Another anecdote to read

Sharing another experience from my own teachings, this time I will tell about METU Development Foundation Schools. In that school, in one of the classrooms that I taught, I had some students with special needs. As far as I learn from my mentor teacher, they had already been diagnosed with some disorders like Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder, Dyslexia or some illnesses which I could not remember. In the lessons, even our mentor teacher could not attend to those children; they were neither listening to the lesson nor help the teacher to cover the lesson. However, I must say that they are still trying to focus on the lesson and do their best even though their efforts were not enough due to their disorder. So, it would be true to say that even their eagerness for being like the other students was not enough for their success.  Hence, as you guess, dealing with those children, helping them to learn as others do was really hard and challenging for us, even for the mentor teacher.

Here, so, when it came to my teaching, I should say that it was really a challenging situation for me. I had thought that even our mentor teacher could not cope with those students, so how would I succeed it? How would I cover my lesson but also have those students to participate and learn in my lesson? Actually, I had no plan before going into the classroom. I should say that everything developed itself in the lesson. What I did was just try to take their attention. I had seen that sometimes our mentor teacher had been just ignoring them so that the other students would not affect badly. However, I had the decision not to do so. So, I always regarded them that day in the classroom. I pay attention to them.

In the lesson, one of them was just turning around the desks as he was always do due to his problem, actually I did not say anything negative to the child since there was nothing we could do. So in this context, I just wanted him to do the activities while he was turning around the classroom. The other one who was a girl with some reading and understanding problems, and she was generally finishing the tasks in longer time than her classmates. That day, I have that girl to sit in one of the frontier desks and I asked the most successful student to help her in the activities. And lastly, there was one boy who was always raising hand but speaking without taking the floor, taking permission exactly. Coming to him, I could not do anything, he just went on doing what he had been doing till that time. Actually, I think that it is a long process so maybe the teacher can just first teach some classroom rules before any other things. I am still wondering about what I could do to prevent that boy speaking all the time, and ensuring that everybody would have the chance to speak as they raise hand in the classroom without offending that boy. Thanks