Some of my most difficult clients in the past have been physicians. It wasn’t because they were rude or ignorant. It was because they were “sophisticated clients” with access to too much information and yet, they didn’t have the subject matter knowledge to weed out the “misleading” from the “informative.”

Don’t get me wrong: I love my physician-clients because they are smart and educated and we can communicate on a similar wave length. The problem is that sometimes they hide behind Google and refuse to face the real diagnosis. They just keep “googling” on for an alternative explanation instead of accepting my advice, for which they have paid.

One of the examples that stands out the most from memory is the case of a family with three boys. It was a most unfortunate case: two out of three of the boys had problems. One of the boys had a case of “classic dyslexia” — he was a bright and verbal boy, smart and witty, but once he had to deal with reading text or producing it, he would be extremely anxious. This boy did very well shortly after I took over his case and his parents couldn’t believe their child was able to improve so quickly. However…

The other boy, his older brother, did not have dyslexia, although the parents wished he had. If it was just dyslexia, it would have been a lot easier to deal with compared to what I had suspected he had. The reason? The older brother had what I believed was some sort of child psychiatric issue. This was clearly outside my area of competence and I had advised the parents to arrange for a child psychiatric assessment as soon as possible. “No! Not possible.” was the response. The father, who was a GP, “googled” and “googled” (and that was in 2003, when the web was really dumb and not as intuitive as it is now). One day his diagnosis was autism and another day his diagnosis would be some other big medical term. The problem? Unfortunately, mental illness carries a stigma and the parents did not want to face the possibility that their child might have problems of a psychiatric nature.

It was sad, but a few years later, I saw the boys’ mom and she told me that, finally, they were lining up for a child psychiatric assessment. Less sophisticated clients would have simply taken my advice and sought a medical professional for help.

The problem was: indeed the father was a medical professional, but his specialty was not child psychiatry!

Posted by Dr. Winnifred Tang

I have signed on to a Twitter account to share tweets with parents and colleagues. Unfortunately, not many are tweeting.

So, one more time, follow me on Twitter at Read2Learn.

Follow me, so that I’ll have a reason to tweet on LD-related topics!

This Halloween, won’t you treat me to some “tweets”?

The media likes to put “spices” and “flavorings” in situations to create interest among the public.

Recently, in Janet Steffenhagen’s blog in The Vancouver Sun, she reported a clash between two UBC experts. One of the experts happens to be my former Ph.D. supervisor, Dr. Linda Siegel.

I think it was wonderful that Dr. Siegel took the time to write a very thoughtful critique of Dr. Chapman’s approach to the proposed full-day kindergarten. As academics, we must not take other people’s comments as a “personal attack,” but rather, as a bridge to success.

If both Dr. Chapman and Dr. Siegel would pull their resources together and collaborate, I think great things could be accomplished. In an environment where children would be free to explore, while given structure to acquire solid language skills, we would only expect good things to happen.

I really hope that after the bursts, or “outbursts,” have subsided on Janet’s blog, those of us who have had the privilege of being educated in the areas of reading development would collaborate to create a better environment for children to acquire early literacy skills.

An army of a thousand is easy to get;
a competent general is hard to find.

Last week, I had the pleasure of having the founder of Dojang, Mr. Robert Lynds, visit my office in Point Grey Village. The purpose of our meeting was to discuss the possibility of developing some classes for pre-school children to foster literacy and numeracy readiness through movements associated with Yoga, Tai Chi, and martial arts.

Our discussion touched on the topic of “excellence” and how to create a positive atmosphere where everyone is happy doing what they do best. The formula for “excellence” is really quite simple and yet difficult to achieve: to attract people of excellence to an organization, you have to “be” an example of “excellence”. In other words, leadership is key, …and good leaders are hard to come by.

In a recent article in Bloomberg Businessweek, Terry Gou, the founder of Foxxcon, the designated assembling outfit for i-phones, i-pods, and a host of other electronic products, is noted for one of his favorite sayings: “An army of a thousand is easy to get, one general is hard to find.” How apt this comment is in regards to leadership!

As a successful businessman, Terry Gou understands the secret to running an organization with excellence. Ironically, this successful assembler of gadgets does not come from a very educated background, unlike Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft.  Terry Gou realizes that in order to keep up with the industry, he will need to do more in the research and development end of things. Will he be able to attract high performers in the scientific field to work for him? Smart people have a mind of their own; money is not the only driving force behind their motive to work for an organization. There are other considerations. Does Terry Gou have the authority that is so essential in leading? In other words, will his “army” of scientist march to his tune? This should be an interesting challenge for Terry Gou!

Some people want to know the secret of our success in managing difficult cases involving LD and ESL children. My answer is: “We attract quality individuals to work for us”. Yes, we do pay our tutors extremely well, but then I am also happy to report that I never hire “lovers of money”—our tutors are all especially recruited for each “assignment” and they take on the “job” out of a love to help others with their knowledge and gift for teaching.

One of the reasons why we are able to attract and retain intelligent and responsible tutors is that they feel understood, appreciated, and challenged intellectually.  As leader of our organization, Dr. Winnifred Tang & Associates Learning Management Inc., I keep up with research in our field on a daily basis and I pass on new information to our crew of tutors constantly. If they encounter difficulties, I am there to help them solve problems and to support them. I also give our tutors a great deal of flexibility and “space” to express their uniqueness in their work. All our tutors are multi-talented individuals with high ideals!

People who don’t share our philosophy and approach will either not be allowed into our organization in the first place, or they won’t last very long.

What is Dr. Winnifred Tang & Associates Learning Management Inc.? We are about quality and excellence: those associated with my practice are highly educated individuals with a proven record of achievement in their fields. We are about using the best of science to inform our diagnosis and treatment of learning disabilities, and at the same time, we design intervention design and delivery it to our clients with artistry. We are both scientists and artists at the same time!

Over the summer, we have been busy planning for two talks at Hycroft for Chinese speaking parents in October.

We hope these talks will help parents to better understand what the factors for achieving academic success are for students who are English learners (ESL) and are new to the country. It is estimated that five percent of these ESL student have a language-based learning disability of some sort–the same percentage as in the mainstream population. It is only through public education and making parents and educators aware of the existence of this problem that the affected ESL students will receive appropriate intervention.

The deadline for purchasing tickets to the talks is quickly approaching. Call our office at 604-222-1688 and my wonderful assistant, Annie, will be able to help you.

See the Chinese talk prelim outline copy.

Since May, I have been battling with allergies and hence my productivity has been lower than usual. I do apologize for my delay in posting the slide presentation for Tea & Talk @ Hycroft for Educators that took place back in May of this year.

It was a very cozy and pleasant gathering. We had the talk (without the slide projector due to technical difficulties!) and a very stimulating discussion afterwards. Of course, there was the delicious Black Forrest cake and pastries and tea too. In short, we all enjoyed ourselves very much. Even my co-workers felt the same way despite of the huge amount of planning and work that went into putting on an event like this. We really do wish that more educators could join us for tea and “shop talk” at Hycroft. It was just so much fun! However, we do know that this is a tense time in our public education system and teachers are overworked and they really do not have that much time to spare. For this reason, we felt really honored to have the number of guests that we had.

So, here is the slide show that was actually not shown on the day of the talk. Yes, “yours truly” (me) brought the wrong projector for the occasion and my guests had to listen to me speak without the slides. In fact, I was so flustered about the absence of the slide projector that I must have been incoherent when I spoke! So, I hope the slides will make up for my performance that evening.

(Please click “HERE“ for the slides.)

We have recently started publishing a newsletter for educators in our area and in this issue, we shared one of our success stories with a Chinese girl who is from an ESL-speaking background.  This girl is quite severely learning disabled and yet within a year, she has made some tremendous progress. Most encouraging of all is the fact that her attitude towards learning has improved as did her social-emotional well being!

The message we want to get across is simply this: LD children do not necessarily have to be in a special school where all the students have LD. With proper support, they can do very well in a regular school setting. The school-based team, working together with an intermediary special education service such as us, can produce some very encouraging results.

Summer is a good time to jump-start LD intervention. Teachers should encourage parents to take advantage of this time to help their children move ahead!

We are having Tea & Talk @ Hycroft for Chinese-speaking parents on May 26^th, 2010. Chinese-speaking parents who find it hard to access special education services due to language barriers should make it a priority to attend this event!

Email us @: events@Learn2ManageLD.com to RSVP.

Over the years, I have come across many cases where Chinese-speaking parents do not know how to access special educations for their learning disabled children. As a result, precious time for learning is lost and the children often suffer from all kinds of emotional issues, and amongst them is low self-esteem. This really saddens me. In fact, this bothers me so much that I will do something about it!

Dr. Winnifred Tang & Associates Learning Management Inc. is organizing a talk for Chinese-speaking parents which will take place on Wednesday, May 26^th, 2010, from 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at Hycroft, home of The University Womens’ Club of Vancouver. There will be a tea reception afterwards so parents will have a chance to chat with all of us from the office of Dr. Winnifred Tang.

Tea & Talk @ Hycroft for Chinese-Speaking parents is intended to be a cozy and leisurely event. We want parents to feel comfortable talking to us about their children’s learning problems. The beautiful setting at Hycroft, hopefully, will help us to achieve this purpose!

Interested parents should contact us as soon as possible to avoid disappointment. All the information is on the flyer.

We have opened an account at HSBC specifically for Tea & Talk @ Hycroft. Parents can go to HSBC directly and make a payment for their tickets. Before they do so, they should email us at events@Learn2ManageLD.com to ensure that the seats are still available. We will send out the HSBC account information upon confirming seat availability.

The registration procedures were designed to reduce unnecessary paper work and communication. We hope you will find this method of registering simple and convenient.

See you at Tea & Talk @ Hycroft on May 26^th at 7:00 p.m.!

In a previous blog, I mentioned that I was really impressed with the professionalism and “professional conscience” of a certain educational psychologist who I like to send clients to. Since I don’t want to embarrass this kindly and modest gentleman, I will not mention his name. To be sure, anybody who has been around in the public school system would know who I am talking about because this gentleman has worked for the B.C. Ministry of education as an auditor of School District Special Education Services.

Given such an impressive bio, one would expect “big fees” for his services. I was pleasantly surprised! The fee was half of what most providers of psycho-educational assessments would charge. The reason for charging less was simply: why make the children “antsy” and the parents pay more when the job can be done within three hours of testing!

I thought, now here is a person who makes sense.

For my clients with LD children, getting the educational psychologist’s assessment is more a formality than a necessity. As someone with academic credentials at the Ph.D. level, specializing in learning disabilities, I am qualified to diagnose a child for learning disabilities.  When I send a client’s child to the educational psychologist, I have done the diagnosis already and know exactly what to expect. In fact, for my Ph.D. dissertation, I was diagnosing LD children using the low achievement approach to identifying learning disabilities. Unfortunately, in British Columbia, as in many places around the world, there is still a great deal of entrenched thinking regarding the definition of LD: an outdated IQ-achievement discrepancy formula is still widely used.  When the assessment has an IQ component, we must have an educational psychologist to do the IQ testing.

As my Ph.D. supervisor, Dr. Linda Siegel, used to say, excessive testing for children is not good for them: do only what is necessary and leave it at that! Thus, I try to satisfy the school’s requirement for a psycho-educational assessment through exposing the child to the least testing possible while getting the job done.

So, it was. By chance, while having a conversation with my Italian hairstylist at her salon, the topic of psycho-educational assessments came up and she told me of a client that she has who seems to fit the profile of the psychologist I have been so impressed with. At an instant, both our eyes met, and we blurted out in unison the same name. “By George, it is Dr. ____!”

I guess birds of a feather do flock together!

What prompted me to write this blog is the autistic and ADHD son of my friend.

I have long put out a disclaimer that I don’t want to deal with autism or certain cases of ADHD. Why? It is because I was trained to teach college level English for academic purpose to students who are English as a second language (ESL) or English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. There is big difference between teaching academic track students and vocational track students. I enjoy teaching the academic tract students more; that is just my personal preference.  When I think about autism and ADHD, I tend to think about the enormous amount of energy spent on “babysitting” and dealing with what I consider to be “lower level” matters such as behavioral problems. I just prefer to spend time teaching academic English to ESL or EFL students. I love teaching dyslexics who are often extremely bright and fun to be with.

It wasn’t until recently that I came to realize that a language-based problem such as dyslexia, a reading disability, is often overlooked in those who have profound behavioral issues. The attention is mostly on the annoying and distracting behaviors; the parents, the teachers, and the other professionals working with the child is literally “putting out fires” trying to contain the behavior problems that the learning issues are left unsolved until too late. That is, for most of the child’s school-life, time and energy is devoted to constraining the troublesome behaviors and not much teaching/learning actually happened.

In the case of my friend’s 19 yr. old son, he has been causing trouble for the teachers since elementary school. He is known by his misbehavior more than his ability to learn, which is unfortunate.

As I got to know my friend’s autistic son, something dawned on me: this boy also has a reading disability— dyslexia— but the attention has been mostly focused on his annoying behaviors! Since this boy is already out of the public school system and is in vocational training, his mother had to pay for a tutor to give him extra help.

The tutor I selected for him is a licensed personal trainer as well as a professional writer. In other words, this tutor is not going to be intimidated by the lad’s inappropriate behavior and, at the same time, he is also good in English and able to teach reading, at least, in the initial stages. In a few months time, the autistic and ADHD boy showed marked improvements in his social behavior. His tutor has been very kind to him and he took the behavior-challenged lad under his wings like a younger brother; sometimes, he would even bring him along to go on outings with his buddies!

As the inappropriate behaviors subsided through the work of the male tutor who was often like a big brother, I launched the next stage of our intervention. This time, I have arranged for a tutor who is trained specifically in teaching those with language-based learning disabilities. This time the tutor is a female and I had to make sure that the autistic lad has made enough progress in his behavior before I introduced the new tutor!

One thing we, that is, the mother, myself, and the tutors, have all noticed is that the behavior and language ability of this autistic and ADHD lad improved at about the same rate. It was as if one was feeding into the other.

I have some theories about why this is happening but I will save that for another blog. The lesson that I want to pass on here is this: we must not neglect the language domain when an autistic and/or ADHD child is “kicking up dust and spewing steam” in his/her bad behavior. Often, when the problems in the language domain are addressed— and autism being a communication disorder—the behavior also improves.