Thursday, April 07, 2005

Special Status

I'm still alive...I was just buried in report cards for the past few weeks...

I have many students with various kinds of disabilities, as befits a teacher of special needs. I have kids with ADD/ADHD. So help me, they are the most frustrating kids on the planet...Still, they are the least of my worries (when I can get them to sit down and stop bothering the other students). Most of my students have what we commonly call a "learning disability" which doesn't really say much as to their condition. Usually it's up to the teacher to figure out what that means for each student so they can help them achieve their best. Generally, I find it very hard to see the difference between "learning disabled" and "lazy and forgetful," although I know the distinction is there somewhere. It just becomes a lot harder to deal with when you have them teamed up together, because you don't know what to blame.

The disabilities these students have are not going to go away. They are serious problems, not just made up by teachers who think students misbehave too much and need to be medicated in order to calm down. And learning disabilities are an even more serious concern because these students are eventually going to join the workforce and be productive somehow. The big problem, from my perspective, is not how do we teach these students (it's simple, the same way as any other student, just break things down more and take it slow) but how we integrate these students into our classroom and the world without pulling everyone down to the lowest common denominator.

No child left behind has begun to translate into "we don't fail kids anymore." Teachers do fail students (at least I do). They may curve their grades a little but at the end of it all students will still fail. What else can you do when Bobby refuses to work or Sally hasn't shown up to class all year? However, some of the kids who don't make it are trying really, really hard and they just can't do it. They're not academics and hey, even Einstein failed math in elementary, right? No child left behind, right? So why don't we just pass them along to the next grade, never mind the fact that they haven't mastered the skills they need to move on. Never mind that every year they get passed up their inabilities are compounded. And hey, while we're at it, since the parents of Bobby and Sally are going to complain, we'll have to pass them too. Never mind that it shows them they can get something for nothing.

Anyone with a bit of common sense (which must not include the people who passed a student of mine into the next grade who failed math with a 40 last year) sees the problem with this. Not only is our education system underfunded, a degree will eventually not be worth the paper it's printed on. Anyone can get one. I'm waiting for this to hit the college and university level, and as special needs students are given their rightful status at these institutions and people who know people are getting passing grades for nothing, slowly the entire education system of North America will crumble.

I don't believe we should have an education system like that of other countries, especially that of the Asian ones we try to compete with. These countries have no place for students who have special needs and have valuable things to contribute to our society. As with a democracy, our education is the worst form there is, except all the others that have been tried.

"Democracy is the worst form of Government except all those others that have been tried from time to time." -Winston Churchill