Misunderstood Minds gives us a glimpse of only a few of the millions of students in the world who may be suffering from serious learning difficulties. The challenge here lies in not only being able to distinguish and identify these disabilities, but also being able to treat them immediately with the help of some experts. At times, some parents or teachers wonder why one of their students tend to exhibit “laziness” or maybe at times they just seem to be “stupid” or even the individual himself struggles in understanding why he tends to behave as such—we fail to realize that these are actually manifestations of a certain kind of learning disability.
One of the students in the documentary is Nathan Vanhoy, a young energetic, playful boy, who was …show more content…
At first, she could not accept the fact that her son was not “average”, that he couldn’t meet the same standards of his classmates; consequently, she kept coming up with excuses that prevented her from facing the truth. Finally, she realized that there is really something wrong with her son’s learning process.
This however never stopped Nathan. He was able to memorize several information and even books that he would read. Little did they know that this “memorizing” was merely a camouflage to his deficiency. The teachers then suggested that he repeat the First Grade to help him overcome this. Although it seemed as if Nathan were succeeding, after 9 weeks into Second Grade, he could no longer keep up with the new materials—his strategy of memorizing was not enough.
Dr. Levine tries his best to analyze the wiring of Nathan’s brain affect which correspondingly affects his ability to learn. Dr. Levine then tests out Nathan’s neurological weaknesses and strengths and comes to the conclusion that Nathan is unable to identify the words that rhyme—Nathan is diagnosed with a phonemic awareness problem. This problem makes it difficult for one to hear, manipulate, and understand the sounds in spoken words and the syllables of speech sounds; hence, Nathan is unable to comprehend the alphabetic writing system since these letters do represent sounds or
One of the students in the documentary is Nathan Vanhoy, a young energetic, playful boy, who was …show more content…
At first, she could not accept the fact that her son was not “average”, that he couldn’t meet the same standards of his classmates; consequently, she kept coming up with excuses that prevented her from facing the truth. Finally, she realized that there is really something wrong with her son’s learning process.
This however never stopped Nathan. He was able to memorize several information and even books that he would read. Little did they know that this “memorizing” was merely a camouflage to his deficiency. The teachers then suggested that he repeat the First Grade to help him overcome this. Although it seemed as if Nathan were succeeding, after 9 weeks into Second Grade, he could no longer keep up with the new materials—his strategy of memorizing was not enough.
Dr. Levine tries his best to analyze the wiring of Nathan’s brain affect which correspondingly affects his ability to learn. Dr. Levine then tests out Nathan’s neurological weaknesses and strengths and comes to the conclusion that Nathan is unable to identify the words that rhyme—Nathan is diagnosed with a phonemic awareness problem. This problem makes it difficult for one to hear, manipulate, and understand the sounds in spoken words and the syllables of speech sounds; hence, Nathan is unable to comprehend the alphabetic writing system since these letters do represent sounds or