Saturday, December 15, 2007

aggravated

i'm beginning to see that there are far worse problems in education than our supposed falling behind in the world market because of low test scores. i don't know if the prevalence of diagnosed problems in kids these days is merely the symptom or actually the problem. my kids this year are ADD to the nth degree. it grows tougher each year to maintain attention while teaching. i can't even take a breath in the middle of a sentence without their impulsive nature taking over and causing them to call out answers, questions, or random stories that have nothing to do with the subject at hand. i teach a classroom full of id with no superego to control it. one of the more problematic should be in an alternative placement. the reason he's not? an inflexible specialist who refused to place kids in said center. "it can be controlled with medication." aren't we then breeding a generation of pharmacologically-dependent children who can't cope with their issues without an rx? that ain't right. it doesn't fix the problem, it merely masks it, and when the dosage needs changing because the kids grow, their education as well as those of their classmates suffers.

2 comments:

rachel said...

oh gosh. in the kindergarten class I'm in, there's one little girl who blurts out anything she's thinking any moment of the day. It's most annoying during story time. At the end of each page she has a comment, or just repeats the last part of the sentence as a question.

teacher: "If you give a pig a pancake..."

her: "You give a pig a pancake??"

teacher: "he'll want some syrup to go along with it."

her: "he'll want some syrup??"

teacher: "Remember we don't have to talk after every page. Now, if you give him some syrup.."

her: "what's syrup??"

Anonymous said...

Education is going full circle again. Thirty some years ago when I stepped into a classroom, finding the right placement for the child was the way to go---even in my my little "Burg"! Then in the 90's "inclusion" became the buzz word.
Truly inclusion is NOT the solution for all the children. Some children can earn the right to be mainstreamed. I had a boy once from a ESE class.Matthew was mainstreamed one hour a day. The children loved him and the girls mothered him. They all learned compassion. But having Matthew all day long would not have worked. In his ESE classroom he had a teacher and an aide with a class enrollement of less than ten. In my room he was one of 25. His needs were not met as easily.

Yes, something needs to addresses. ADHD children need to channel their energies positively. They are too young to do it without a little medical help and behavior modifications. (which take lots and LOTS of time )
I could go on and on....but....