The Speed of Dark

M-‘s second week of college was complicated by other medical problems in the family, but he is still happy to be going and engaged in his classes.   He is taking notes in class, and can usually give a moderately coherent report of the class.   He is working diligently on his homework.  He survived his first in-class quiz (pre-algebra) and made a passing grade (78/100.)   That’s higher than I made on my first calculus quiz and higher than he made on his assessment test before entry, so we’re very pleased.   Read the rest of this entry »

One of the things many parents wonder about–and worry about–is whether their kid with disabilities will be able to go to college.   It’s pretty easy, sometimes, to come up with a firm “No, sorry, this child will simply never be able to attend college” and at that point concern can shift to other ways to prepare the child for adult life.  And sometimes it’s pretty easy to see that a given child will be able to–colleges now accommodate students in wheelchairs, for instance, much better than they did fifty years ago, when simply being unable to walk unaided barred wheel-chair bound students who could not reach classrooms or labs or rooms in the dorms.

It’s the borderline ones–the “maybe” cases–that cause parents the most angst.  I know, because I have one of those.    And yet…in time, with enough hard work from everyone involved…sometimes “maybe” turns to “yes.”   Yesterday we had a taste of “yes.” Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks, as our son, with his dad’s help, has figured out a way to use public transportation part of the way to community college, and has continued to try to improve his reading skills in preparation for his first classes.   They’ve walked around on the campus; they got his student ID and his bus card and so on and so forth.  Read the rest of this entry »

If you can’t drive, and probably won’t ever drive, then learning to use public transportation is a necessity.   We’ve worked on this since our son was quite young, and by the time we faced the “how to get him to his classes in the city” he had been on buses, trains, subways, and airplanes (oh, and ferry boats) so we did not expect much difficulty with this. Read the rest of this entry »

Our son’s been increasingly interested in getting more education, for the very practical reason of earning more money…having the part-time job has taught him that he’s unlikely to ever make enough to live on from it, even if it were full-time.

So we took him to the nearest city’s community college to find out what was available.  Very sensibly, they insist on all incoming students (not just ones who have special ed and resource courses in their high school transcript) taking their assessment test.    I had been encouraging him to read and write something every day, and he had been, but what with my own work I hadn’t been teaching him.   We had hopes he would do well, at least on the math part of the test.

He didn’t.

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