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Seriously hoping others will weigh in on this thread...


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What she describes sounds like underachievers who intentionally underachieve by pretending. There are people like that around which was why I had a doctors note for PE accommodations. There are people who don’t want more difficult work and so they act dumb in order to cruise rather than be placed in hard classes.

 

My high school teachers wanted to put me into the most difficult class for math and Chemistry. I told them I wanted to cruise. So I wasn’t lying about my abilities but I am sure some of my classmates are purposely underachieving for daily work and did very well for college entrance exams. My classmates who were underachieving were not in remedial classes and did not have extra support so they didn’t use up any extra resources.

 

There was a school psychologist attached to the gifted program whose main responsibility was underachievers. That psychologist did cost tax payer money. However the gifted program does need a psychologist because there were classmates with anxiety and depression due to academics. So it was still a need even if underachievers don’t exist in that gifted program.

 

I don’t know what was the point of the OP on that thread you link though.

 

If 5% of public school kids waste tax payers money by pretending, then what does OP expects other people to do. I rather the local kids that get into trouble and end up in juvenile court pretend they need after school remedial help and end up staying out of trouble.

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I hesitate to because she's apparently not a homeschooler and I suspect she's a troll (possibly working for ixl, which she posted about in her only post outside that thread). It's a really odd thread for a newby to start and I hate to encourage it. I noticed a legitimate case of my son pretending to not know things, but I considered it an age-appropriate and creative way of responding to boredom. The appropriate response on my part was to alter my teaching approach. There were no tears involved--I employed humor when possible, or said, "Oh, it must be xyz [obvious wrong answer which student corrected]" if I wasn't 100% sure whether my son knew the material I was covering. 

Edited by MerryAtHope
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I just hate for parents of kids that struggle to then hop on that thread and think what she is saying applies to their kid.  I got enough of that garbage from teachers and other professionals when my own kids were in school.  

 

Do some kids deliberately under perform?  Sure.  But this type of thing feeds right into the mindset of the people I run into all the time that think a kid that struggles is lazy or stupid or has a bad attitude in general.

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I just hate for parents of kids that struggle to then hop on that thread and think what she is saying applies to their kid.  I got enough of that garbage from teachers and other professionals when my own kids were in school.  

 

Do some kids deliberately under perform?  Sure.  But this type of thing feeds right into the mindset of the people I run into all the time that think a kid that struggles is lazy or stupid or has a bad attitude in general.

 

Yes.  Absolutely.

 

But I don't understand the whole point of the thread!  It's all so WEIRD!

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But I don't understand the whole point of the thread! It's all so WEIRD!

My interpretation is that she is complaining about 5% of the public school population wasting tax payers money by pretending to need services. That’s all I got out of her long post.

 

She is not offering free services after all. Even though she mentioned people can PM her for advice.

Edited by Arcadia
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My interpretation is that she is complaining about 5% of the public school population wasting tax payers money by pretending to need services. That’s all I got out of her long post.

 

She is not offering free services after all. Even though she mentioned people can PM her for advice.

I get the impression that she believes she has an exceptional ability to detect these faking kids.

 

I feel bad for the kids she works with.

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I clicked on the thread because I thought it was going to be about something like what my oldest would do...when he was preschool age he thought it was really funny to purposefully get things wrong. We had this math game and I was really worried because he couldn’t do even the simplest tasks. Then I realized he got every single one wrong (which seemed odd, even random guesses would occasionally be right) and would giggle every time. The game also kind of reinforced it because when you got a wrong answer there was this funny horse that would say something. He liked the horse. 

 

After I read the thread, I couldn’t even really grasp the point of the post except that it was pretty offensive. So I decided not to engage. 

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I don’t understand this sentence though in her post #48 of that thread. What is validity response testing?

 

“ If it is enough of a struggle that you seek out an assessment, please consider clinics that follow their association's position statement on adding validity response testing to the list.â€

 

ETA:

Also which association has position statements?

Edited by Arcadia
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I don’t understand this sentence though in her post #48 of that thread. What is validity response testing?

 

“ If it is enough of a struggle that you seek out an assessment, please consider clinics that follow their association's position statement on adding validity response testing to the list.â€

Yeah I didn't get it either.  

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She'd probably think my SN child was a "faker".

 

-Nearly all have some other area of their life that they shine in

 

Yep, she's a talented artist

 

-none of them have had obvious cognitive delays, in fact the opposite is more likely, as in, they appear to be quite intelligent

 

She's quite intelligent (scored in the gifted range on a totally non-verbal IQ test) but she does, in fact, have cognitive impairments in working memory and auditory processing.

 

-chronically pretend not to know something they once knew

 

Day-to-day inconsistency is a huge problem for her. One day she'll whip through a particular exercise easy-peasy and the next she'll give you a "deer in the headlights" look like she's never before encountered the material.

 

-Students rather suddenly reverse a growth trend or skill and now can't see very well, hear very well, speak very well, read very well, spell very well, or do math very well.

 

It's called a progressive hearing loss and it's actually not super-uncommon. Only 1% of babies have hearing loss but it's 6% by school-age.

 

-I speculate (and hope it isn't so), that the hugely expensive emotional disorder known as Munchausen Syndrome, may be born this way.

 

I have been accused of Munchausen-by-proxy for being so determined to peel the layers of the onion of my child's complex issues.

 

-Yet this is still an emotional issue

 

DEAD WRONG and precisely BECAUSE I was so persistent in seeking outside expensive treatments and evaluations, I finally have irrefutable proof.

 

My heart breaks for all the SN kids who have to deal with this sort of cr@p from self-proclaimed "experts".

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My heart breaks for all the SN kids who have to deal with this sort of cr@p from self-proclaimed "experts".

She works for the public schools. If I want to assume in a mean way, she is trying to deny services by claiming a child is faking.

 

Since homeschoolers can get services from their school district here, I guess she is assuming homeschoolers who ask for school evaluations are faking it too.

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She works for the public schools. If I want to assume in a mean way, she is trying to deny services by claiming a child is faking.

 

Since homeschoolers can get services from their school district here, I guess she is assuming homeschoolers who ask for school evaluations are faking it too.

 

Maybe you are right, it just isn't clear.  I don't think she is saying they all are fakers, but my main issue is I don't get what her point of posting that information here was and I don't feel she ever really clarified it except to say that in the past she has tried to share her information with homeschoolers and they haven't been receptive so she decided to do it again.  

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Maybe you are right, it just isn't clear. I don't think she is saying they all are fakers, but my main issue is I don't get what her point of posting that information here was and I don't feel she ever really clarified it except to say that in the past she has tried to share her information with homeschoolers and they haven't been receptive so she decided to do it again.

Except that she only said that after people repeatedly told her that her school based information wasn't particularly pertinent for this forum. Then suddenly she has a mission to reach out the homeschoolers.

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Maybe you are right, it just isn't clear.  I don't think she is saying they all are fakers, but my main issue is I don't get what her point of posting that information here was and I don't feel she ever really clarified it except to say that in the past she has tried to share her information with homeschoolers and they haven't been receptive so she decided to do it again.  

 

She stated that she thinks 1 in 5 kids in the SPED are "fakers".

 

There is a legitimate problem  called "malingering" but it's typically adolescents and adults who are trying to "game" the system in some way. All the 16 and 17 y.o.'s who are suddenly claiming "ADHD" in order to get extended time on the SAT's, adults trying to get workman's comp/disability/injury settlements, etc.

 

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She stated that she thinks 1 in 5 kids in the SPED are "fakers".

 

There is a legitimate problem called "malingering" but it's typically adolescents and adults who are trying to "game" the system in some way. All the 16 and 17 y.o.'s who are suddenly claiming "ADHD" in order to get extended time on the SAT's, adults trying to get workman's comp/disability/injury settlements, etc.

 

It's scary that someone working in special education believes that 1 in 5 of those kids are faking.

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Her statements regarding kids who seem to know things then suddenly don't was supposed to be evidence that they are likely faking, which showed me just how little she must understand about kids who struggle.  Or how the brain functions in general.  Goodness, I forget stuff all the time.  I KNOW my kids do.

 

That kind of attitude is why my dad, whom I love very much and still miss, was NOT the best person to teach me math.  We would go over something, I swear I really did know what he was talking about in that instance and that is why I got that one answer right but by the next day (or even the next problem) that information was gone.  Just gone.  And I guarandamnteeyou I was not faking squat.  It was frustrating as heck.  He would get so mad (mad out of frustration himself, I'm sure) and insist I must know how to do it because we had gone over and I had understood.  Yeah, Dad, but that info didn't stick.  Sorry.  It really hurt my feelings and made me feel so stupid.

 

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It's scary that someone working in special education believes that 1 in 5 of those kids are faking.

Maybe she read too much of this kind of articles

 

“There is a long history of symptom-feigning in psychiatry, driven by legal, financial and academic motives. To counter this, a battery of tests has been developed to detect feigners. As yet there is not a specific test to catch feigned ADHD. Sollman and co used a range of general "malingering" tests to see if they could detect the fakers. No test by itself was able to pick out the students with fake ADHD. A glimmer of hope was offered by pooling the results of all these tests together, which did detect students who were faking their ADHD. However, this approach also identified two students with genuine ADHD as fake. Clearly an undesirable outcome.â€

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/mouse-man/201007/new-study-claims-it-is-easy-fake-adhd

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Her statements regarding kids who seem to know things then suddenly don't was supposed to be evidence that they are likely faking, which showed me just how little she must understand about kids who struggle. Or how the brain functions in general. Goodness, I forget stuff all the time. I KNOW my kids do.

 

That kind of attitude is why my dad, whom I love very much and still miss, was NOT the best person to teach me math. We would go over something, I swear I really did know what he was talking about in that instance and that is why I got that one answer right but by the next day (or even the next problem) that information was gone. Just gone. And I guarandamnteeyou I was not faking squat. It was frustrating as heck. He would get so mad (mad out of frustration himself, I'm sure) and insist I must know how to do it because we had gone over and I had understood. Yeah, Dad, but that info didn't stick. Sorry. It really hurt my feelings and made me feel so stupid.

It was also disturbing that she said that we should all take heart in knowing that when we feel frustrated about not making progress with our child in homeschool, not to worry, they are likely faking that they can't do something.

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I couldn't bring myself to feed the troll, but reading that thread sure made me angry.

 

I, too, hated the suggestion that forgetting previously learned material was fakery. That is the very nature of DS's math disability. He forgets material that is not constantly practiced, because he never truly achieves mastery, and he can't generalize. He has a conceptual disability. He has good rote skills, so he can follow a formula and seem to understand, so teachers think he is making progress. Meanwhile, he forgets the foundational things he seemed to know before. It's like building a tower of blocks but having it supported by broken toothpicks on the bottom. Inevitably, the tower falls apart, but people who only see the top of it don't understand that the holes exist underneath.

 

Kids like this are often accused of pretending.

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I couldn't bring myself to feed the troll, but reading that thread sure made me angry.

 

I, too, hated the suggestion that forgetting previously learned material was fakery. That is the very nature of DS's math disability. He forgets material that is not constantly practiced, because he never truly achieves mastery, and he can't generalize. He has a conceptual disability. He has good rote skills, so he can follow a formula and seem to understand, so teachers think he is making progress. Meanwhile, he forgets the foundational things he seemed to know before. It's like building a tower of blocks but having it supported by broken toothpicks on the bottom. Inevitably, the tower falls apart, but people who only see the top of it don't understand that the holes exist underneath.

 

Kids like this are often accused of pretending.

Exactly

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Obviously neuropsychologists need to be able to tell if someone is trying to game the system for an unfair advantage or for drugs like Adderall. But that doesn't seem to be what this person was talking about.

 

Most children need some pushing to do their best. And really none of us do our absolute best all the time and I think that's fine. Can you imagine how stressful it would be if you had to do your best all the time?

 

But most people don't fake actual learning struggles. There are stigma attached to learning struggles that would go against this woman's thesis for one thing. I am sure there are some kids out there with a psychological disorder like this but I don't think that it is something that all parents should be worried about.

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

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My 7 yo is likely dyslexic.  She is incredibly inconsistent and always has been.  One minute she knows something and the next it is gone.  I guarantee that she is not faking.  I am quite certain that she would give her right arm to not struggle.  And I would give both of mine to take the struggles for her. 

 

This woman's posts made me angrier than I recall being in quite some time.

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My 7 yo is likely dyslexic.  She is incredibly inconsistent and always has been.  One minute she knows something and the next it is gone.  I guarantee that she is not faking.  I am quite certain that she would give her right arm to not struggle.  And I would give both of mine to take the struggles for her. 

 

This woman's posts made me angrier than I recall being in quite some time.

Yeah, same here and me too.  

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And honestly, if she had come to WTM, taken a bit to get to know people, then asked some questions and shared her views I think people might have been willing to actually discuss.  She wasn't looking for discussion.  She was looking to "enlighten" us, as far as I can tell.  

 

ETA:  I don't know about anyone else but I've had enough "enlightenment" to last a life time.  So have my kids.

Edited by OneStepAtATime
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