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Children Should Get Tested for Learning Differences

Janet Ruth Heller urges parents to have their children tested for learning differences in the article “A Decision of Whether to Be Diagnosed or Not,” now live at https://www.learningsuccesssystem.com/tips/decision-whether-be-diagnosed-or-not 

This essay was posted on February 25, 2018 on the website Learning Success.

Here is some of my advice:

I feel strongly that all children should be tested for learning differences like dyslexia before they enter school. If a child has a valid dyslexia diagnosis, the family can request that the child get extra time for tests, be able to use a computer for tests, etc. The dyslexia diagnosis can also help teachers and professors to understand and work more effectively with an individual child. Without knowing whether or not a child has dyslexia, a teacher does not understand the cause of spelling problems or reading problems. Children with dyslexia are not lazy, sloppy writers or readers: these children’s mistakes result from the unique way that their brains process information.

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Janet Ruth Heller

I am the past president of the Michigan College English Association. I have a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago. I have published four poetry books: Nature's Olympics (Wipf and Stock, 2021), Exodus (WordTech Communications, 2014), Folk Concert: Changing Times (Anaphora Literary Press, 2012) and Traffic Stop (Finishing Line Press, 2011). My scholarly book, Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and the Reader of Drama, was published in 1990 by the University of Missouri Press. My fiction picture book about bullying for children, How the Moon Regained Her Shape (Arbordale, 2006; 7th edn. 2022), has won four national awards. My play The Cell Phone won fourth place in a national contest and was performed twice at the Fenton Village Players One-Act Play Festival on June 24-25, 2011 in Fenton, Michigan. Triton College produced another play, Pledging, as part of its Tritonysia Play Festival in May 2017. Choeofpleirn Press published Pledging in Rushing Through the Dark (2022).