The young mother had used all her resources to help her 15 year old son get the special education he needed. He was diagnosed as someone with a learning disability -- just a year earlier – and was already feeling the pressure of being transferred from mainstream classes to special education classes. “Dummy, dummy!” his classmates would call out as he passed.
Finally, in desperation, his mother called a hot line for a national organization that focused on helping families with a child suffering with learning disabilities.
Since then, the term “learning disability” has been co-opted by parents with mentally challenged children who prefer to use the term “learning disabled.” Some believe it muddies the waters for the child who has a normal IQ – or higher – but who suffers from having a learning “difference.” In this story, the son had a normal IQ but severe learning “differences.”
Soon after the call, a lovely woman with blue eyes and a matching dress showed up at the frustrated mother’s home. She shared her story.
“My son was learning disabled. He simply couldn’t read. We tried everything. They passed him through grade after grade and he still couldn’t read. We took him to the best diagnosticians. We finally accepted that he would never be able to go to college.
“But he loved to ski so his father and I decided to invest money in his skiing. He took a lot of classes and he did very, very well at it. He zipped up and down the mountains as if he had wings. He was finally happy. He’s working now as a professional ski instructor in Aspen, Colorado and loves it. I think if you could find something your son loves to do and help him excel at that, he could have a happy life.”
She then gathered her things and left.
It seemed that this strategy was too late for this young man. He had already turned to alcohol for self-medication. It took over four years for his parents to detect his alcohol abuse and get him help. It was then and only then that he could concentrate on his skills as a martial artist.
He concentrated on earning a black belt in Tae Kwan Do, then taught children karate to work his way through college. Yes, he managed to go to college. Within two years, he was on the Dean’s list. He also stayed alcohol free and attends AA meetings regularly. His karate life and his college life – a totally unexpected possibility – were too important to him to “screw up,” he says.
The morale of this story? If you know how to do something especially well, you don’t usually become a follower. You often become a leader.
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