~ Peter Flom ~
The latest news is that I was interviewed by Understood.org. You can read the interview here
My book Screwed up somehow but not Stupid is now available on Amazon. It is also available on Barnes and Noble and Powells. (This is the same book as the one on the side of this site, but now in book format). It’s a little bit about me, but mostly about nonverbal learning disabilities and […]
The best known learning disability is almost certainly dyslexia. Many have heard of dyscalculia as well (although it did get a red squiggle indicating a misspelling). There’s the LD I have – nonverbal LD – which is even less known. And there are LDs like dyspraxia. But what about LDs we haven’t discovered yet?
People with nonverbal learning disabilities often have problems where it is hard to identify the real cause. When the person is a child, it may be even harder for parents or teachers to identify the real stressor. NVLDers often don’t know what they have done wrong or what is causing them problems. This is because […]
I hear and see a lot of people asking questions about their child’s behavior without asking the child about the child’s behavior. Now, it is possible that a child does not know why she is acting in a particular way, or what is stressing him out about a particular situation, but surely that is the […]
Why do kids behave “badly”? (Here, “badly” could mean almost any behavior that most adults find objectionable). Of course, there are multiple reasons. Sometimes they are doing what their peers do – but they have some choice in who their peers are. Other times they are reacting to stress. Nearly all people, kids or adults, […]
The link has slides from my talk at the LDA of New Jersey Fall2014
I’ve been called lazy a whole lot in my life, almost always by teachers who had no clue. Sometimes they used the euphemism “does not apply himself”. The best teacher who ever taught me, on the other hand, said I tried harder than almost anyone. But “lazy” is a four letter word. It should never […]
We are often told to dream big, aim high and so on. But what if we don’t? What if we dream small? There is a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon (by the way, this is a great comic) in which Calvin asks Hobbes what he would wish for if he could have anything in the […]
When your child comes home from school he may be exhausted. Even if it was just an ordinary day. Even if other kids come home raring to go. Even if she doesn’t appear exhausted. He may be right at the edge of a meltdown. Why? Because all day long he has been stressed. Stressed by […]
On October 19 the LDA of New Jersey will have a conference. The conference goes all day, from 8 to 4. It will be held at the Livingston Campus Student Center of Rutgers University in Piscataway, NJ. For full directions and registration see www.ldanj.org. I will be speaking from 2:30 to 4. My title is […]
People with learning disabilities have significant challenges in life; I am not one to minimize those. And there are ways we are different from neurotypical people and I don’t want to minimize those, either. But it’s easy to lose sight of the many things that having an LD doesn’t change. Here are some:
There is an old saying that “a square peg won’t fit in a round hole”. Yet much of education, especially for those of us with learning disabilities, seems to consist of trying to force a square peg into a round hole. But can we change the hole?
Recent Comments