posted July 17, 2009 10:38 PM         

quote:

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When I read the Bhagavad-Gita and reflect about how God created this universe everything else seems so superfluous.
- Albert Einstein

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posted October 28, 2009 11:14 PM         

It serves you right to defend them, I am not going to say more, it's crystal clear "

VirgOh,

I didn't read the whole thread. I just read the aforementioned stuff for the first time.

Therefore,I felt the need to defend myself and to make myself crystal clear which I thought that I already did in the first place.

No...it's not crystal clear. I am not an idiot that I doesn't know that it was a crack at me.

Your remarks come off a bit patronizing,condescending,and snobbish.

The reason why I said those things in my previous post is that the education system is flawed. It's mainly auditory sequential teaching methods that are in the schools. Many students aren't auditory sequential learners just like I am not.

Many people with learning differences like Dyslexia,Dyspraxia,ADHD (it depends on the overlapping traits/symptoms and the severity of them) have problems with education systems. I was in special education for 3 years before of the severity of my traits/symptoms. I had to get auditory,therapy,speech therapy,phonics training,and motor skills therapy to be competent with language and coordination. A lot of people are like me in that way. At least 1/5 of the population have some type of neuro-divergence.

any ways, if education catered to all types of learners and not just auditory sequential learners, more people would graduate from school. The drop-out rate would decrease. A majority of people that drop out from school have learning differences like Dyslexia. Many gifted also have dropped out of high school. What makes it more complicated is that my people with learning differences are gifted too. In special education system,that's called
"twice exceptional".

also to add to my points:

For Adults >
Learning Disabilities and Low Income Populations

Failure to succeed in school and poor social skills can result in long-term problems for individuals with learning disabilities. Chronic unemployment or underemployment is all too common. To understand and to effectively manage job training or financial assistance programs, it is wise to keep the need for adult literacy programming and social skills training in mind.

Here are a few facts about the relationship between learning disabilities and low income populations:

* 62% of students with learning disabilities were unemployed one year after graduation.

* 35% of students identified with learning disabilities drop out of high school � twice the rate of their non-LD peers.

* The U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice found that �LD youth were twice as likely to be judged delinquent by the courts than non-LD youth� as a result of inability to repeat their stories correctly, inability to follow sequences, inability to answer demand questions or to be declared oppositional.

* 65.4% of households in which family members report having specific learning disabilities have an annual income of less than $25,000 as compared with 38.8% of the general population.

* Difficulty with reading comprehension and following a systematic birth control plan are among the top reasons teenage girls identified for NOT using birth control aids

* 50% of females with learning disabilities will be mothers (many of them single) within one year of leaving school.

* Within Washington state�s 1997 welfare caseload, 54% had learning disabilities; 35% were classified as �slow learners;� 14% had mental retardation and 5% have other learning needs.

* Substance addictions and learning disabilities are the most common impediments to keeping welfare clients from attaining and maintaining employment.

* 60% of adults with severe literacy problems have previously undetected or untreated learning disabilities.
http://www.ldanatl.org/aboutld/adults/special_pop/low_income.asp

there is more:

What are the Consequences

The consequences of not intervening early in a child's academic career are devastating for the individual, as well as society. Scholastic defeat leading to low self-esteem, high dropout rates, high teen-suicide rates, chronic unemployment and incarceration are well-documented results of delayed or ignored identification and treatment of learning differences.

Clearly, there is an urgent need for comprehensive, early-intervention programs to salvage this vast number of under-served students, and development of a more effective system of reading acquisition that will nurture fluent readers. Fluency in reading is the heart of academic success, and learning disabilities are the heart of 80 percent of reading problems. Other disabilities, such as Attention Deficit Disorder and Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder, also contribute significantly to academic failure.

As we know, the spiraling effects of reading and learning failure have a profound effect on society.

* Reading disabilities account for 80% of all learning disabilities. (Source: Kennedy-Krieger Institute)
* 35% of children with learning disabilities drop out of high school. (Source: Nat'l Longitudinal Transition Study)
* 50% of juvenile delinquents have undetected learning disabilities. (Source: Educational Testing Service Report)
* 60% of adolescents in treatment for substance abuse are learning disabled. (Source: NICHD/Hazeldon Foundation)
* 62% of learning disabled kids are unemployed one year after graduating high school. (Source: Wagner's 1991 National Longitudinal Study)
* 25% of the young-adult population lacks the basic literacy skills required in a typical job. (Source: United States Office of Technology)
* Learning disabilities and substance abuse are the most common impediments to keeping welfare recipients from becoming and remaining employed. (Source: Office of the Inspector General)
* Approximately 50% of criminal offenders have learning disabilities. (Source: Dr. Nancy Cowardin, American Bar Association)
* 31% of learning disabled kids are arrested within three to five years after they leave school. (Source: Wagner's, 1991 National Longitudinal Study)
* The average cost of special education is less than $10,000 per child per year. The cost of locking up a criminal offender is $31,000 per year. (Source: U.S. Department of Justice and Santa Clara County Office of Education)
* Language-based learning disabilities are costing society $7.5 billion annually. (Source: The Dana Consortium; 1999)
http://www.haan4kids.org/ld/stats.html

Raymond

------------------
"Nothing matters absolutely;
the truth is it only matters relatively"

posted October 28, 2009 11:18 PM         

Thomas Jefferson was arguably one of the most well-educated Americans of his time. He was well-read, thoughtful, knowledgeable in a wide variety of topics from the arts to the sciences,and the founder of the University of Virginia. The same could probably be said of Ben Frankllin, or James and Dolly Madison. On the larger world stage, we could credibly make such claims for Rene Descartes, William Shakespeare, Galileo, Michelangelo, and Plato.

Buter this one thing unique about the education of all these people, which is different from that of you, me, and our children: none ever were given grades. All attended schools or had teachers who worked entirely on a pass/fail system.

The model of education from its earliest times was one of mentorship, starting with hunter-gatherers taking children out on the hunt 100,000 years ago, all the way up to the teaching methods employed at the university founded by Thomas Jefferson. The teacher and the students got know one another. They interacted constantly throughout the day. The teacher knew each child, had a clear vision of each child's understanding of the coursework, and worked with each child (or encouraged them to work with each other) until the teacher was satisfied each child understood the material...or was hopelessly incapable of being educated. Because this latter was virtually an admission of failure on the part of the teacher, it happened rarely.

When a student graduated, the most impressive thing she or he could share with prospective employer was not a Grade Point Average (GPA) or even the name of the institution attended: it was the name of the teacher. Students of the great teachers of history often became famous themselves because of thoroughness with which their mentors had inculcated knowledge, understanding, skill, and talen in them.

This is how things went from 98,000 BC to roughly 1800 AD. Then name Wailliam Farish.

Around the turn of the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution was going full-bore. Piece-work payments were becoming increasingly popular, and many schools were beginning to pay teachers based on the number of students they had, as opposed to a flat salary.

William Farish

William Farish was a tutor at Cambridge University in England in 1792, and, other than his single contribution to the subsequent devastation of generations of schoolchildren, is otherwise undistinguished and unknown by most people.

Getting to know his students, one may suppose, was too much trouble for Parish. It meant work, interacting and participating daily with each child. It meant paying attention to their needs, to their understanding, to their styles of learning. It mean there was a limit on the number of students he could thus get to know, and therefore a limit on how much money he could earn.

So Farish came up with a method of teaching which would allow him to process more students in a shorter period of time. He invented grades. (The grading system had originated earlier in the factories, as a way of determining if the shoes, for example, made on the assembly line were "up to grade." It was used as a benchmark to determine if the workers should be paid, and if the shoes could be sold.)

Grades did not make students smarter. In fact, they had the opposite effect: they made it harder for those children to succeed who style of learning didn't match the didactic, auditory form of lecture-teaching Farish used.

Grades didn't give students deeper insights into their topics of study. Instead, grades forced children to memorize by rote only those details necessary to pass the tests, without regard to true comprehension of the subject matter.

Grades didn't encourage critical thinking or insight skills, didn't promote questioning minds. Such behaviors are useless in the graded classroom, and within a few generations were considered so irrelevant that today they're no longer listed among the goals of public education.

Grades didn't stimulate the students, or share with them a contagious love for the subject being studied. The opposite happened, in fact, as the normative effect of grades acted as a muffling blanket to any eruptions of enthusiasm, any attempts to dig deeper into a topic, any discursions into larger significance or practical application of content.

What grades did do, however, was increase the salary of William Farish, while, at the same time, lowering his workload and reducing the hours he needed to burrow into his students' minds to know if they understood a topic: his grading system would do it for him. And it would do it just as efficiently for twenty children as it would for two hundred.

Farish brought grades to the classroom, and the transformation was both sudden and startling: a revolution as rapid and overwhelming as the Industrial Revolution from which it had sprung. Within a generation, the lecture-hall/classroom shifted from a place where on heard the occasional speech by a famous thinker to the place of ordinary daily instruction.

While grades didn't help students a bit--and, in fact, had the now well-known effect of "dumbing down" entire nations--they vastly simplified the work of teachers and schools. So they spread across Europe and to America with startling speed, arriving here in early 1800s.

Without grades, the assembly-line-classroom would not be possible. With grades, whole categories of children were discovered who didn't fit onto the conveyer belt, providing an entire new realm of employment for adults who would diagnose, treat, and remediate these newly-discovered "learning disabled" children.

Responsibility for the success of learning shifted from teachers to students: when kids failed, it was their own fault, because they obviously had a defect or disorder of some sort.

A processs of sorting and discarding the misfits began (just like in the shoe factory) which, to this day, rewards the "standard" and wounds the "different."

William Farish gained, but something precious was lost to generations of students thereafter: the mentored learning experience.

Research by Child Development Theorist Linda Kreger Silverman suggests that less than 30% of the population strongly uses visual/spatial thinking, another 45% uses both visual/spatial thinking and thinking in the form of words, and 25% thinks exclusively in words. According to Kreger Silverman, of the 30% of the general population who use visual/spatial thinking, only a small percentage would use this style over and above all other forms of thinking, and can be said to be 'true' "picture thinkers"

According to L.K.Silverman's research for over two decades, there is a high confidence (over 80%) that:

* At least one-third are strongly visual-spatial.
* One-fifth are strongly auditory-sequential.
* The remainder are a balance of both learning styles.

Of that remainder (who are not strongly visual-spatial nor strongly auditory-sequential):

* Another 30% show a slight preference for visual-spatial learning style.
* Another 15% show a slight preference for auditory-sequential learning style.

This means that more than 60% of the students in a regular classroom learn best with visual-spatial presentations and the rest learn best with auditory-sequential methods. http://psychology.wikia.com/wiki/Visual_thinking

To sum is up, schools use to be all about mentoring, one-on-on interaction between the student and teaching,adapting to the student's learning style. There were no grades which were based on factory systems. They were pass/fail. Mainstream schools involve auditory lecturing teaching, but it is only suitable for less than 40 percent of students in the regular classroom. If schools were like the schools before the 1800, the diagnosess of learning disabled,ADHD as well as the dropout rate would be considerably smaller. To address the students that are truly learning disabled (or should I say learning differenced),there are special education therapies that can address those things like auditory therapy,speech therapy,motor skills therapy. That's what special education programs are for. They are not just for children that are mentally retarded.

Raymond

------------------
"Nothing matters absolutely;
the truth is it only matters relatively"

posted October 28, 2009 11:50 PM         

Learning disabilities often lead to long-lasting psychological harm unless they are caught early, says a study being released today by the Learning Disabilities Association of Canada.

But many kids slip through undiagnosed, it says, leaving them unable to function later in life.

The study found that depression, anxiety, and unemployment are significantly more common in people with learning disabilities than in those without.

Philippa Slater, B.C. representative of the learning disabilities association, said the findings confirmed what many people involved with learning disabilities have known for years.

"The impact is huge," Slater said. "These kids don't graduate, they're under or unemployed, they try so hard to succeed but they can't. A lot of teenagers with learning disabilities commit suicide because they can't handle it."

The saddest part, said Slater, is that these outcomes are so preventable.

"It's so easy to help these kids," Slater said. "They have great potential but because of their learning disability they can't fulfil that potential. With early intervention and accommodation, they could overcome those barriers and be equal to their peers."

Slater said early intervention and help have been hard to come by since provincial funding for learning disabilities assistance was cut in 2001.

The study found 29 per cent of parents with learning disabled kids said their children needed learning aids or services but they could not afford them.

The study authors proposed a number of changes to help the learning disabled, including mandatory early screening.

"There has been a great deal of research that shows screening in kindergarten can accurately predict whether or not a child will have future reading disabilities," said Fran Thompson, past president of the B.C. branch of the International Dyslexia Association. "The key is we can predict their troubles and help them before they fail."

Between five and 10 per cent of children aged six to 15 have a learning disability. The study found that approximately half of those children go undiagnosed.

The usual test for learning disabilities is a psycho-educational assessment, which requires a psychologist and costs $1,500 to $2,000.

But Thompson says University of B.C. professor Linda Siegel has recently developed a screening program that costs $1,000 per kindergarten classroom.

The study also recommended that teacher training require courses on detecting and teaching for learning disabilities. Rickie Sugars, a 30-year-old with a learning disability diagnosed when he was 12, agrees with the recommendation.

"Trying to deal with learning disabled kids through trial and error is hard for teachers, so in the long run, training would make things easier for them," he said.

"And what impact does trial and error have on the child? It hurts. I can attest to that."

Sugars was glad the study proved the connection between learning disabilities and poor mental health.

"There is a large majority of people with learning disabilities who struggle their whole lives because of it," he said. "The confidence, the self-control, and the respect they didn't learn as a child can cause a lot of grief in terms of fitting into society properly."

The study, called Putting A Face On Learning Disabilities, used Statistics Canada survey data to determine how learning disabilities affected people's lives. Researchers also conducted focus groups with adults and children with learning disabilities, as well as with parents of learning-disabled kids.

They found learning disabilities made children less likely to succeed in school, and made adults less likely to have graduated or be employed, and more likely to report suicidal thoughts, depression, or anxiety.
http://www.canada.com/topics/bodyandhealth/story.html?id=b9d2dbb7-f6d1-408d-a9f1-411162f2952c&k=66040

Raymond

------------------
"Nothing matters absolutely;
the truth is it only matters relatively"

posted October 29, 2009 12:01 AM         

Robert Moyzis, professor of biological chemistry, and his colleagues studied genes from 600 individuals worldwide. Among numerous new genetic variations of the receptor for the dopamine neurotransmitter, they found one linked strongly to both ADHD and a behavior trait called "novelty seeking," a condition often underlying addiction. Their analysis of the genetic variations also suggests that this variation occurred recently in human evolution between 10,000 and 40,000 years ago.

Between 10,000 and 40,000 years ago, anthropologists concur that humans were developing the first signs of complex societies, replete with agriculture, rudimentary governments and the creation of cities for the first time. Humans also were rapidly expanding and exploring the planet. These revolutionary changes in human societies may have changed the forces that selected for certain genetic traits.

"Our data show that the creation of the 7R allele was an unusual, spontaneous mutation, which became an advantage for humans," Moyzis said. "Because it was an advantage, the gene became increasingly prevalent. This is very different from other genes that predispose to genetic disorders, where the mutations are detrimental. We believe this helps explain why a disorder with such a strong genetic association is so common today." http://www.healthcare.uci.edu/news_releases.asp?filename=ADHD-advantageousGene.htm

I want to point out that even though DRD4 7R gene is strongly connected to ADHD with approximately half of ADHDers having DRD4 7R gene, it doesn't mean that all nor most DRD4 7R gene people have ADHD. Many DRD4 7R gene people aren't diagnosed as having ADHD, and it could be for a variety of reasons like not dealing with the public school system and were in schools like Montessori,Waldorf,and Sudsbury. They could have been homeschooled. They could have learned a lot of discipline,especially if they got spanked by their parents a lot. Some might have been viewed as troublemakers,delinquents. Some might even be misdiagnosed Bipolar. Some might even been thought of as "he's just one of those Tom Sawyer-like boys,Huckleberry Finn-like boys"
Some might have found outlets to channel their DRD4 7R traits. Some of those could be sports like football,track n' field,swimming,hockey,and basketball. They could also have been involved in creative,artistic outlets. There are numerous reasons that DRD4 7R gene types aren't diagnosed as having ADHD. Even neurodivergent conditions that tend to be comorbid with ADHD could mask the DRD4 7R gene traits like Dyslexia and Dyspraxia. The more severe the Dyslexia,Dyspraxia (especially if having both), the more likely they will be viewed as having disordered and placed in special education classes which tend to have negative stigma attached to them, being known by many as "retard classes".

page 4 - 5 THE EDISON GENE ADHD And The Gift Of The Hunter Child by Thom Hartmann

What exactly defines those bearing this genetic makeup? Edison-gene children and adults are by nature

Enthusiastic
Creative
Disorganized
Non-linear in their thinking (they leap to new conclusions or observations)
Innovative
Easily distracted (or,to put it differently, easily attracted to new stimuli)
Capable of extraordinary hyperfous
Understanding of what it means to be an "outsider"
Determined
Eccentric
Easily Bored
Impulsive
Entrepreneurial
Energetic

All of these qualities lead them to be natural:

Explorers
Inventors
Discoverers
Leaders

I also a believe that just because a person has a brain difference doesn't mean that they have a disorder. Just because a person has a chemical difference doesn't mean that it's a chemical imbalance. These seem like perceptions in regards to people that don't fit what is termed as "normal" which is actually determined by what the majority of society believes is right and acceptable. Norms can change over time. What's a disorder today can be a difference that is tolerated tomorrow. Homosexuality was once viewed as disorder and listed in the Diagnostic Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders, and it is not now. People of different races have been viewed as disordered,but they aren't now. 100 years from now, ADHD will not be viewed as a disorder. I believe that as we advance more and more into a high tech society to the point that schools will be high tech to the point of virtuality reality equipment being used in hand-on education environment, the brains of ADHDers will be more appreciated for their ability to think outside the box. Schools will nurture independent minds. There will be Thomas Edison-types that won't be sent home,labeled "stupid" to the point they don't want to go school and so have to be homeschooled. Schools will have teaching methods that will reach all types of learners and not just the auditory sequential learners which will cut down on learning disability diagnoses,boredom in the classroom,and high school drop-out rate. Education will be interesting,fun,appealing to the novelty-seeking student. People that are made to be explorers,entrepreneurs,leaders,pioneers will not be trained to be factory working types. No more drugging the hell out of them to make their minds conform to what "normal" minds are supposed to be.

That's what I envision for the DRD4 7R gene type as well as everybody that doesn't fit the neurological norms of society.

Different,divergent doesn't mean deficient,disordered,deficient

Diversity can be a good thing.

Raymond

------------------
"Nothing matters absolutely;
the truth is it only matters relatively"

posted October 31, 2009 04:22 AM         

India means something only to me as I have Jupiter running through it on a map, and have generally found Indian people agreeable to me (I am British).

However, I would guard against saying: 'The Germans are the best' 'Africans rock' 'The Brazilians are the most beautiful people in the world' sort of arguments, because they are invariably full of faults and will irk people.

posted November 02, 2009 06:29 PM         

From a Chaldean Numerology standpoint India = 12 or The Hanged Man ,which is connected to Neptune. Neptune is usually seens as mysterious. That might answer part of your question. India is so connected to metaphysics and mystery that I think the Neptune connection makes sense. I also read in a very old astrology book that India is ruked by Saturn. This might account for the suffering and misfortune India has endured and since Saturn can be a spiritual planet in Vedic astrolgy maybe that is why India is seen as a very spiritual country in the West. Great suffering can lead to spiritual growth and asceticism. India is known for both. Just a few ideas!!!!