"We look for an aptitude-achievement discrepancy as well as a processing deficit," one of them explains.

Your eyes glaze over and you begin to feel you're not too smart. It's like they're speaking another language. You haven't a clue what these people are talking about.

Actually, I've always felt that special education does use a foreign language.

That doesn't, however, mean that you can't learn it. Like any language, after a while, you'll get it.

When you meet with Pupil Evaluation Team, or Case Conference Committee, or Child Study Team, or whatever it's called in your area, you will probably hear sentence mentioned above.

Let's chop that sentence into pieces:

"We look for an aptitude-achievement discrepancy..."

Your child's aptitude is his ability to learn. When I was in school, we called it an IQ. In order for someone to have a learning disability, he has to have at least average aptitude for learning. In other words, he needs to have ability to learn as well as any average child of his age.

His achievement refers to how well he is learning, or extent to which he has received information and mastered certain skills. This may be where problems show up.

The evaluator looks at whether there is a big difference, or discrepancy, between those two scores - aptitude and achievement. Is there a big difference between what he SHOULD HAVE learned and what he really has learned?

I was actually talking to my mother when I first heard about it. I called her to chat and she told me she was watching this show called “Trading Spouses”. Isn’t that name terrible?

I couldn’t believe my Mom was watching such a thing.

But, after she told me about it, it sounded hilarious, so I decided to check it out when it came on in my time zone (we have a four hour time difference). And she was right, it was hilarious. So, I watched it with my husband last night.

Now, I’m not a big reality show fan. So, I’ll get to point in a second.

So, anyway, last night’s show was about two husbands that traded places. The one was a New York City lawyer who lived in Manhattan – and he changed places with a low income worker who lived in country in Georgia.

(Okay, and just to clarify for those of you whose minds might be going elsewhere – there was no hanky panky going on…)

So, you can imagine difference in life style!

The country guy had his very first plane ride to get to New York, and he was blown away by speed of life. The rich man’s kids were great; but his wife was a witch. Shocked that he was never at a restaurant that required dressing up, bragging about their beach home being worth $2-3 million, freaking out when someone walked into kitchen with sand on their shoes, and nagging and pushing son about getting his bar mitzvah speech right – especially since affair was costing about as much as a wedding.

They city guy was in culture shock too. The house was run down and messy; and kids were NIGHTMARES! They were totally out of control.

Unfortunately, I have seen kids that bad before in real life – but it’s been awhile. They were hitting, fighting, ignoring their mom, telling man to “shut up” – can you believe it? And this was good behavior in front of television crew and visitors? It was really awful.