"Learning disabled" are more advanced learners!

I've finally figured out how to bring a learning conundrum I've been working on for some time into one simple answer. What I've learned in the past months, absolutely confirmed yesterday is this: There is almost no one out there to bring the learning methods and content knowledge of tutoring/teaching together with an applied understanding of cognitive and affective aspects of learning. Tutors know content and methods but do not by and large know how to adapt their methods to the thinking of non-conventional learners. Psychologists and educational therapists can work with novel and unique cognitive abilities/responses, but rarely have much idea about how to connect it with academic content and method. This is the small "aha." I CAN do that, often in marvelously simple ways that make great changes in a relatively short amount of time.

The big "aha" is this (and it would be a great presentation especially to associations of parents or networks of those supporting the so-called learning disabled): non-conventional learning is a gateway into the future of education. If I have my way there will be no more learners labeled as "learning disabled". Without romanticizing non-conventional learners, I can attest that the order is wrong. Instead of trying to remediate, rehabilitate, make functional those with Asperger's, and dyscalculia, for instance, I have found that the far more powerful approach is to reach into their thinking and draw it forth (educare-- means "lead out"), honor it, and help the learner translate that thinking, tailor that thinking to meet the demands of tests, schools.

The irony is that these students are much higher order thinkers, and their problem is not that they "don't get it" but rather that they get too much. They are trying to process an extraordinary amount of information at the same time and thus 1) get their wires crossed, 2) take too long (like having too many programs open and running on your laptop-- it eats up serious RAM). This is something an embattled parent with a "developmentally disabled or delayed" child would love to contemplate. They may be on the frontier of a massive shift in learning away from the industrial emphasis on "instilling or installing" into student-products (the learner as manufactured object approach) to one in which learning is about leading out the particular and valuable genius in each child and finding both customized and generalized methods that might effectively do that.

What I am finding in my work with learning "disabled" students is that they are teaching the world how to enter this new era. I worked yesterday with a fifth grader with "dyscalculia" (trouble computing with numbers, sometimes even simple addition and multiplication). I correctly intuited that he was an intuitive/conceptual/contextual thinker on this higher order level. The first thing I did was take him out to the back yard and show him a ripped bit of leaf. I said, "This is how they teach math in schools". "You don't know where this ripped piece comes from or what it does or how it relates to anything else." "We're going to show the leaf and the tree, and you'll see how they relate, and once you have a system in your head you'll be able to more easily compute numbers." I showed him using different circles (flower pots, circular patio table) and string, how the circumference is a little more than 3 times (i.e. pi) the diameter. That got him intrigued. I showed him what addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, looked like on a number line. I helped him to always verbalize what he was doing, slow down, and allow himself the time to ask and answer his own questions in leading himself through a math problem. He did very well, and began catching his mistakes and identifying when he was "crossing wires". He was becoming a self-aware learner, aware of his own cognitive processes and how to identify and adapt them.

So here is my challenge to you, dear reader (and I'll work to assemble this on my end too): Get me a group who really wants to be a part of this shift in awareness, this shift in eras, and I can give a presentation, keynote, lead a workshop on what I'm doing, or simply provide my services to small groups or individuals.