"Special Needs Biography"                                                                        Survival Spanish by Icornology  
Assignment for Special Needs Learners
UCLA Teacher Credential Program
July 2010

My name is Matthew, and I live in Culver City with my wife Alex and 5 year old son Aidan.   I spent more than a decade working in the field of marketing research, both in New York and Los Angeles, and am now aspiring to be a secondary science teacher.  While I have had no formal teaching experience, I worked for a semester during college as a state paid ESL tutor to adult immigrants in South Florida, and taught English to 5th graders in Shanghai for a month.  In addition, I have had many years of experience in training and project management roles.  I feel that I have a lot to learn, but also a lot to offer.  One of my main reasons for deciding to become a teacher is that I have always had a strong desire to help disadvantaged people.  Among the disadvantaged are those with learning disabilities, both diagnosed and undiagnosed.  

I grew up with an older brother who was born a month late, but looked like a preemie.  Born in the 1960’s, no doctor ever figured out what went wrong, or even a proper label for him.  He learned to read when he was three, which prompted one psychiatrist to label him a genius.  But his strange behaviors and chronic deficits in social skills had other doctors label him as mentally retarded.  Craig went to many doctors and spent many years at some very expensive schools, even having a Bar Mitzvah and graduating from high school, but still ended up clearly unable to work or live independently, instead relying on my father and social security.  My brother received a tremendous amount of resources, but none of it seemed to really pay off.   Looking back, something that he did not receive enough of and what might have had a significant positive impact on his future was acceptance.  Craig was never accepted for who he was.  Not knowing any better, my parents focused all of there efforts on trying to make him “normal”, which he was never going to be, instead of working toward having him reach his innate potential. 

Throughout my early childhood, my parents called me their “absent minded professor”. My head always seemed to be somewhere else.  This didn’t change as I got older.  By the time I was in middle school, I was upsetting my parents with terrible grades.  They were convinced that I was just a lazy daydreamer.  Looking back, my parents were partly right, but I also remember often trying hard to do well in school, but I almost always failed in my attempts.  Eventually, these repeated failures made me lose my will to keep trying.  I honestly felt that I was too stupid to excel in school.  After many years of excessive daydreaming, poor grades and evaluations by school psychologists, I eventually learned to pay attention just enough and to study adequately enough to get through most of my classes with at least mediocre grades.  I continued to struggle with some of the same issues when I attended college.  After being put on academic probation twice, I was diagnosed with ADD (attention deficit disorder).  With this information, I eventually learned how to compensate for my academic weaknesses. It took me six years, but I graduated from college and even went on to earn a master’s degree.

Years later, on a snowy winter day in 2005, my son Aidan was born in Manhattan.  Although he had been born in distress due to complications during labor, he was released from the ICU within 48 hours, and we took home a healthy baby … my wife was okay, too : >).  He hit all of his normal developmental milestones, but at around 21 months he stopped using the dozen or so words that he had acquired and didn’t want to play with us anymore.  At first we just thought he was going through a phase.  Being in a multi-ethnic family, perhaps Aidan was getting a bit overwhelmed processing three languages spoken in our home.  But after several weeks of this we started getting nervous.  At that point we were living in a 70 year old building in Queens, so we figured he must have eaten some paint flakes and gotten lead poisoning, but the lead levels in his blood turned out to be normal.  Over the next couple months, we watched our playful affectionate babbling little boy disappear, and a tormented drooling toe-walking child emerge.  He didn’t even want his own mother to touch him.  Aidan was diagnosed with autism just shy of his second birthday.  Thanks to a specialized diet and countless hours of therapy, Aidan is now happy and healthy and will start kindergarten this fall, but he is still autistic.  He has made of lot of progress, but like with my brother Craig, there doesn’t seem to be a way to make Aidan “normal”.  Having learned from the mistakes of my parents, Alex and I have come to accept who he his and focus our efforts toward having him reach his full potential.

I have discovered first hand that learning disabilities come in many forms, some apparent and others not so obvious.  Through the learning challenges I’ve been exposed to with my brother, myself, and my son I feel that I have acquired enough insight and sensitivity to help those who have learning difficulties that may or may not have yet been assessed.  Because children with learning problems might especially benefit from having lessons taught to them using overlapping methods, I will try to make class a sensory experience for my students, presenting material in ways that could best address each student’s learning style combination (visual, auditory, reading/writing and kinesthetic).  I plan to incorporate multi-media presentation tools that help to simplify complex information, and clearly express its significance in their lives.  By applying these methods to the teaching of science, I believe that I will be able to convey its wonders to an otherwise indifferent audience of students, including those with learning disabilities.  Hopefully, I will even inspire some of them to pursue a career in the sciences.