Brilliance Unleashed: Extraordinary Success in Kids with Severe Learning Disabilities - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

Twelve children. Twelve prognoses that turned out to be wrong.

For decades, children with severe learning disabilities have been defined by what they cannot do. They are labeled, underestimated, and quietly written off by systems that mistake a diagnosis for a ceiling.

In Brilliance Unleashed, developmental psychologist Dr. Marion Blank tells the true stories of twelve children she treated over more than fifty years of clinical work. They faced autism, dyslexia, deafness, blindness, cerebral palsy, and language impairments so severe that speech was considered out of reach. Every one of them was expected to live a life bounded by their diagnosis.

They didn't.

This is not a method book with case studies bolted on. Each chapter is one child, one situation everyone agreed was hopeless, and an honest account of what was tried and why, including the months where nothing moved and the approaches that nearly failed. You meet Ira, a deaf, legally blind child with cerebral palsy who had no discernible skills at six and learned to read and sign. Pete, who fought his way out of dyslexia after school had given up on him. Adam, a "non-verbal" child with severe autism who at nine years of age displayed the skills of an 18 month old and who at 15 years of age is handling a high school curriculum.

What you'll find inside:

• Why reading failure so often has nothing to do with intelligence or effort


• The role of the roughly 100 small "non-content" words that make up about 60% of everything we read, and why most programs skip them


• How to tell the difference between a child who cannot and a child who has not yet been reached


• What changed for each of these twelve children, described in enough detail to be useful rather than inspiring

Dr. Marion Blank holds a Ph.D. from Cambridge University and directed the Light on Literacy Program at Columbia University's Department of Psychiatry for over three decades. She has published more than sixty peer-reviewed papers and six books, created the Preschool Language Assessment Instrument, and writes for Scientific American on the reading failure rate in American schools.

For parents who have been told to lower their expectations, and for the teachers, clinicians and therapists who suspect the child in front of them is capable of more.

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