Undiagnosed Learning Disability Is Subplot on Lifetime TV’s ARMY WIVES

I’m always on the look-out for learning disabilities that haven’t been diagnosed. A few years ago I diagnosed ADD in a 10^th –grade friend of the family based on something he said to me. (“I don’t know why I didn’t study for my history exam – I love history.”)

The boy’s younger sister had already been diagnosed with ADD. But because he didn’t present the same as his sister, his went undetected until his parents had him tested after I gently suggested this to them.

Which is why I was pleased that, in episode 10 of Season 2 of Lifetime TV’s ARMY WIVES, Roxy was told by Roland, who’s teaching a GED course, the reason she failed the practice exam even though she knew the material. It was because she had a learning disability that interfered with transferring her knowledge to a written test. Roland told her she wasn’t dumb; in fact, she was smart. She just needed to take the test orally.

True, this reveal was not nearly as compelling as the reveal when fans of THE COSBY SHOW found out along with Theo, when he was already in college, that he had a learning disability that interfered with his test taking. (My tears flowed when Vanessa told her father he should be sorry for all the times he ragged on Theo about his grades.) Or in PUNKY BREWSTER when a 12-year-old couldn’t read the poison antidote instructions that could save her younger brother.

In case you believe that you may have an undiagnosed learning disability, there’s a book that may speak to you. Dr. Mel Levine’s A MIND AT A TIME is a treasure trove of explanations of numerous areas of the brain that can affect things that we do (or can’t do).

The author’s writing style is quite dense so you have to be determined to plow through the material and extract the relevant information. Yet the result may be worth the work, especially if you discover some thing or things that you may have been unfairly beating yourself up about all your life.

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Reliving the 1970s with Derogatory Media Portrayals of Women and Limiting Reproductive Freedom

Last week on Twitter someone drew attention to a new BMW ad that would have been right at home in the mid-70s. That was the time when I taught newswriting classes at Temple University Center City and had a large collection of newspaper articles and ads that featured derogatory portrayals of women. I tweeted that I’d already been part of this battle. Did we really have to fight it again?

And then right on the heels of that throw-back to the un-liberated ‘70s comes the July 31^st article by Stephanie Simon in The Wall Street Journal titled “Treating the Pill as Abortion, Draft Regulation Stirs Debate.”

Apparently there is a draft regulation circulating within the Department of Health and Human Services that “treats most birth-control pills and intrauterine devices as abortion because they can work by preventing fertilized eggs from implanting in the uterus. The regulation considers that destroying ‘the life of a human being.’”

I can’t even write about this topic because it makes me so angry. Again, the battle for women to have control over their reproductive organs has already been fought. Must it really be fought again?

On Sunday night I saw the new Batman movie THE DARK KNIGHT. Part-way through the endless violence sequences I asked myself what makes this movie so popular at the box office. Why do so many people want to see larger-than-life characters being brutally vicious to each other? And we call this entertainment.

I’ve just reviewed the military spouse winning essays of the “Tell-Your-Own-Story” contest that I co-sponsored with YourMilitary.com in connection with Lifetime TV’s ARMY WIVES series. Several of the essays described the difficulties when a spouse is deployed. And as I write this post I’m also in an email conversation with a deployed National Guard member.

The juxtaposition of fake violence and real violence seems surreal, as does returning to the ‘70s with its derogatory media portrayals of women and the limiting of reproductive freedom.

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