Here's how it FEELS to have a learning disability....try it!

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I did "Mary had a little lamb" and "Baa baa black sheep"

I didn't finish the task because it was taking so much mental energy and I got the point. I had to imagine each word and pretty much pretend that I was bouncing back and forth visually between the columns of rhymes....if that makes sense.

I can't imagine what is going on inside those kid's heads and how they feel mentally when they finish a task. I give them a lot of credit....well....more than a lot of credit.

I make good grades but forget stuff, like keys, all the time. I'm seeing a psychiatrist next about being co morbid with ADD.

Ditto. Everyone here with AS already knows what its like to have a learning disability. The feeling you're describing of becoming overwhelmed trying to juggle nursery rhymes in your head is precisely the feeling we have when we're forced to be in a room with more than three people at once. Just replace nursery rhyme words with facial expressions, extraneous noise, body language and sarcasm.

Welcome to our world.

Are you saying that is a learning disability there?

AS is a learning disability. It affects BRAIN DEVELOPMENT of the ability to learn to interpret those things, thus they remain ever confusing and overwhelming.

Asperger Syndrome, HFA and PDD-NOS are all learning disorders. I thought you knew that. Or am I missing a joke?

I thought the OP meant school wise as in learning subjects. I always had learning problems but they didn't become obvious until my preteen years because the work started to become abstract and more complex. I'm a concrete learner and visual. Plus I had troubles grasping and it was hard to understand. It was all blamed on my AS. I guess that's the severe part of me because I see lot of aspies doing school work on their own and they don't need lot of extra help and don't their work modified and they can go to college. I never went because I struggled in school so much. I only went and did several courses but I never went for any degree.

Compared to me trying to keep up with five mental rabbit trails at the same time, it's easy. But I have lots of practice. (And ADHD, which is like cheating when it comes to letting your attention bounce from one place to another. Also, singing one and saying the other is definitely cheating.)

I think it's a technicality of how you define learning disorder. The definition that most people think of is a disorder in a relatively narrow area, like math, reading, writing, or the non-denotative aspects of speech. Autism's effects are much more global than that (thus the word "pervasive" in the official name for it), and so it might be thought of as a "developmental disability" or "neurological disorder" rather than a specific "learning disability".

I didn't vote because I believe that my daughter and I have learning disabilities, but no one believes me. I don't dare discuss it too closely with her because she is better off believing she's fine until I can get someone to tell me how I can help her. She knows she has trouble staying focused and remembering things, but she has been treated for so long like her problems are 100% due to a personal failing that she now resents any attempts to interfere with her business. She is overwhelmed with all the things she is expected to remember in school or to memorize for school, all the papers she is supposed to organize or keep up with, all the assignments that take her so long to finish when she keeps being distracted by her own thoughts, and the pressure of being told how smart she is right before being told how much she is disappointing everyone. She finds public school boring and frustrating, is teased IN CLASS by other students but is afraid to leave it because she loves her friends, perhaps because they are few. And while we are seeing a psychologist, he does not like the idea of labeling her so has not been willing to consider learning disability as yet. We are still in the early stages with her, mind you, so I have some dim hope... but I personally have been living with it for years and I think I might not have AS but simply be someone who is different enough from people around me, who has suffered for so long as someone who shows too much intelligence for anyone to think I might have a problem outside of my own attitude, who has spent so many years being found sub-par and unacceptible, that I have so very many different little stims because of the stress alone.

I guess this isn't what the thread was about. I just never thought I'd feel jealous of someone with an actual diagnosis and a family member who has found a way to understand how it feels to be this way. Executive dysfunction just seems to be met with a roll of the eyes. I could live with it... if I just thought that the people around me were willing to accept it. And now my daughter is going down the same road.

Mention inattentive ADHD to your shrink. It's possible the lack of organization and the overwhelmed feeling might yield to some of the same strategies that ADHD people use.

Heros without a doubt. I grew up as an average to above average student with discalculia. And only those that have been there truely understand how difficult it is to be judged lazy and stupid for not understanding the "simplests of mathmatical functions ect".
Oh for the day when people will not be judged on anything, but there effort and heart.

This is how it feels when I'm trying to understand why other people react the way they do.

My girlfriend gets mad at me sometimes when I lock up while we're arguing, I'm trying to keep track of what's going on in her head, predict what may happen next, and adjust the model constantly as new input comes in, and after a while the whole house of cards falls and I have to dig through and resort it til I figure it out.

I got bored after the second word of the second nursery rhyme. I've been dxd with AD/HD inattentive type, but I don't consider myself learning disabled.

I don't want to be a poster child for political correctness, but I really do feel that I never had a learning disability. In fact, it's just the opposite now: I can process and analyze large quantities of information, and report it concisely to those who need to know it. My Asperger's is a case where I am differentially abled.

In school I was bad at math, comprehension, punctuation, expressing language in writing...etc. Basically everything but art.
I tried the nursery rhyme thing and it took me about as long to think of the words like I usually do.

Sweet mercifal crap! Tried for 2 seconds before my fav song came into my head, louder than ever......

"Jimmy cracked corn and I don't care".........

Kudos to anyone that can do it.......are we allowed to write the rhymes out or is that cheating?

To the OP.......you are a GREAT mum.......so uplifting. Can you be my mum too? I am probably a bit old.

Mics

This was easy (I picked "Hickory Dickory Dock" and "Old Mother Hubbard"). I have several learning disorders, including ADHD (Type 2 Inattentive) and dyscalculia (an umbrella term for differences dealing with arithmetic, mathematics, direction, etc.) Perhaps thinking so differently from the norm enabled me to do this nursery rhyme thing with ease?