People were fascinated with the above title of Lisa Harris’ workshop. As she said in her description, “In traditional schools, when they have a student they don’t know what to do with, they like to put a label on them, not realizing that it might hurt that student. In my case, I was thought to be a slow learner. So, to me, I thought that I was stupid. I felt this all my life and into adulthood. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I learned that I was dyslexic. I think that if I was in an alternative school, maybe they would have looked further into the problem or given me the time to work through it.”
In the workshop they looked at labeling in schools, did some role-playing, and examined how people could find their strengths.
After the workshop, Lisa said, “one of the participants came up to her at lunch and thanked her. He said he no longer felt alone. His son’s school had labeled him as inferior because he was dyslexic and laughed when he said he wanted to be a doctor. Now he understood what had happened.”
Lisa said that when she was school age she made friends in other schools with an elite group who thought she was very intelligent. So finally, when she was a senior she insisted that the school test her intelligence. When the results showed a very high IQ the school panicked and tried to conceal the results so they couldn’t be blamed for the “injustice of my education.”
“Eventually I gave up trying in my high school. I think that many young people who have a hard time learning in traditional schools would do well in learner-centered alternatives. In fact, I met many people at the conference who felt they had dyslexia or some other challenge that hadn’t been addressed in school and this was one reason they were involved with educational alternatives.”
“For myself, I didn’t give up on myself. Eventually, I graduated from the New York Institute of Technology and have had a long career in teaching, writing, and photography.”
