Beatrice Otter beatrice_otter at zoho.com
Mon Oct 21 00:12:11 BST 2019

---- On Sun, 20 Oct 2019 15:50:12 -0700 Gwynne Powell <mailto:gwynnepowell at hotmail.com> wrote ----

From: Howard Brazee <mailto:howard at brazee.net> 
I have mixed feelings about diagnosing learning difficulties.   Getting a name for a problem can enable teachers to come up with better teaching strategies. 
But? When a label for someone?s learning difficulty isn?t found, teachers *still* need to come up with better teaching strategies. 
Labels simplify things.   But simplification isn?t the goal. 
Gwynne: I've seen so many parents who were immensely relieved when their 
child was diagnosed. Partly because it meant that better strategies could be 
targetted at the problem, but partly because they'd spent so long being told 
that they were 'neurotic parents', making a fuss, patronised by doctors, and 
generally ignored or blamed for their concerns and their child's behaviour. 
The diagnosis proved that they weren't idiots or failures, and that they had good 
reason for their concerns. 

Beatrice Otter:
There's a tumblr post I saw recently on labeling people with psychiatric diagnoses and such.  In some cases, the label can be a good and positive thing, and in others it's a negative thing, and in many cases it's not the label but how much freedom within/around the label we have.\

The conclusion was that people are like cats.  We don't want to be put in boxes by someone else, but if there is a box that suits us, we may climb in and make it our home.

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