Story of the Day 1/ 19/ 2009

This is an old story, but it keeps coming up- but my apologies if you have heard it before.
At any rate, it came up at lunch , today.
At lunch , my daughter Sarah was carrying on about IQ tests.
Now, I have a very personal belief that IQ tests are good for two things, looking for learning disabilities and getting qualified for special education services.
They don’t’ tell how smart or dumb a person is, although, sometimes, they do say something about their personality……
Somewhere in the midst of the discussion, my son asks me if he got to be in honors classes because he did well on his IQ test…..
Well, actually, his IQ tests did measure intelligence. Just not his.

You see, when he was little, not quite 3 years old, he was being “evaluated” to transition into school services. He was deaf, which qualified him, but in order to assess his needs , they did a whole bunch of tests, including an OT (occupational therapy) and a PT (Physical therapy) evaluation, and an IQ test.
The woman who tested him asked me if it would be okay to do the longer test. Apparently, it is not popular with parents, and she wanted the opportunity to do it .
Before she started, I asked her if she had any familiarity with testing children with hearing loss.
“No.” I then suggested that she speak with my son’s audiologist, before testing him, since I thought she should have some insight.
She told me she would.
Then, she did the test, which largely amounted to asking me pages and pages of similar questions like, “How many words does he use in a sentence?” “Does he use proper word order when he uses an adjective?”
I interrupted a few times to tell her she really needed to speak with my son’s audiologist, and she assured me she would before she finalized her report.

A few weeks later, she came out to the house to give me the results of her testing.
My son was “mildly mentally retarded.”

Of course, my son is not mildly mentally retarded, and this theoretically well-educated woman hadn’t bothered to find out anything about testing children with hearing loss either from my son’s audiologist or from anywhere else.
I did however, as a result of this , learn that her intelligence was impaired.
Over the years, I have seen her slated as speaking at this function or that function, and I always get a laugh. Her name is Patty Martin-Brown. If you ever see that’s he is speaking anywhere, I do not recommend that you attend.

So, I tell my son this story, and then I explain how well he had done in such a short number of years.
Okay, he didn’t’ do all that well at signing. But that isn’t’ my fault, I did try.
But, when he started taking off with his spoken English, I remember his speech therapist explaining very carefully to me, that even though he was making great progress, I should not expect his language skills – either signing or speaking- to catch up to that of Hearing children. He ‘d had much too late of a start to catch up.
He was probably about 4, when she told me this.
By the time he was 7, she was telling me that she thought he might someday actually catch up., She didn’t’ want to promise, but.
By the time he was in 5th grade, he had essentially caught up.
That doesn’t’ mean that he spoke the same as a Hearing child would- his speech is still a little special. In a very nice way, or that he heard what was going on around him, but he was doing well enough that he had straight A’s , all year. Straight A’s doing the same course work as all of the other students in his general ed class. That meant doing papers and writing answers and even giving speeches. Although that is another story.
So, imagine my surprise, when he started Middle School and I found out that they had placed him into remedial classes.
I complained.
Well, you knew I would.
And I was told that they were concerned how he would handle having multiple teachers, and these classes had less teachers and more tiem to focus on et students.
I still complained. The work was beneath what he had been doing the year before.
I was told that eh could be moved at the end of the first quarter, assuming he had doen all-right.
Well all right was straight As.
But they didn’t’ move him.
And , yes, (you knew it was coming) I complained.

On my way out of an absolutely frustrating and unproductive meeting, a staff member pulled me aside and told me to have him retested. His IQ retested.
“But why?”
Because it was low, so this administrator was judging him on the test from when he was not quite 3, and not on anything he had accomplished since then.
I tried to tell her that an IQ test doesn’t mean anything, and she told me to “just do it!” Because its administrator would not understand anything else.

So I did.
I requested that he be retested.
A month later, he was moved into all honors classes, and for the next 2 ½ years, every time I ran into that administrator, she would tell me how brilliant my son was.
And I would think, “And you are incredibly stupid.”So, I suppose that an IQ test can measure intelligence, although, not necessarily of the person taking it.

I will also tell you an important detail.
Back when my son was getting ready to turn 3, and Ms. Martin-Brown presented me with this evidence of his mental retardation, my response was, "Do we get more services?"

I have always been pragmatic.