How difficult can this be? Understanding students with learning disabilities

By Gina Vilardi
College of Education
Long Island University, C. W. Post
October , 2010

I really enjoyed today’s lesson about behaviorism. I thought the activity where we had to close our eyes and have our partner tell us were to go was a lot of fun but it also made me realize that it would be hard to live life being blind and I’m thankful that I have my eye sight. I actually really liked the movie how difficult can this be. It really caught my attention and made me realize what disabled people go through on an everyday bases. Whenever anyone has any type of anxiety the first reaction they do is look away or look at their shoes because they think that the teacher can’t see them.

I was guilty of this in high school but I never realized the actually reason why I reacted the way I did. The movie also mentioned that people with a learning disability have a two-step process that goes through their head. For example, if a teacher asks a question like “What’s the name of the book we just read?” and picks someone to answer, they say the name of it but when they choose a person with a learning disability to answer what the book is about they are still processing the name of the book and that’s what their answer will be. The movie went very in-depth with all the different stages that these children with a learning disability go through every day. This movie made a huge impact on me and I think it is very important that teachers understand that learning disabled people cannot function as quickly as they want them to.