Unlocking Potential: College and Other Choices for People With LD and ADHD

A chance encounter with an unfortunate bird provides the springboard for Harry Sylvester’s marvelous reflections on confronting and conquering his learning disabilities. Legacy of the Blue Heron: Living with Learning Disabilities is a moving personal account of coping with learning disabilities by an individual with severe dyslexia who became an engineer, businessman, boat-builder, and president of the Learning Disabilities Association of America. This entertaining storyteller’s experiences lead to wise, common-sense advice for solving many problems faced by students, parents, and educators.

Focusing on social skills training for adults with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorders (AD/HD), this book offers solutions for tackling behavior that is often inattentive, impulsive, and hyperactive. Advice is given on how to handle common social problems such as manners, etiquette, communication, subtext, listening, and interpersonal relationships. The format of the book is designed for AD/HD learning styles and includes true stories, practical exercises, and tips that keep those with AD/HD reading. Adults with AD/HD learn how to identify behaviors in themselves that can cause problems in social relationships.

Combines poignant stories told by learning disabled adults with advice for therapists counseling them. This book provides counselors with insight into the personal dimension of learning disabilities and ADD, as well as practical guidelines for their assessment and treatment. Carol Wren shares powerful stories of adults with learning disabilities, letting readers hear their anger, depression, and struggles with substance abuse. Her framework links LD with certain emotional problems, while Jay Einhorn’s commentary adds guidance on counseling LD adults.

Parents of teens with learning disabilities face a wide range of questions and concerns regarding the education of their children. Periods of transition, particularly the movement through high school to the working world or to further education, can be particularly difficult to navigate. Guiding Teens with Learning Disabilities helps parents as their children shift from teenage life to adulthood. It includes sections on planning for transition, post-secondary education, vocational training, career preparation, and life in the community.

What is dyslexia and how is it assessed in adults? What is the most appropriate training for those who work with dyslexic people? This comprehensive guide is for professionals working with adults with dyslexia in the learning and working environment. It uses practical definitions and offers advice that can be understood by professionals and employers with little or no previous understanding of dyslexia.

In the well-researched and compelling Standardized Minds, former journalist and economist Peter Sacks launches an exhaustive attack on the national obsession with testing — and lands a few hits. If you think you’ve heard every argument against standardized tests, think again. Sacks methodically picks away at our feeble attempts to measure the mind, reaching back into the history of testing with unsettling revelations about the creation of the first intelligence test and its many flaws. He deftly illustrates how the belief of inferior cultures motivated the creator of the SAT college entrance exam and takes on all that standardized testing has wrought: ability grouping, gifted programs, state accountability efforts — even the effect on parents whose perceptions of their own children are often shaken by scores on a sheet of paper. Standardized Minds is a persuasive must-read for parents, educators, and lawmakers that challenges our basic assumptions about intelligence and pays homage to the talented minds we may have overlooked in our fervor to rate the human brain.