Back in 1998 I was in Russia and had an Uzbek visa, planning on taking the train from Moscow to Tashkent. The lady at the train station said that to sell me the ticket, I needed a Kazakh transit visa… ok so go to the Embassy.
The guy at the Kazakh Embassy said that to issue a transit visa, I had to have a train ticket.
Transfering a car tag from my car to another car I had just bought.
DMV: You’ll need proof of insurance on the new car before we can transfer the tag.
Insurance company: We can’t insure the second car till it has a tag.
Wasted half a day on that stupidity.
When I was going through flight school, a girl who was just a few weeks behind me in her training, received her pilot’s license before her driver’s license. She needed a ride to the airport, but could then hop in a plane and fly it wherever she wanted to go.
This definition isn’t really in play anymore, but I have a former student who recently went through a battery of tests, including IQ tests. These were done by professionals, it was a whole day deal–we aren’t talking about an internet survey. His verbal subscore was 161; his math subscore was 125. By the classic definition, that 30+ point discrepancy indicates a learning disability in math.
To get a sense of how ridiculous this is, he scored a 5 out of 5 on three AP exams, including both computer science and calculus, as a freshman, before he turned 15.
Once, I called the airline 24hours ahead of my flight and asked if I could move to another flight. They would only do it for something ridiculous like $600 (on a $200 ticket), so I of course declined. I would up being – no shit – the only person on the plane outside of the flight crew. :dubious:
Back a few years I had contact with a church summer camp. On the annual inspections: the fire dept. forbid the use of dead-bolt locks; the police dept. insisted locks had to be dead-bolt.
Manager had two sets, used the one the inspector wanted.
Ohio is going through something like that with school security. The current panic is active shooters, and while teachers are being told all this stuff about how they need constant vigilance and training or the kids will die, etc., and to teach the kids to pile desks in front of the door, it’s actually illegal to have dedicated barricades standing by, because a dedicated, purpose-built barricade is an illegal lock under the fire code.
Discalculia is a real thing though.
Geniuses can have learning disabilities. If you’re stupid, you’re just stupid. But if just one or two small thing are out of whack, that tells us there’s a problem, often one that’s fixable.
You’re a teacher?
The airline probably needed to move the plane to a new location anyway and would have done so even if you weren’t the only person on the flight.
Not sure if this qualifies for the thread or not. A friend of mine a few weeks ago was hit in an intersection. The lady that hit him had the green light but the intersection had not yet cleared. In Ca we have a gridlock law. Never enter an intersection that you can’t clear. My buddy was issued a ticket for the gridlock law but the lady that hit him was determined to be at fault.
And learning disabilities often aren’t confined to just one thing. If you do have dyscalculia, you might also have trouble with understanding things like time and spatial relationships. It’s also not uncommon for dyscalculia to accompany things like ADHD or autism spectrum disorders, which can and do affect people with high IQs. It could be a symptom of something like a nonverbal learning disability, which affects a lot of areas of life.
I don’t think a battery of tests like that is a standard thing that most students go through. It certainly wasn’t when I was in school (maybe I’m wrong and it is now). If he did, there’s probably some reason for it, something he’s having trouble with. That kind of thing sounds expensive, not the kind of thing you’d do for no reason.
It’s entirely possible to ace AP exams but have trouble with some aspects of daily living because of a learning disability. If you have problems with spatial thinking, you might not have a lot of trouble in school, but you might not be able to parallel park, for example. Someone with a nonverbal learning disability might do well academically in school but struggle socially.
Back in WWII, companies could get draft deferments for people who were vital to their operations (particularly if the companies themselves were important to the war effort). Since there was a limit on how many people could be designated as vital, a lot of companies tried to game the system: if they had an important employee who was physically unfit, they wouldn’t bother calling him “vital,” but they would be sure to call all the fit guys they could “vital.” Towards the end of the war (and after, when occupation soldiers were needed), the Army changed the level of physical fitness required for service, so people like Isaac Asimov, who weren’t terribly fit, but had never been designated as “vital” found themselves in boot camp.
This is one of the reasons that numerical scores and formal definitions shouldn’t be the be-all-and-end-all of education. Having them is important because without them, it becomes difficult to have any standards, but there should be wiggle room to make exceptions when clearly warranted. In a similar note, this is how immigrants with an unrecognized Blue-Ribbon Diplomate of Academic Finesse from the Breakaway Republique of Northern Ruritania can get into schools that would normally require a local high school diploma or a foreign equivalent recognized under the Equivalents in Education Act of 1995 (which doesn’t recognize breakaway Ruritanian states). Faculty can do an independent evaluation, assess transcripts, review syllabi, and administer exams to determine whether or not the candidate should be considered qualified.
My stepson had a student job in the Financial Aid office of the local university a few years ago. He was getting close to graduating, at which point he would lose his student status and be out of a job. So he applied for a full time position that had recently been posted, and for which he was qualified due to the experience from his student job. University HR wouldn’t even look at his application because he didn’t have a degree, even though he was only a few weeks from graduating. And the application deadline was before graduation, so he couldn’t wait and apply for the job after he had his degree.
My mother bought a folding electric wheelchair while she was visiting us in CA at Christmas. She got anxious about taking the Li-ion battery on the plane home, as new regulations came into play on Jan 1. Being conflict-averse, she decided to leave it at our place, and have me ship it to her back at home in Australia.
Uh, nope. While airlines have rules about carrying batteries, there are exceptions made for mobility devices. So if she’d taken it with her, it would have been fine to bring as carry-on baggage. Suddenly, when it’s shipped, it becomes DANGEROUS GOODS!!!111 and requires, among other things, reams of paperwork, specific static-free packaging materials, and a cost of nearly $1000.
Thanks mum. She ordered a new battery ($800) and I’ll bring this one to her next time I visit. As carry-on.
That actually seems a remarkably sane outcome, kind of the opposite of this thread.
Of course it’s a real thing. But he doesn’t have it–his math skills are tremendous. It’s just the verbal is off the charts.
Of course they can. And this kid has some interesting issues. But they aren’t with processing numbers/mathematical reasoning.
Right, and he does have issues–and lest you think I am not on this kids’ side, I’m the one that kept up with him in college and intervened with his parents to get him testing. But whatever his issues, it’s not a MATH disability. No one with a math disability is blowing the top off of college level math courses as a high school Freshman (and went on to do the same pretty steadily: there were literally maybe 100 kids in the country last year with his test scores.)
My point here is not that smart people can’t have learning differences; it’s that rigid definitions of “learning disability” are less than useful when talking about real people, and you have to look at the whole context.
They are absolutely useful and are appropriate for the student as you have described him.
So if you had two kids with identical academic outcomes but one had a 31 point discrepancy between math and verbal subscores and the other had a 29 point gap, both from single tests, you’d diagnose the first with dyscalculia and and the other without? And suggest meaningfully different treatments/accommodations for the two?