Monthly Archives: July 2014

There is Some Hope for the World

liaBetween hearing horror stories about what is happening in education from our families, as well as reports and studies and seeing the results first hand day in and day out from our families, there are some glimmers of hope that we might survive in spite of our governments and institutions.

As much as I care about all of our kids with developmental problems, I am on a larger scale really concerned about our future as a society. We have wars going on all over the planet, people seem to find new reasons for killing and harming each other, and technology keeps giving them faster and easier ways to do it. We have people starving, people who lack even the basics needed to sustain life. One would think that in 2014 we would have some clue as to how to live together and help and support each other on this tiny planet; but evidently we don’t.

There are obviously a lot of things that need to be done; but we certainly do need to make everyone smarter, and we really need to help some people become really smart. We can help more of the people get it and some of the people really wrap their heads around the problems and start really fixing them.

Today I saw a glimmer of what can be. I saw a beautiful young lady who gave me hope. At her last evaluation I encouraged her family to buy her her very own set of encyclopedias. She likes to read—a lot. On good days her digit spans are hitting 12, and today her math was testing at high fourth grade, word recognition at college level, and reading comprehension at tenth grade level. She carries around medical books for casual reading, and today she needed to tell me about what she thought were the three most interesting spinal diseases. Cute, sweet, great sense of humor. (With an impish grin of her face today—just to mess with me—she said she thought that TLP was causing her tinnitus. Then she laughed.) She’s doing wonderfully physically and starting to get into doing chores. Great kid. And, by the way, she’s five! Five! Meet Lia.

There is hope for the world.