Ignorance towards learning disabilities.

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Why do so many people think that if you have a learning disabilty that it makes you stupid? I mean I have three learning disabilities, Dysgraphia, Asperger, and ADD, and I have a 3.2 gpa. And I speak three languages, Spanish, English and French. How does that make me ret*d?

I don't think many people are able to comprehend what a learning is and isn't. It's very upsetting, isn't it?
My daughter has multiple LDs and her teachers would not address them saying, "But she's too smart to be learning disabled!' And mind you, these were teachers. It is very frustrating.

It's why I don't tell many people about my differences.

Last edited by asperity on 05 May 2008, 6:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.

You said it yourself, they're ignorant. The media portrays Autism as being virtually indistinguishable from Downs Syndrome, and they don't even identify the high functioning end of the spectrum as existing at all.

they dont represent lfa either,they only represent one part-the most profound case of lfa [LFA with severe MR] rather than those whos intelligence is in the borderline MR range and above.
downs syndrome is not always severe,am know downs adults who are higher functioning than some aspies in care,downs adults do tend to get called child like in mental age though more than autistics,like the ds adult who recently was wrongly charged by the police for racism and assault at college-they kept referring to him as being a five year old,am have been on the same course he's been on,and they are not designed for such profound intellectual disability.
a DSer only has to show their face and they're instantly assumed to be some DS stereotype.


as for learning disabilities,the reason they get associated with retardation is because intellectual disability is usually included under the LD label.
some people will use only the term learning disability when meaning mental retardation,its wrong because LD is supposed to mean a weakness in a specific skill,rather than all.

ret*d just means backwards/delayed. You would be ret*d in the areas that your learning disabilities cover, but that's it.

I'm ret*d in many ways, all of which are due to the umbrella label, Autistic Disorder (social interaction and communication being just two of them for example). I'm not ret*d in many other ways too.

The media doesn't represent "HFA" well either; it's all AS and HFA/LFA savants. The "boring" middle where the majority fall is always missed.