Snap. Snap. Zip. Unzip. Shove. Squeeze. Sit. Squash. Zip again. That’s the sound of a student packing for college for the first time.

This Slacker Mom is an open letter to those who are going off to study teaching. I am writing to you because I want something from you.

When you are choosing your courses, can you take the time to look at learning disabilities? Pretty please?

I have an ulterior motive here. In March my daughter received a diagnosis of dyslexia.

Since we noticed a problem, a few years ago, we have heard some really daft things from well-meaning teachers.

When I asked one teacher, “are you trained in dyslexia?”, the answer was, “we here at the school are trained in many learning modalities”.

Dyslexia is not a learning modality; it’s a language disorder.

At my daughter’s school, I get the impression that learning disabilities are seen as strictly the territory of the learning specialist.

But it is the classroom teacher who spends the most time each day teaching my child.

Most children like my daughter only spend an hour a two a week with a reading specialist.

Classroom teachers need to have a basic understanding of what learning disorders are, and how to work with them.

What’s that, you say? You’ll be teaching normal children?

Most children with ADD/ADHD and dyslexia have normal to above average intelligence and some are gifted. Einstein comes to mind.

How about Sir Richard Branson, (I’ll bet he was fun to teach! Richeee ... get down from there, right now!), Nikola Tesla and Jennifer Aniston?

My daughter has an above average vocabulary, but has trouble retrieving all her big words when she needs them.

Ah, you say, but these issues are not that common.

Let me enlighten you. One in ten students have dyslexia. In a classroom of 20 you will probably have at least two students with the issue.

The numbers for attention deficit disorder are about the same. So that’s four children in a classroom of 20, right there, and these are not the only learning issues.

I’ll bet those four start to feel like ten when you don’t know how to work with them.

So I am asking you future teacher, do the research.

Take a course. Read some books. Heck, watch a couple of YouTube videos. Do it, because you want to be a really good teacher.