Gettin set up during finals season... good idea?

Welcome, the lucky few of you who get around to reading my first post. I appreciate your show of loyalty to me. I hope this will pan out into a valuable resource for people who have learning challenges, people who are family/friends/coworkers of people with learning disabilities, teachers, psychology and education professionals.

My vision for this blog is to begin to open up the little box that we are packing learning disabilities into. I want to open a cross discipline and cross community discussion about all students who have difficulty learning in the American "mainstream" classroom.

To lay it all out, this is a discussion about any aspect of learning and education in the context of my experiences and discussions with members of my community.

Inspiration comes from a variety of experiences:

My experiences as an adult with a recently diagnosed learning disability, have changed who I am, who I want to be and what is most important to me.

Growing up undiagnosed irreparably damaged me in some aspects, and provides me an endless sea of determination in improving myself and in making all my resources available for others.

I have seen my abilities and my sense of self grow more in the recent year than it has in my whole life and I want to share that.

I spend much of my time discussing my learning disability, NLD (Nonverbal Learning Disorder), with the online community on face book. The individuals I have met through the group forums are constantly challenging me to synthesize and research more information about learning and the human mind as a whole, and it is an endeavor which I take great pride and enjoyment from.

I frequently have to branch out of my NLD in my research and problem solving because my fiance (who I hope will become a co-author to this blog in the future) has ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder), and we are regularly challenged to accommodate both of our neurological problems at the same time.

If I look around at my closest friends, I have found that I have surrounded myself with people who have other neurological deficits, who all provide me with a rich source of experience that allows me to put a firm context to the often convoluted academic information that I get from my research.

And education is likely to be a frequent theme in this blog, because both my fiance and I are students in a university setting and aspiring teachers. He has one more semester of courses before his student teaching in secondary physics education, and I am pursuing a degree in special education with an emphasis on learning disabilities.

Generally you can expect hot political ideas to surface relatively frequently because we are immersed in the battles of the day. Some examples off the top of my head, English as a Second Language, School/Public policy, Standardized Education, Curriculum Development, Progressive vs. Traditional Pedagogy Practices, the list goes on.

I want to encourage my readers to comment and message me, whether you have a question, you are upset about something, you just want to say hi, or you want to chat. Typically, my best ideas and inspirations comes from the questions and comments I get from other people.

For those interested, here are some links to the discussion forums I regularly participate in.

http://www.facebook.com/notes.php?imported#/group.php?gid=83530935976
http://www.facebook.com/notes.php?imported#/group.php?gid=5817612058
http://www.facebook.com/notes.php?imported#/group.php?gid=2237450434