| New
Perspectives
- Feb, 1993 Issue #20 |
TURNABOUT CHILDREN
Mary MacCracken
Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1986
Condensed by Reader's Digest, March, 1990
The author tutors
young children with Learning Disabilities in the New York
City area. This book talks about her experiences with individual
children and some of the education philosophy she has developed
from this experience. She observes there are between five
and ten million children in the U.S. with some form of learning
disability. These children are often bright and eager to learn,
but by the third or fourth grade have encountered enormous
difficulties in regular classrooms and are judged failures
both by themselves, and by their classmates, teachers, and
parents. The author points out there are several types of
Learning Disabilities, thus there is not just one teaching
technique. However, she asserts, the teaching philosophy which
covers all these children is: "Start at the point where the
child actually is, teach to the strengths, respect the child's
intelligence, break learning into manageable components and
build from there." Actually, this is a good philosophy for
any child, with or without a Learning Disability. Two other
important elements the author talks about are the necessity
of active parent support rather than blame or labeling, and
the creation of a safe place for children to work where "Kindness,
consideration and forgiveness are the usual way of life....
and the rules are few and fair and are made by the people
who live and work there, including the children." Those children
with Learning Disabilities who are not turned around in Grade
School become many of the children who act out their emotional
and behavior problems as teenagers, and feed the growing industry
of Special Purpose Schools and Programs. The Special Purpose
School and Program has the same approach, start with where
the child is really at, and create a safe place. The major
difference is that programs for teenagers are more a cure
for behavior problems and require heavy structure, while the
author in working with younger children is more a prevention,
and can more easily work within the typical structure of a
family.
Copyright
© 1993, Woodbury Reports, Inc. (This article may be reproduced
without prior approval if the copyright notice and proper
publication and author attribution accompanies the copy.)
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