week 8 pre reading

A learning disability is, “a condition giving rise to difficulties in acquiring knowledge and skill to the normal level expected to those of the same age.” To be mentally retarded is to be mentally delayed, like having the brain of a two month old in a ten year old body. Also to be emotionally disturbed means to be any mental disorder not caused by detectable organic abnormalities of the brain and in which a major disturbance of emotions is predominant. These categories are specialized towards people with special needs who are behind on where they need to be mentally, therefore being put into special programs at school. These programs consist of students who would fall under the three categories and are put together in one classroom where a teacher of sorts attends to their special needs. To explain how people of color are over-represented in special needs programs is difficult. They way I look at it, we can refer back to privileges, or in this case lack there of. Lets say we have a poor lower class asian family living in a rural area where it is douced with radiation, or infestation and you have a pregnant young girl living in these conditions. Malnutrition to the baby can lead to serious implications. In relating these learning disablities in people, we have to go back to as early as the person bing developed in the mothers whomb. We can take into account the people of color are generally living in bad conditions where environmental factors can lead to a learning disablity or due to low income and high demand for providing for the family, we can include the lack of being able to provide necessary things that are beneficial to the development of a normal baby to the equation. I also find it interesting on how some people who dont necessarily know how to speak, read and write english have to take a test in english to prove they are “normal.” Just like when we had the guest speaker this past wendsday hand out questionairs in differnet languages that most of us could'nt understand and decided to either not answer or take a wild guess at what it was trying to ask us. This scenario is very realistic to many and can determin how their lives will proceed in the case of being placed in a special needs program or not. Thats just crazy! We need to put ourselves in their shoes in that sort of situation more often to realize how we tend to assume that because you are poor or an immigrant and dont speak great english or have access to basic neccesties, doesn't mean you are less of a person than what the normal is.

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