Cohen's Article
"The first step toward developing interventions is to recognize and understand
the various pathways for children's developmental difficulties and the
specific areas of functioning that may be impaired along the way."
This article touched a lot on the environmental factors a child will bring to a classroom. The fact that something ingrained at home can predetermine how we interact with new people speaks volumes to my personal experiences working with students in a behavioral special education program. One of my students exhibited many of the traits discussed in this article. The lack of motivation for academic gratification or the desire to seek academic mastery plagued him through out his three years in middle school. As he got older he matured and some of these behaviors diminished. It speaks to the notion I already had; that his home life and relationships he had developed there were influencing his interaction with the world he lived in.
Maura & Raffi
Raffi's social interactions and lack of successful negotiation through them reminds me of one of my students who moved on to ninth grade this year. He also exhibited a desire for social interaction but was often frustrated with his own verbal disability. I would notice often in class that he would rely on teasing other students as a way to create humor. Many of the students laughed because they believed it was sarcastic but on many occasions he was met with animosity for the comment he made.
"Maura intellectually understands that everyone evidences some spheres of
relative weakness, though she insists on seeing her decoding problems as
proof that she is 'dumb'".
I see a lot of students respond this way to academic challenges they have even when they are aware that what is occurring to them is normal. An example would be the MCAS prep class I taught after school. Many of the students possessed a great intelligence for math. Their main reason for not receiving a proficiency on the test usually resulted from weaknesses in a specific area of math on the previous years test. Similarly to Maura, many of the girls in the class understood why they were there, but they would always refer to themselves as being a "sped student" even when many of their peers took the class with them.
I agrees with the idea that it is important too consider what each child brings to the table. I coached a girl this past year not knowing that there were serious issues at home. Her motivation dropped, she stopped responding to what I was saying, and just completely shut down. Even when asking if something was wrong, she never responded. She just kept saying that she was fine. It wasn't until months later that I found out the truth. Sometimes I feel as though we just educators just need to assume that something is wrong and try to adjust the learning process so that they don't shut down on us.
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