Tag Archives: learning disabled

When I first started teaching…

When I first started teaching the General level, I had no training in Special Education. The academic office created only two sections for 9th grade General English, so I had close to 20 students in each group. Now I know that for many teachers a class of 20 is a dream come true. But when roughly half of the students in both sections read on a third grade level, about a quarter of them had come from self contained classrooms, and nearly every student had been diagnosed with ADHD or Executive Functioning Disorder, the room was less like a class and more like a circus. And did I mention that 35 out of the 40 qualified for preferential seating? What was I supposed to do? Put the desks in a single line, wear roller skates, and glide back and forth for forty five minutes?

I was lost. How I ever managed to keep control of the class, let alone teach them anything, is beyond me. The curriculum was supposed to be the same as that of the College Prep track but at a slower pace.

We were supposed to read The Odyssey. We watched the movie instead.

At the same time I was trying to teach the Generals, I had also been assigned the 9th grade Honors English students. They were brilliant – a joy to teach. Discussions were animated and their textual interpretations inspiring. They were strong readers and fabulous writers. Unlike the General students with whom I eagerly watched the clock, my honors students and I frequently found ourselves cut off mid-sentence by the bell.

Now that I have been out of the classroom for some time and am farther removed from the experience of teaching the unteachables, I am heartsick to realize how much I shortchanged that group of wonderful, underestimated kids. Reading the posters for the Visible Knowledge Project brought this home. I used so many of those strategies with my Honors students – they annotated their texts, held discussions on blogs and discussion boards, kept reading journals wherein they tracked their development as readers, and learned to ask the deeper questions rather than simply seek the quick, easy answers. I made sure that, like the illustration given on the “Active and Critical Reading” poster, the students approached the texts using their original repertoire of skills, used new skills I modeled for them, thought about their own reading processes and connected their critical observations to other works and contexts, transferring their knowledge to new and different situations.

What did my General students do? For the most part, they played fetch. I threw out a question, they found the answer, and I patted them on the head for paying attention. Then we moved on.

All of this is not to say I didn’t try. I asked them to keep an Active Reading Journal with sections for predictions, questions, observations, clarifications and evaluations of the text. My intention was to help them more fully engage with the text by making predictions, asking questions, and recording their observations, then go back and review their reading to clarify any misunderstanding and make a final evaluation of a literary device or other mechanism. It didn’t work very well, as the students never got beyond a one or two sentence entry. I never tried anything else with them because I assumed out of ignorance that they couldn’t handle anything deeper.

After reading Sherry Linkon’s and Randy Bass’s posters, I know I left those kids behind. Linkon’s inquiry project would have immensely benefited that group. The cyclical quest for information would have challenged them to ask good questions, gather strong information and revisit their findings over a long period of time. It would have been just what they needed – a focused, bite-sized plan of attack, an opportunity for intellectual growth, and a manageable, slower pace. For students who by virtue of their disabilities can see only the parts of the whole or the whole and not its parts, an exercise of this type would have helped them fuse the two together and advance not only in their reading comprehension but in their textual analysis as well. Instead of allowing them this freedom and exposing them to a true and valid academic task, I assigned four separate five paragraph essays. In essence, I told them, “Memorize the format, kids, then fetch the answers to the question and plug them into place.” To use Linkon’s phrase, I had no balance between structure and open-endedness.

The weeks’ readings made me wish to be back in the classroom with my former General students. I would ask them to do Think Alouds so that they could see their ability to “unpack” (as Bass calls it) a text. I would build my own “Schematic of Student Reading,” using Bass’s Learning Activity Breakdown as an example (how useful it would have been to truly label and attack my students’ obstacles, rather than fruitlessly complain about them in the staff room). And lastly, I would follow Bass’s shift from written to oral assignments; yes, my students needed to learn how to write, but how could they write any deep critical interpretations without knowing why or how they made such interpretations?

Ultimately, I was a good teacher trying her best to work with the limited knowledge she had. I taught my developmental students basic skills, which I suppose was all that was expected of me as the teacher of a Basic Skills course. But I wonder – oh, how I wonder – what transformation would have taken place had I helped my students make those deeper connections with the text. Would those frequently maligned and misunderstood students have become stronger, better thinkers who valued difficulty and recognized it as a way to bridge the gap between surface observation and deeper meaning? Could I have helped them out of the “good dog” mentality and into true scholarship?

I think I could have. And if I ever have the opportunity again, I won’t let it slip away.