PROBLEM STUDENT – NO SUCH THING!

Topic 1.2

CARER, KEEPER…

CLASS 1

2. List the qualities needed by a teacher who would like to establish rapport and understanding with his/her students.

3. Work in pairs. Discuss the term ‘children with special needs’. What kind of needs are those?

4. Read the title of the excerpt below. Suggest ideas on what the title might mean and what kind of character the novel might describe.

5. Read the excerpt and pay special attention to the description of the boy’s behavior. Make a list of details that strike you most.

Text 1.2.1

From SILENT BOY by Torey Hayden

We were coloring. Kevin had a thing about coloring, and I didn't mind it because it was relaxing and it was the mindless sort of activity I found best for allowing us to talk without its being apparent that was what we were doing.

I had brought us one of those huge posters from the discount store which one colors in with felt-tipped markers.This poster depicted a spaceship out among the stars.

Kevin was coloring the crew at the window of the rocket and I was doing the sky because it was large and boring to color, so Kevin didn't like it. I was not especially enamored of it myself.

'You know,' I said after what seemed like an inter­minable amount of coloring, ‘I'm not so keen on doing this either. I wish I had a broad-tipped marker instead of this one.'

'Well,' replied Kevin matter-of-factly, 'you have to do it.'

'We could split it,' I suggested, looking at all that was left.

There was a long, long silence as Kevin stared at the poster. I saw his knuckles go white as he gripped the pen harder. His breathing tightened. They were the same old signs, and I glanced around the room quickly to see what could possibly be frightening him.

'No, you have to do it,' Kevin said. His voice was low. The muscles along his jaw tensed.

I stared at him because I could see his fear coming up on him but I didn't know what was causing it. Then I looked back at the poster, thinking perhaps I could distract him from the fear.

'Why don't we just leave it blank? There's too much coloring. I could do the stars instead and outline them in black. Then they'd stand out good.'

'No,' he said very quietly.

I looked at him. He looked squarely back at me. Fear had dilated his pupils but there was an intensity behind them that I did not recognize.

'What's going on, Kevin? What's wrong?'

'You have to do it. You have to color that sky.'

'Why?'

He began to tremble. His whole body arched away from me slightly. 'You have to do it.' I watched him.

His voice was only a whisper. 'You have to. Because I've told you to, do you hear?'

I shifted positions. I'd been sitting on my feet and the circulation was going, so I moved them.

'Awk!' Kevin screamed when I did. His marker flew out of his hand. Abruptly, he dived for the safety of the table.

'Kev?'

'I didn't mean it!' he shrieked and covered his head, as he rolled into a ball. 'I didn't mean it, I didn't mean it. You don't have to!'

Stunned, I only gaped at him.

'I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I didn't mean it!' He was in tears already, rocking and sobbing. 'Please, please, please, I didn't mean it. Honest I didn't. Please. I'm sorry.'

'Kevin, I don't mind. It's not that big a deal. Don't be frightened. I'm not angry. You want me to do the sky? I don't mind. I'll do the sky. Okay?'

'Please, please, please, please, please,' he begged. 'Oh please don't think I meant it. I didn't. Please, I'm sorry.'

'Kevin?'

He was beside himself, rocking and weeping, crying for me to forget and absolve him. I was too astonished at having caused such a furor to really think about what was going on. On my hands and knees I crawled across the carpet to try and talk him down from his hysteria. WHAM!

Leaping to his feet when I approached, he threw the table off over his back. 'Get away from me!' he shouted. His face grew red, terror glazed his eyes. 'Get away! Get away!'

Before I could gather my senses, he had picked up one of the chairs. He hurled it at me with keen precision and it didn't really miss. Painfully, I staggered to my feet.

The room was too small for Kevin to be able to elude me to his satisfaction, and clearly it was I who terrified him. He reacted to me as if I were the Devil Incarnate.

Because the room was so small and he could not get away from me, Kevin felt obliged to keep me at bay by throwing things at me. He needn't have. I was quite suf­ficiently panic-stricken myself and was perfectly willing to stay out of his way. This frightened, I knew he was dangerous. And looming up to his nearly six-foot height, he made an awesome sight when he held a chair aloft.

6. In pairs now, share ideas on how the situation will unfold. Do you think Kevin will calm down as suddenly as he exploded? Will the teacher succeed in controlling him?

7. Finish reading the excerpt and say if your predictions were correct.

Text 1.2.2

From SILENT BOY by Torey Hayden (continued)

There wasn't much for me to do. I ducked. A lot. Kevin threw anything and everything he could get his hands on. Chairs, pens, the poster, my box, its contents, even the table. His terror gave him improbable strength. And I, like a circus performer, jumped and ducked and dodged. The most painful things turned out to be the numerous small wooden blocks I had had in my box. They were two-inch square colored counting cubes with surprisingly sharp edges, and Kevin fired them like mis­siles.

Frantically I looked around for a call button or some other method of summoning help. There was none. I did have a key to the door, which the stupid aide persisted in locking. Still, with Kevin in this state, I did not want to chance turning my back on him for long, especially in front of an exit. But what else to do? Through my mind whirred all the alternatives I could think of. Would I be able to talk him down from this? Would he wear himself out before he splattered me? Should I just keep dodging and hope my strength held out longer than his? I don't think he was dead serious on really hurting me. All he wanted was to keep me away from him. But that made him plenty dangerous. Every move I made was inter­preted as an attack and provoked another frenzy of panic and missiles. But it was a vicious cycle. When I moved, he threw things. When he threw things, I had to move again to avoid being hit.

Around and around and around we went. He was screaming now, ripping at his clothes and throwing him­self against the walls in an attempt to escape me. When he came to the door, he jerked at it violently, but of course it was locked.

In the end, I confined myself to the two bare walls and stayed away from the windows and the door so that he would not think I was blocking any exits from him. I held a wooden chair in one hand and fended off what he threw the best I could. He began to scream when I kept the chair in hand because I think he thought I was plan­ning to attack him with it. He screamed and screamed and screamed.

That did the trick. They heard us. Within moments a crowd of faces pressed against the small door window, frightening Kevin even further. Next came the frantic rattling of a key in the lock. Kevin tried to run from the door and fell face forward over the table. His hysteria mounted as he scrambled to his feet and threw himself against the windows.

The door burst open. People spilled in. Relieved to be rescued, I slumped back against the far wall and slid down to the floor. They swarmed over Kevin and tried to pull him from the window. He shrieked louder and fought like a wounded tiger. The Marines were there and they had his legs and his pants. They pulled his shoes off as they tugged him down from the sill. I heard the sound of cloth tearing as they struggled to lift him. There were six of them this time, six big burly men with tattooed arms and Charles Atlas muscles rippling under their shirts. Still they could not maneuver Kevin. They got him down from the windows but now he was on the floor, wiggling and squirming. Kevin escaped their grasp and, like a caged bird, battered himself against the window again. Two more men came and then a nurse. Dana was there too. So was the psychologist and two people in business suits whom I did not recognize. I stayed away from them all, clear over to the far side because I was still afraid I would only add fuel to Kevins delirium, if I approached. In the end, it took nine men to defeat that one cornstalk of a boy and bear him out. All the way down the corridor

I could hear him screaming, the pitch of it high and hys­terical.

Dana came over to me, righting chairs and the table as she came. Of all the people in the room, she was the only one to come to me in the aftermath of the commo­tion. I was rolling up the sleeve of my shirt to look at my arm.

All of me hurt. There was no point in denying that. Now that Kevin had been borne away, I was feeling sorely in need of a little comfort myself.

The chair had hit my arm, and already a red-and-pur-ple bruise stretched out along the upper half. Dana touched it gently.

'They'll have a doctor in for Kevin,' she said. 'You ought to have him look at that before he goes. Does it hurt?'

I nodded. 'You've got a scratch on your nose too.' She fingered it and then refocused her gaze on me. 'What happened?'

'I wish I knew for sure. I don't.'

'He just went off?'

I shrugged.

8. In small groups, discuss the last phrase of the excerpt, I shrugged. Choose the statement that you think suggests the teacher’s attitude to Kevin.

A. The teacher doesn’t seem to care about the boy.

B. The teacher is not competent enough to comprehend the reason.

C. The teacher is ready to give up on the child.

D. The teacher wishes to forget the unpleasant incident.

E. The teacher prefers not to talk about it for a while.

F. _____________________________ (your explanation)

9. In small groups, discuss the problem of whether the author sympathizes with the boy. Find proof in the above text to make your point, loud and clear.

10. In small groups, talk about the situation as if it was YOU in that room. What sort of reaction would yours be, under the circumstances?

____________________________________________________________________

HOME ASSIGNMENT

1.Watch the movie Gridiron Gang. Prepare to talk about it in class a while later.

2.Read the article below and do the task the follows.

Text 1.2.3

PROBLEM STUDENT – NO SUCH THING!

by Christina Frank

Spend time in any elementary-school classroom and you're likely to spot at least one of the following: a kid who can't sit still, a kid who practicaly crawls under her desk to avoid being called on, and a kid who never remem­bers to do his homework—along with a motley as­sortment of other types who stray from the model of the ideal student. In the past, such children might have been punished, been sent for extensive tutor­ing, or been written off as hopeless; these days, they'd probably be labeled with one of the ubiqui­tous "D's"— like ADD (attention deficit disorder), ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), LD (learning disorder), or BD (behavioral disorder).

But pediatrician Mel Levine would just call these kids nor­mal. Sure, they may not respond well to a standard, one-size-fits-all teaching approach, but in his mind it's the teachers who need to change, not the students. Embracing the notion that all children are wired to learn in subtly dif­ferent ways, Levine has created a program called Schools Attuned, which trains teach­ers how to tailor their methods to each stu­dent's specific strengths and weaknesses.

Each subcategory can be translated into a specif­ic, comprehensible learning issue. "Saliency determination," for example, which falls under memory, refers to a child's ability to extract what is most meaningful in a passage of text. "Sequential output" is the ability to follow steps in a specific order. A child may be perfectly intelligent, but fail to do well in school because his brain shortchanges him in one of these small, but significant areas.

By targeting a child's weakness so specifi­cally, Levine's assessment avoids broadly la­beling children with assorted "disorder" ini­tials.

Though he acknowledges that the la­bels served a purpose for a while, he feels it's time to move forward. "The labels are too global, too inaccurate, too vague, and too pessimistic," he says. "We can help these kids so much more effectively if we label the phenomena and not the child."

He'd also like to replace the word disorder with dysfunction. "Dysfunction is where something's adjusted in a way that doesn't quite work," he explains. "If your TV set wasn't working and all you had to do was turn the right knob, it doesn't mean the whole TV is broken."

So instead of diagnosing a child with LD (learning disorder), for example, you might say she struggles with her active work­ing memory, which means she has a hard time holding several things in her mind at once. This may make it hard for her to ab­sorb reading material or to write papers.

"By specifically identifying a child's problem like this, you can begin to help her," says Levine. "Then she doesn't feel retarded and teachers can come up with a whole bunch of strategies to help deal with it."

Plus, warns Levine, one of the major haz­ards of reducing children to learning-dis­abled status is low self-esteem, which in turn correlates with drug use and delinquency.

Some of Levine's solutions are so simple, it's amazing no one ever thought of them be­fore. For fidgety students, he recommends that teachers keep a bowl of spongy balls on their desks, so that instead of noisily tapping a pencil, a kid can go up and get a ball to squeeze quietly. Stopping a student from fid­geting altogether is not necessary because fidgeting may actually serve a purpose for a child by keeping him alert and focused. He just needs a nondisruptive way of doing it. For a child who dreads being called on, the fear usually has to do with having to re­spond immediately.

"Some children's mem­ories don't work that fast," explains Levine. "A teacher can give that child a warning that she'll be called on tomorrow, say, about the causes of the War of 1812. This way she has 23 hours to get ready instead of 3 seconds."

Some argue that this amounts to fa­voritism. Levine disagrees. "We don't treat any two kids the same because some children need flexibility in one area, some in other areas," he points out. And in fact, "to treat everybody the same is not to treat them equally, because it will favor certain kids."

Many teachers who use the program say Levine's approach saves time in the class­room because it cuts down on time spent disciplining. And often the interventions designed for one child become something that's useful for the entire class.

Danette Lipten, who teaches 6- and 7-year-olds at the Bank Street School for Chil­dren in New York City, took the week-long Schools Attuned workshop four years ago. "I am so much more thorough in my under­standing of kids and of how they learn," she says. "And I am able to communicate so much better with parents. The value of the program is immeasurable."

Schools Attuned is meant to be a collabo­ration between teachers, parents, and the children themselves. Parents are given tech­niques for helping their children at home and the kids themselves are "demystified," as Levine calls it.

"As soon as we figure out what the issue is, we explain it to the child and give him the words for the things he needs to work on."

He also promotes the idea that it's as important to develop stu­dents' particular strengths as it is to help them remedy their weaknesses.

Levine has a soft spot for offbeat kids be­cause he himself fit into that category. He describes himself as "a kid who ran around with his nose running, his fly open, and most of the time carrying a snake or a tur­tle."

He was a good student, but lousy at sports. "Kids would fight to not have me on their team," he recalls.

Raised on Long Island by parents who worked in the garment in­dustry, Levine decided at a young age that he wanted to be a doctor. After graduating from Brown University in 1961, he won a Rhodes Scholarship which took him to Oxford; he then enrolled at Harvard Medical School. But it was his service during the Vietnam War that had a major impact on his think­ing. As the school doctor at an Air Force base in the Philippines, he became fascinat­ed with the potential relationship between pediatrics and education. "It just seemed we had so much to teach each other and that by combining perspectives we could get an in-depth sense of how a kid was wired."

Schools Attuned was born in 1987. It has flourished especially in recent years, thanks to generous financial backing from such high-profile investors as Charles Schwab (who himself was dyslexic) and the Geral­dine R. Dodge Foundation. Levine and his colleagues have established 10 Schools At­tuned regional training centers, as well as a broader, nonprofit institute called All Kinds of Minds. In the works is a PBS series along with a video library that he hopes to make available to every school in the country. At the moment, over 5,000 education professionals have gone through the program. He dreams of creating actual Schools Attuned schools.

But reforming American education is just one of Levine's passions. He is a fanatic animal lover who, with his wife Bambi (to whom he has been married for more than 30 years), lives on a farm in rural Rougemont, North Carolina. They have no chil­dren, but are surrogate parents to 240 geese, along with numerous peacocks, swans, pheasants, cats, dogs, and donkeys. When he's not fulfilling his role as Professor of Pediatrics at the University of North Car­olina at Chapel Hill or on the road promot­ing Schools Attuned, he is likely to be hold­ing a meeting of The Carolina-Virginia Pheasant and Waterfowl Society, which he founded. "I've never done anything with­out overdoing it," says Levine. "I try to do ab­solutely everything in excess."

Perhaps because of his own eccentricities (his other interests include Oriental porce­lain, metal sculpture, Robert Frost poetry, and gourmet food), Levine appreciates that which makes people unique—and believes it is highly valuable. "Our society desperately needs all kinds of minds," he says. "So let's make sure that every child is getting his or her strengths strengthened. Let's not punish kids for the way they're wired, but let's celebrate and encourage that diversity. I'm trying to prop­agate a generation of optimistic kids, who will feel that they've made a contribution, that they are successful in their own ways. If you can show people how to believe in themselves when they're young, then it be­comes a lifelong process."

2. Prepare a summary evaluation of Mel Levine’s accomplishments (100+ words).

Topic 1.2

CARER, KEEPER…

CLASS 2

2. Watch an episode form Freedom Writers. Do you understand now where the title of the film comes from? Why does the title really work?

3. Teachers should care about their students’ growth, that’s true. But to what lengths should they go? Talk about it in pairs.

4. Read the following verse from the Holy Bible (Ecclesiastes XI:I). In small groups, interpret its meaning from different perspectives.

Cast thy bread upon the waters:

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 895