This week I am back in the classroom, as a student. A colleague and I are taking a course on Autism, and it has been amazingly fascinating! We are learning lots, wanting to try it all out and feeling a sense of information overload!
It has also been an opportunity to feel a bit of empathy for the students I work with. I find I fade in and out of consciousness, I struggle to stay focused, I am easily distracted, fidgety and I almost fell asleep in class. I watch the clock, and I really wish I was in the back row, so that I could play with my iPhone. I am doing all of this, as a ‘typical’ student. (Other than my self diagnosis of ADD) I have no learning struggles, I am in a course that is of interest to me, and is taught at a level that I can comprehend and learn. Yet, I still struggle to pay attention.
At one of the many times I was fading off into my own mental ‘La La Land’, I found myself wondering what happens in the mind of a student with learning struggles, while they struggle to pay attention. How exhausting it must be for them, when they have diagnosed struggles in learning, and the material they are being taught is beyond their interest, or beyond their understanding, or beyond their developmental ability.
And we wonder why they sometimes have issues of bad behaviors!
Speaking of bad behaviors, the main point that I have retained this week is that behaviors are communication. So, if the students with special needs are behaving ‘badly’, maybe what they are communicating is ‘I can’t do this anymore’, or ‘when are you going to start talking my language’, or ‘I am so frustrated, because I just don’t get it, and I feel so dumb.’
Maybe they work so hard, all day long, to hold it together at school, that they go home and unravel … where they can just be who they are, without having to conform to a community and culture that is as foreign to them as moving to Siberia would be for us.
I think that despite struggles to get my readings done (because the IS an exam), I will finish this course with fresh eyes and ears, to see and hear and understand the hearts of the students with special needs … a worthwhile week!
itsawonderfilledlife 