Physical Disorders and Health

Impact of chronic illnesses (diabetes, epilepsy) on learning.

Beyond visible disabilities, there are chronic health conditions that silently impact school performance and require specific psycho-pedagogical monitoring.

Diseases such as type 1 diabetes can cause fluctuations in glucose levels that directly alter the ability to concentrate, mood and cognitive processing speed.

A student with hypoglycemia may appear distracted or irritable, not because of lack of interest, but because of a metabolic emergency.

The teacher should be aware of these signs to allow food intake or breaks without stigmatizing the student.

In the case of epilepsy, it is crucial to be attentive to "absence seizures", which are brief disconnections of consciousness that can occur dozens of times a day.

To an outside observer, the child appears to be daydreaming, but in reality his or her brain has "rebooted," missing vital bits of explanation.

This creates learning gaps that are often mistaken for ADHD or lack of ability.

Intervention involves repeating key information, providing support notes to fill in those gaps, and maintaining fluid communication with the family and medical team to adjust medication if academic performance falters.

Screening for mild sensory deficits (vision/hearing).

Major disabilities are often diagnosed early, but mild sensory or functional deficits go undetected, eroding learning year after year.

Non-refractive visual problems, such as difficulties with ocular convergence or motility (line following), can make reading physically painful or exhausting, leading the child to avoid reading and be mislabeled as dyslexic or lazy.

The teacher should be alert to physical signs: rubbing the eyes, moving too close to the paper, skipping lines, or recurrent headaches.

Similarly, mild hearing loss caused by recurrent serous otitis serosa or ear wax plugs can prevent correct discrimination of phonemes, affecting literacy and oral language acquisition.

There is also Central Auditory Processing Disorder, where the ear functions well, but the brain does not filter out background noise, making it impossible to follow a noisy classroom.

Early detection through classroo