In the past, children with learning disabilities were hidden at home. A pathetic few might never have left home until their souls had first left their bodies. Today, however, children with learning disabilities are integrated into the mainstream.

Many parents of children with learning disabilities know that academically their children may not be able to cope. However, they prefer their children be around others so that they learn social skills that will help them survive a harsh world.

My only son was born a healthy, curious and alert child. Up to the age of eight years, those who did not know his school results assessed him to be an intelligent boy. Doctors would advise me to put him in the top schools in the country. However, I felt something was amiss where his learning was concerned.

He could recite a video's contents from the first note of the signature tune to the last name at the credits. This was made possible through viewing the same video repeatedly until he knew every tone and tune, every character and event in it.

That was how he learnt to 'read' the first story book. He came home one evening and told me he could read. I found it odd though, that before he finished saying the words on the last line, he was already flipping the page. Soon he hated 'reading' to me because he realised, as I did, that he was just reciting the story and he didn't know the letters that stuck together and formed the different sounds. I found out subsequently that his classmate had been faithfully reading to him the same book and he had been listening to her more than he had been trying to piece the letter sounds together.

The sad thing was that the kindergarten teachers were fooled into believing that he could read too. If only they had checked by getting the children to read randomly selected words. By the end of the first year of kindergarten, I had given up trying to convince the teachers that my son was not learning to read.

This year, I was given a First Grade to teach, the first in my twenty-three years of teaching. My colleagues had the same mentality as the kindergarten teachers, that the children would pick up their reading skills by and large - they would not need intervention yet - the co-ordinator said. I was flabbergasted, when approached by the Principal as to why we were not helping the children read at all, the same co-ordinator could say, wide-eyed, that the level was told not to give remedial lessons.

I had started my own experimental

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