Reflecting on Why I Chose to Go Into Teaching
I want to become a teacher as it’ll be a rewarding and challenging career, and I know first-hand the difference a teacher can make in a child’s life. I worked at my local swimming pool, teaching lessons on and off for 11 years (now going back for the 5th time). During that time, I discovered my passion for teaching and working with youth. I found it rewarding to work with a group of children regardless of age and see their progression and triumphs, making it fun for them and wanting to return. During this time, I also got to teach children of different abilities. One little girl stood out to me; she had an accident when she was younger, and her leg was amputated. She showed me how resilient children could be and that they all just want to be treated the same as everyone else. The evaluation of skills had to be slightly modified for her, but it made me realize that the same objective can be met in many different ways. Another student had Down syndrome, and I learned the value of different types of learners as he was a visual learner. He watched and copied exactly what you were doing versus talking through the steps. Teaching swimming lessons to children and adults helped me develop my interpersonal skills, confidence, patience, and observational and listening skills, all of which will help me in my elementary school teaching career.
Now that I have started this program, my desire to become a teacher has not waned. In fact, my resolve has strengthened this past year to work with children and make a difference in their lives. I had lost two aunts at the beginning of the year, then a couple of cousins I didn’t know as well, and most recently, I lost my childhood best friend. She left behind her two children, who now live with their father and grandmother. Seeing our community come together each time and take on more roles and knowledge of our traditions, acting as a role model for the younger generation, and being someone they can turn to gives me a sense of purpose. I want to bring this background knowledge to the classroom. When working with students, especially in lower-income schools, I want to be cautious because not everyone has the typical family circle. So for events like Father’s Day or Mother’s Day, I will modify crafts or activities we talk about to include all types of families.
I want to give students a safe place where they can go. When they walk through my classroom doors, I want them to be comfortable being themselves so they can learn. One thing that will be a challenge is setting those boundaries with students who are also family. During my observational practicum at Suwilaaks, I had the chance to practice setting boundaries, and two students wanted to be close to me the entire time. Right away, this little boy ran to me out of nowhere, threw his arms around my neck to hug me, and shouted, “Ms. Seymour, I love you!”. The little boy didn’t want to let me out of his sight and always wanted me to sit on the bench or floor next to him. He also tried to climb into my lap, so I patted the bench and said to sit beside me so we could listen and watch the teacher together. There was a little girl who wanted all of my attention as well. She did not seem to require as much physical contact as the little boy, but she wanted to tell me about her life, and I kept redirecting her attention to Ms. Wilson and the lesson. I look forward to writing a new reflection when I am done at the end of the program.
Reflection on Inclusive Education
I enjoyed watching the F.A.T City YouTube video with Richard Lavoie; it was a great way to put Learning Disabilities into perspective for those who do not have one and give us a better understanding of how to help students in the classroom, even though the video is old. When talking about children with disabilities, people often talk about what a child is not instead of what they are – it is the definition of exclusion. This is a bias that I feel we are slowly moving away from, with Shelly Moore’s 5 Minute videos highlighting this shift as well.
One of the most common misconceptions of learning disabilities is that it is a school problem when it actually it affects every waking moment of the Child’s life. For a learning-disabled child (or LD as referred to in the video), one common misconception is that they just need to try harder and be pushed more to keep up. Anxiety affects performance, putting kids on the spot in a negative way does not help them learn. The first reaction to anxiety or negative interaction is to look away from the source. LD children have a difficult time processing the language according to the workshop back then, they have to process the question and then the answer, whereas the non-LD kinds just process the answer. Richard says to use techniques like taking the child aside and telling them they’re having trouble in the lectures and that they are having difficulties understanding and they make a plan on how to tackle it to help ease their anxiety.
Another common misunderstanding about learning-disabled students is that they are easily distracted or have short attention spans when those are two different distinctions. LD children are distractable as they pay attention to everything, everything catches their attention whereas in a short attention span, people pay attention to nothing. When it comes to visual perception – don’t tell kids to look at something “harder”, they are already trying their best in an environment that is not built for them to succeed. It is also not advised to try and bribe them with something like “You can get in line for recess first” These things do not motivate children, especially when motivation is not the problem. Richard emphasized perception; that learning disabilities are all about perception. You can all see it but you can’t bring meaning to it until you have someone give you direct instruction, like, a teacher. LD kids were expected to go to the corner and learn themselves back in the 80s and sadly even today in some places.
Reading Comprehension – usually taught through vocabulary, go and teach all the hard words in a story and the child will comprehend the story. Comprehension has much more to do with the background than vocabulary. Dysnomia is a word-finding problem, they talked about how our brain has 2 functions – storage and retrieval – and that learning-disabled kids have a difficult time with storage. Associative tasks (2 or more at a time) or Cognitive tasks (1 at a time) are a “normal brain functions”, the video said that LD students are only able to do one associative task at a time. Because of this, the best thing they could give the LD child is the gift of time, rather than putting them on the spot, snapping their fingers or rushing them and saying everyone is waiting, I very much agree with this, it is cruel to put students on the spot like that.
According to the F.A.T City Workshop, we learn from the time we’re born until we’re 5 years old that spatial orientation doesn’t dictate object identification. That is until we get to school where a “p” could be a “b” or a “q” etc. Then things need to be decoded. Never tell a child who is struggling with a task that the task is “easy”. The main thing he is trying to emphasize is that a learning-disabled child is usually so busy trying to decode something rather than understanding the message. When it comes to auditory and visual activities, some children can read something but they don’t understand until they hear it (auditory input). The example he gave was that he was telling a teacher his daughter has an LD and can’t see the board far away but she is good at math and just needs it written down on a piece of paper rather than the board and more often than not he would hear the teacher say “that’s not fair to the other children” when in fact it isn’t. Children learn their morals based on what they see us do rather than what we tell them to do. Fairness – does not mean that everyone gets the same, fairness actually means to give the student what they need to help them succeed.
At the 53-minute mark, they read the last page of the booklet and the words seem like gibberish but close to actual words. Then he asks them what month and they go through each month guessing. Then he reads them a story about George Washington cutting down a cherry tree. The reading activity they did, did not align with Scarborough’s Rope and the current scientific research about reading as there was no guidance, no background information given or familiar words in the text. Learning to read is so complex and takes lots of time and practice. At the end of the workshop video the participants reflect back on their experience during the F.A.T City Workshop. They feel like it would be a good workshop for other children or other parents to see how learning-disabled children have trouble in a “regular classroom”. This program could potentially offset the stigma around learning-disabled students, I would love to see something like this happen in our school district today as well as one for cultural sensitivity