Small Victories Part 2

There’s no manual to follow when you become a teacher. I should be more specific. There are lots of manuals for different curriculum that you choose to teach, and nowadays there are even more manuals for curriculum that you have to teach. But there are no manuals that tell what to do when you get students with personality quirks and handicaps that prevent them from learning. There is a lot of theory with philosophical stands on what to do with different kinds of kids, but rarely do you get the specific issue you have to deal with spelled out for you. It’s like wanting to buy a new appliance and you check out Consumer Reports ratings of all the possible ones you might consider, only to find that when you go to the store, none of the models listed in CR are there. You have to take your best shot with what is available and hope it’s the right one.

When John entered my 5th grade class on the first day of school, he was majorly school phobic. His parents had to drive him to school each day. They would walk him to the school where he was supposed to make his own way down to his classroom where learning would take place. The problem those first days was that John never made it to the classroom directly.  As soon as he entered the building he had a major panic attack, went straight to the nurse and sat in a corner of her office. I knew that he was in the building, but I had 20 other kids in the room that I also had to teach, and couldn’t leave the room.  I discovered early that there was one girl in the class that was friends with John, so I asked if she would help coax him down to the room. It usually took a while but he did come down to the class and usually did okay. After a week of this though, it became a little tiring. His panic attacks continued whenever he came to school and it was harder to coax him down to the room. Something had to be done. I decided if Mohammed wasn’t going to come to the mountain, then the mountain would come to Mohammed. I told John one morning in the nurse’s office that if he didn’t come to class, I would bring the whole class down to the nurse’s office and hold my lesson there; and that’s exactly what I did. I explained to the class what we were going to do, that during the lesson they should just pay attention to what I was teaching and ignore any reaction by John. I got to the nurse’s office with all of the students and I taught a lesson. I’m not sure what it was about, or that any of the students in the room actually got much from it, but everyone played their role perfectly. John spent the entire lesson with his hands over his ears. His friend sat near him, but didn’t interact with him at all. When the lesson was over, we all went back to our room, including John! From that day on he came to class on time. He still had occasional panic attacks, but at least continued to listen to what was going on in the classroom and was easier to calm down. His parents were quite amazed in the change in his behavior. I recently saw him outside of the high school chatting with his friends, and smiling as he entered school. I can’t say that I’m the cause of any success he had, but do feel good that he’s got a better perspective of learning and school. I’ll call that a victory.

A few times in my teaching career, I’ve had students enter my class from foreign countries. In the case of Debby and Tommy they were both from China. Neither at the time they entered my class had any grasp of English. Luckily our school had an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher that worked with them once a day on learning the language. That meant that the rest of the time I had to communicate with them without knowing their language. With Tommy I did have the advantage of having another student in the class that did speak his language, so that helped in translating things I did. That wasn’t the case with Debby. One of the things that I had been studying at the time was American Sign Language. I wasn’t proficient enough to speak with it to people that knew it fluently, but did know it enough so that I could share those fundamentals with my class. Doing that made a major difference in the adjustment of those Chinese students to our class. The biggest obstacle in being in a class where no one speaks your language is understanding. Getting others to know what you want, and knowing what others want. Both Debby and Tommy were very reticent to try and communicate, because (in my humble opinion) they were not confident in their abilities and did not want to look out of place. ASL changed all of that. It leveled the field. No one in my class knew ASL and I taught it by infusion meaning I rarely spoke English words to correspond to ASL ones. The students learned to understand what I was saying by the context of what I was doing and what I referred to with gestures. This is where my Chinese students excelled, since they didn’t have the English the rest of my class would try and rely on to make sense of my signs. They allowed their observations to connect to words in their own language that had meaning. The more I taught ASL, the more both Debby and Tommy’s confidence grew, for they learned faster than my English speaking students. Over time, it balanced out, the Chinese students learned more English and the rest of the class had a better handle on how to communicate with the Chinese students and make them a part of the class.  By the end of the year, when I had some Silent Days (in which no one could speak for a whole day) everyone as a unit was communicating and demonstrating things that they had learned. I don’t think I could have planned it any better. Part of it was timing, part of it was luck, and part of it was making it up as I went along, because it seemed right.  I know for a fact, it wasn’t in the manual.

I’ve found that it’s the small victories that you learn the most from, are more memorable and keep you going.