. I am aware it's different in the US, where people have specific ideas of parenting, self-expression, individuality, and personal choice.
It seems relevant that in the UK you have different classes for each subject whereas AFAIK in Japan you’re with the same group all day every day.
I think, anyway, my memories of school are faded.
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School might not be directly liable for long term consequences like someone eventually becoming a drug dealer but they are legally responsible and liable for most of what happens in school, extending far beyond just education.
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