"You think you're teaching him things, but really, he's teaching you things".
In my previous reflections on children with special needs, I talked about the need for the inclusion of children with disabilities in the mainstream school. It is sadly something not yet achievable in Singapore. I understood it was not going to be easy and that it will take time. Having no first hand experience dealing with children with disability in a mainstream classroom context, I didn’t realize how exactly difficult it was until I watched “Educating Peter”.
Teachers need to be trained the essential skills on how to deal with children with disabilities in general. With the segregation in training for mainstream and special disability teachers, I’m not too sure whether mainstream teacher would be resilient enough to handle the presence of a special child in the classroom. We saw how Peter’s teacher initially had to grapple and struggle to adapt. To add, his classmates were initially uncomfortable around him too (and for a peculiar reason, the boys were still uncomfortable around him at the end of the video).
Let me digress here a bit. In this video I saw the most beautiful side of being human. Peter’s classmates were kicked, punched and mangled to a pulp by him. But knowing Peter, never once did they retaliate. In fact, they handled the situation very well by trying to calmly reason with Peter. Will our kids in local schools be the same? Can they understand and be forgiving while they are being pulverized to a pulp every single day? Forgive me for being pessimistic, but I do not think so.
Peter's teacher overcame the situation with much patience, empathy and dedication. She was scared in the beginning. It’s fair and understandable to be scared. What's most important is that she overcame that fear. Many, if not most, of the local young teachers these days step into their teaching careers already with the mindset that teaching is a very stressful career. The media has also assisted very much in increasing stress levels by reporting the upward trend of the number of teachers receiving treatment at the Institute of Mental Health.
The National Institute of Education as taken a progressive step by introducing the theoretical Individual Differences module into its teacher training package. Will this module be enough to equip young, idealistic teachers to handle children with special needs in the mainstream classroom? Without practical knowledge, I fear that this training is far from being sufficient.
Labels: education
<< Home