Woke up at 5am this morning and couldn't get back to sleep. It appears that my body clock means I am firing all on thrusters at this time of the day lol.
It is all to easy to blame teachers for all the problems in our education system when it comes to meeting the needs of dyslexic or disabled kids. The main issues are:
Teacher training which has little to nothing about teaching and kids with a disability or and other learning difference.
Government policy which dictates what and how our children are taught at school. The government also dictates schools have to teach to achieve targets through testing rather than teaching kids to learn.
The cost of sending teachers off to specialist training courses is very high and you then have to add into the mix the fact that another teacher has to be brought in to cover for the teacher on training.
Also parents get exasperated every time there is a teacher training day. As a teacher you cannot win.
Mind you I am not saying there are not any bad teachers what so ever. But the vast majority of teachers want to do their best for those they are teaching.
Here is how most teachers got their training in inclusion back in the day.
I did my PGCE in Inclusive Education way back in 1995. We spent half a day at training in specialised subject groups and the other half a day in mixed groups of trainee teachers doing teacher training math or English and other subject areas.
The idea being we inclusion trainee teachers had to trickle down our training in inclusion to the other trainee teachers.
Difficult to do when there are only two of you in each group of around 60 people. But you can imagine how difficult it was. But I guess it was better than nothing.
I was one of those kids who gave up on school. I basically just stopped attending when I was 14. Ohhh I went and did the subjects I enjoyed like art and music but the rest I just stopped going. I wasn't because I was not bright enough the fact I now have a master degree shows that I am. Even then you do not need a degree to be intelligent. I think we too readily define intelligence by IQ and by academic qualifications.
But I just couldn't do exams at all because my hand writing was just to slow and messy. Remember we are talking mid 70s here so there was no computers around.
I could moan about the school teachers, about the issues with my dad because he just thought I was stupid but I no longer do that. It does nothing to change the situation as it is now and wastes a lot of negative energy.
At 14 I got a job with a tree surgeon company and earned a bit of cash from that. Mind you I was only 14 and you were not supposed to work until you were 16 back then. I went from dead end job to dead end job for a while. However, became a musician a creative talent I blame my dyslexia for lol. Enjoyed that tremendously.
I now feel that without the struggles I experienced at school and with my dad I might not have had the determination to prove them all wrong when I returned to education at age 35. I might never have become and inclusion teacher and dyslexia specialist. I might never have had the opportunity to work with other dyslexics struggling like I once did.
Looking back on it now I would not change one thing at all because all those life experiences made me the person I am now.
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