RA>I frankly don't know enough about many of these issues to discuss them.
  >I can't prove it, but I sometimes suspect a lot of people are just
  >waiting for somebody else to post something on these topics so they can
  >learn something about them.  I will toss out something I heard from one
  >of my coworkers yesterday:  one of her daughters is a special ed.
  >teacher.  She has a lot of Spanish-speaking kids in the class, kids who
  >don't speak English.  I would suspect that most of them are also
  >Indians (many people don't seem to realize that there are Indians south
  >of the border).  It seems that a lot of these children have been tested
  >in English and labelled retarded simply because they cannot answer
  >questions in a language they don't know.  I am definitely not amused by
  >this, especially when one considers the push in various quarters for
  >English as the official language.
Whether English is or is not the official language does not justify
*labeling* a person retarded on the basis of a test they cannot
understand.  I'm sure you followed the case of the Indian woman who was
released from the mental institution where she had lived for many years
simply because she spoke a different language and came from a different
culture, so they thought she was crazy!
I remember being given one of those stupid IQ tests when I was a
child, about seven. And I not only spoke English quite well at the time;
I also read it fluently. I still did quite poorly on the test; I rated
high level retarded on it, as a matter of fact. I know this because I
saw the score later in a portfolio on me in one of the schools I
attended for a short while during my childhood.  I even remember some of
the questions: things about bathtubs and doilies and other stuff.  I had
never bathed in a bathtub at that point, or used an indoor toilet; and I
certainly had never seen doilies.  But I had read "A Child's Garden of
Verses" by Stevenson; and I could do multiplication.  That score never
marred my life, partially because I attended school so seldom that
usually by the time my records arived anywhere, I wasn't there any
longer anyway; partially because it was probably pretty clear to anyone
I *wasn't* retarded; and partially because I had outstanding acheivement
test scores.  I'm sure many kids like me *did* have their lives messed
up because of those test scores, however.
                       Sondra
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 þ SLMR 2.1a þ I like persons better than principles. - Oscar Wilde
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