Abstract

This paper chronicles the author’s experience, as an instructor and as an administrator, taking up the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and implementing changes in the curriculum to accommodate a logic student with dyslexia. The author discusses his misconceptions about dyslexia and his attempts to determine more precisely how it affected his student’s reading abilities. While his student struggled with abstract symbol systems (e.g. standard logical notation), the student had no difficulty with sequences of letters. The author elected to teach the introductory logic course with a logical notation composed entirely of letters, namely Lukasiewicz’ notation. The author details the work that went into learning this notation and teaching an introductory logic course in it, including overviews of lessons on semantics, syntax, and introduction/elimination rules for proofs. The student learned the material very quickly and with great success, progressing to moderately sophisticated proofs. The author reflects on how this reformulated version of an introductory logic course squares with the ADA’s language of “reasonable accommodations” and implores professional philosophers to take seriously what the ADA means for their pedagogy.