Adult Learning Disabilities Can Be Overcome

I remember the look of despair in one man's eyes when he was asked to read the label on tub of cream cheese. I did not want to ask him what the problem was, because I could immediately tell what was wrong. That fact of the matter was that he could not read, and while he and others with adult learning disabilities can feel really embarrassed about their situations, it is important to remember that they can be overcome.

I decided to volunteer my services at an adult literacy group meeting at our local library as a result of my encounter with the man at the supermarket, and I talked to a counselor about adult learning disabilities and the affects they can have on a person. He informed me that the biggest problem is that many adults see such disabilities as a source of shame and will not seek out help for them because they are afraid they will be seen as stupid.

The counselor told me that such things as dyslexia, ADHD, and other adult learning disabilities are correctable and that people who have such problems usually find that addressing them opens up a whole new world. I was still not convinced, so I started to talking to some of the members of the group to get their perspectives.

The first man I spoke to told me that he did, in fact, suffer from dyslexia. He said that he had pretty much given up on reading, because the words would get scrambled in his mind. A few years ago, he was in an accident and became permanently disabled, and told me that he got tired of spending all of his time watching television. He said he envied his friends who could read and said he felt he had missed out on so much. After finally seeking help, he told me that within a few months, his dyslexia was almost a non-issue for him.

I was absolutely amazed. Here was a man suffering from one of the most proliferate adult learning disabilities, and yet he essentially corrected it within a few months with some simple techniques he had learned to unscramble words.

Another woman who had a host of adult learning disabilities and had never graduated high school was waiting for her GED to be mailed to her. She had just passed her equivalence exam and was getting set to start college. I asked her what she had done to turn things around, and she said she finally got up the courage to ask the local librarian about such services.

Adult learning disabilities can be overcome. It just takes a little bit of courage, patience and perseverance, but they can definitely be conquered.

Accredited Online Universities Are Becoming More and More Respected

When I was preparing for college, accredited online universities were few and far between, and I certainly would never consider going to one. There was a sort of stigma attached to them that gave the impression one really was not going to school at all.

With the world of technology today, however, that stigma has all but gone away, and accredited online universities are becoming more and more respected.

One of the accredited online universities that is picking up momentum is the University of Phoenix. I have two friends that opted to use it for graduate school, and both have really enjoyed it and found it to be challenging. I think it is a matter of discipline that makes these types of schools challenging, because one has to keep to task in order to keep up with school work.

My friend Ursula said of all the accredited online universities she encountered, the University of Phoenix appealed to her the most because it was the one she found to be the most established. She was working towards a degree in criminal justice and said that her employer was perfectly willing to accept a degree from the online university and actually had good things to say about it from his own personal experience.

I had another friend, Lowisa, who decided to major in psychology through the University of Phoenix. She looked at other accredited online universities, but chose Phoenix because it was the easiest for her to enroll in and begin her course of study. She said that she found the work to be challenging and said she felt that she was learning a lot.

Kapella University is another great example of the number of accredited online universities that provide a good distance education. I had a friend named Justin who decided to enroll at Kapella University and found it to be very convenient. He said that between work and taking care of his family, he did not have a lot of free time. He said that Kapella worked around his schedule.

I was always wondering about these accredited online universities and how much accountability was actually in place for them. In speaking to may friends, I discovered that they are involved in virtual classroom discussions on an almost daily basis, have weekly papers that they have to write and tests that they must complete in order to move on.

It made me realize why accredited online universities are becoming increasingly popular and respected. People like the convenience of being able to study from home, they receive a good education and they have the satisfaction and advantages of obtaining a college degree.

Bottom-Up Learning in 7th Grade Science Hopes to Turn every Child into a Genius

To a parent looking at her child's 7th grade science homework, it can seem quite workaday, quite pedestrian. To any parent who dreams of a wonderful future in the sciences for their child, the top-down instruction system that regular schooling involves has to be disappointing. They teach a child all the rules and the theories first, and at the end of each chapter, they try to challenge the child’s understanding with a bunch of problems. This kind of “lay a strong foundation” method certainly does make competent scientifically-literate children. What it doesn't do is to build good scientific imagination that is capable of envisioning the great and powerful new things in science.

People read about how the real experts in any field have a gut instinct for their area of expertise. A great basketball player or chess player can look at the field before them, envision all kinds of possibilities and go for the one that they just believe will work. They don't sit and work anything out. They just see the solution. There's a saying that geniuses are not common because that means of becoming one haven’t been made widely available yet. Educators today want to see if genius can be taught. They wish to see if they can teach 7th grade science students a reliable gut instinct about their physics and math.

The way they wish to go about it happens to be pretty daring for a school lesson plan. There is no more top-down. It's all bottom-up from now on. What that means is, that students are supposed to just learn to perceive patterns in things before them instead of learning the rules and hoping that a kind of instinct can fall into place one day. The brain, they believe, is a surmising machine. It can develop ideas about things without certain knowledge of the details. Most people have an eye for something or the other. Some people are good at learning tunes quickly; some are good with wordplay. Whatever kind of gut-instinct pattern recognition or surmising a child is naturally good at, educators hope it can transfer to useful 7th grade science.

Education has usually gone with the belief that people need to fully understand something before a gut instinct can reliably form. But scientific experiments show otherwise. In one study, people who were shown paintings of different kinds of artists were quickly able to point out similarities among paintings by the same artist. Once the brain has an actual goal in mind, it can quickly find ways to pick out patterns and clues.

One way that schools are teaching 7th  grade science students about fractions, that follows this method, has been to allow them to use a computer program that graphically shows them how to make fractions by cutting up blocks enjoining them. Students always dramatically improve in their ability to handle fractions after putting themselves through a course such as this. Using video games such as this one can build up mental images in children's minds of how scientific concepts actually fall together. It's an exciting new time for middle school education.