I was comforting myself last night by reading comments on an article about leaving academia. Many people think academia is a fantasy land, a cushy job - but in reality, the 12 hour days, seven days a week, the expectation to answer emails within an hour no matter the time of day or night - it's so draining! We're thinking seriously about an exit from academia. One person's comment said that she's so envious of her department secretary because she gets to go home at 5 and not think about work until the next day.

You're right, it's harder for him. He definitely has executive functioning difficulties. It's amazing to think that a person with a Ph.D. can have these problems, but he does. Usually I'm able to think positive and actually help him, but we're both exhausted and out of gas tonight.

Most of the time, my husband is a black and white thinker. About big ideas, philosophical ideas, science, physics.... he's a creative and expansive thinker. But day-to-day stuff? Not so much. Tonight, for example, he has to write a letter on letterhead. He can't find the "good" template he made a few weeks ago, but he does know where the old template is. The old template, however, "is terrible," and he doesn't want to sign his name to something "terrible." This small project that should take an hour is probably going to take 4 hours. I'm the complete opposite. I would rather spend 1 hour on a task and make it pretty good, good enough, than spend 4 hours to do something absolutely perfectly. To me, the difference between pretty good and perfect is not worth stressing over. My mind is constantly making calculations about what to do vs. the time there is to do it. Apparently our task-to-time ratios are vastly different. He's also REALLY BAD with time. He's been known to say that the experience of 5 minutes and 1 hour feel almost the same to him. Maybe I'm just a slacker, but this is really bugging me at 10:30 on a Friday night! :glare:

An Orton-Gillingham program is what you must have for a dyslexic child. There is no point in doing it halfway or haphazardly. You can actually change the way the dyslexic brain processes written language, if you do it correctly... it's been shown to work in MRIs. So cool. You can make OG instruction really fun with lots of movement games. In fact, movement will be important!

That's awesome. Around here, the /o/ in hot sounds pretty twangy to me... like h-aaaahhh-t.

I also like to imitate other people's accents, so now I think I've actually changed the way I say certain words.

I'm feeling a lot better about this now :laugh:

Hooray! Vindicated! :-)

I was thinking about the vowel circle! Poor kids with me insisting they reaaally drop their chins for /o/. Lol. I think I'm incapable of making the right sound, though... I may need a speech therapist!!

I was recently at a reading teaching workshop, and found out that I pronounce some sounds differently than my colleagues. I'm from Maine, but I live in Pennsylvania now. The teacher (from Wisconsin) was explaining the difference between the vowel sound in "hot," and the vowel sound in "ball." To me, they sound exactly the same. My boss, a speech-language pathologist, says that they are indeed different. I always thought people around here just had twangy accents... turns out I'm the odd one! :lol: Are those vowels the same or different where you live?

My husband does this. He waits till the last minute to do things because he doesn't "want to waste" the weekend working when he could be relaxing. I don't get how he can relax while he's got a mountain of work to do, but it's how he thinks. Right now he's freaking out because he has to write a bunch of lectures, correct homework and write two exams. Even though he had the weekend... but he didn't want to "waste" it with work. Sigh. I hope you find something that works for your son. I'll be listening in intently!

Oh dear, housemate... never mind. I guess marching off in a huff is not really practical!

Omg! That woman sounds horrible. She can't let things go with a 10 year old? And to say "problem daughter" - really?! If that was my daughter, I would have looked straight at that woman and said, "She's NOT a problem daughter. She is a WONDERFUL daughter!" and marched away. It sounds like this woman is not reasonable, and may have her own disability... either in social thinking, emotional regulation, etc... SOMETHING is clearly up with her! I'm 100% on your daughter's side here, even if she does do things that are annoying and disrespectful. 10 year olds don't have the same control over their actions that adults *should* have. I can remember so many things I did as a kid that, thinking back... were incredibly dumb and obnoxious. Ugh. Adults can be the worst sometimes.

Oh man.... I've watched it twice. It's incredible! I was shocked that the "healthy" foods (organic granola bars, yogurt, etc) caused that guy to gain a LOT of weight around his middle. He wasn't eating what most people would consider a high-sugar diet... but our culturally acceptable levels of sugar really AREN'T acceptable for our bodies. I watched it on Amazon prime video.

Canned soup sounds good. When I got braces as a kid, it took days for the extreme soreness to go away. It was awful and I was starving all the time. Canned Progresso chicken soup has really soft chicken pieces, and it'll feel more like a real meal. Good luck!

Great letter - it's insane that supplies from a PUBLIC school should be donated to mission trips rather than to the school. It doesn't even sound legal.

Well, at least this is an easy thing to try, and plus you get to eat potatoes :)

Sure! I hope it works. There is some debate about "safe starches" in the paleo community... the idea being that certain starches are pretty hypoallergenic (that's not the right word, but I can't think of it at the moment). Rice, white potatoes and sweet potatoes are in that category. Corn, quinoa, gluten (wheat, rye, barley), and any others are not, because they can irritate the gut.

Making kids sit through lecture-style teaching as the primary way to learn is horrible. I sympathize with you and your son! Learning styles notwithstanding, that's just not going to be good for anybody, and if anything will lead to behavior problems as kids get bored/confused. Classroom teaching doesn't have to be non-stop fun, but it does have to be very interactive with kids answering/actively thinking/working on things nearly all the time.

When I was trying to help my husband's tummy issues, I read that diets that are too low carb can make your body produce ketones, and yeasts can actually feed on ketones! (That's just ridiculously unfair, in my opinion.) If your diet really is too low carb, you may want to add some "safe starches" (potatoes, rice - not gluten or corn) and see how you feel. Too low carb also makes the thyroid malfunction, not sure if that affects yeasts. Paul Jaminet has something called the "Perfect Health Diet" which may be helpful to you - it includes a low-ish-to-moderate amount of carbs. You can read about it here: http://perfecthealthdiet.com/the-diet/ It would be pretty ironic if the low carb diet, designed to fight candida, actually produced ketones to feed the candida. Maybe you could do a day or two of slightly increased carbs and see how you do.

Ack!!!!

I think problem with the term "learning styles" is that it makes abilities (and weaknesses) seem fixed. If a teacher tells a student that they're so good with visuals but not with text, for example, that student may never be willing to try very hard to comprehend text. Or... they may feel compelled to study a certain way that "fits" their learning style. I don't think this is necessarily AS true for people with disabilities (like if you have APD, for example), but it's worth knowing that in research studies, teaching to someone's supposed "learning style" had no benefits.

I'm not saying learning styles are completely wrong, just that we shouldn't box kids into one style or another. I know some people, younger than me, who had their learning styles assessed in school. Their teachers separated them into groups based on the styles - and then they had to do things like draw pictures of vocabulary words if they were "visual," make up songs to remember them if they were "auditory," etc. That's just going too far. It's fine to work with the child's strengths, but we should never assume that a child is 100% one way, or that their strengths can never change/expand. If we assume a child is only good at learning with lots of visuals, and never work on reading text without visuals, then we're doing them a disservice. Same if we insist on text-only and never allow them visuals. Personally, I definitely comprehend better when I'm able to read text rather than listen or watch. I really, seriously loathe watching video presentations... but it could also be that I'm just not that good at listening or watching for comprehension. I also never practice those skills, because I hate them (and I'm an adult, so I can choose that), but it's possible that I could expand my skills, if I worked at it. Obviously for kids with APD or something, you really can't insist that they do a ton of listening-only work. I'm just saying that nothing is set in stone, so we have to be cautious about labeling learning styles. We also do have to teach kids to work with their strengths as well. It's a balance.

Are yoga pants PE and school appropriate? Everyone's wearing them these days, and I think they're pretty age-appropriate for middle school.

Yep, my Special Ed master's program made a big deal about how the "learning styles" idea is a myth.