Parental Influence and Special Education

Developmental problems with school age children

Many children suffer with development and learning difficulties at school and tend to get left behind, isolated or excluded from lessons. These children get labelled as having special needs, and the special education provided may hinder the child's growth and development. Occasionally these children are grouped together and put in a special class and treated like psychiatric patients.

Usually there is nothing wrong with these children. They are normally gifted and highly intelligent. The real underlying problems may not be understood by teachers. The real causes of learning difficulties may be generalized anxiety disorder combined with major self esteem and depression issues. With generalized anxiety disorder and depression, a child would be unable to concentrate at school. The child may have serious family problems. Problems that the child does not understand or is fully conscious of, and problems that the child is unable to put into words. Hence the child is often seen as being stupid.

Unlike secondary school, children often have to put up with one teacher who either loves them or hates them. If they are lucky to get a teacher that loves them and understands their needs then they may excel in their education. But if they end up with a teacher who does not like them, that child is going to seriously under perform.

The best thing a parent can do is to provide a happy unconditionally loving and supportive family environment for their children at home. This means that they have a strong foundation, and can go to school feeling confident and happy. Children from loving families with high levels of self esteem are those that usually succeed and excel at school. Definition of self esteem, is the degree to which you feel you are loved. Having high self esteem means you are absorbing love.

Whatever problems a family suppress, the sensitive child may feel and express. If there is a suppressed secret problem in a family such as a drug problem or relationship problem, then a sensitive child may cause trouble by feeling and expressing whatever that family is suppressing. A sensitive child may develop neurosis as a result of a family denying and suppressing problems. Such child may even later on be rejected by the family, or seen as the black sheep of family. This black sheep may be unlovable for such types of parents. A child with these types of problems can not meet the demands of life and take school seriously and be able to concentrate. This is when learning difficulties begin to develop.
Last year of infant school is crucial for child’s development. This is where the child’s self concept forms with regards to how good he or she is at learning and performing at school. If a child gets disturbed at this point then his/her education will take off in a negative way.
Teachers and parents need to be talking to each other to address the needs of a child. Children can also be mistreated or neglected by teachers as well as parents. Sometimes children are taken out of English classes just so the special needs teacher can make up her class numbers. The actual English teacher may feel there is nothing wrong with the child, in which case the parents need to get involved and make a request that the child not be taken out of these lessons, and that any special education should be done outside of English class.
A child needs to be with someone they can easily develop with. This should be the main factor of choosing a class. If there is a class where the teacher does not like the child, then the parents needs to get involved and request that their child changes to a different class, or a different school altogether. Different teachers have different learning styles and different behaviours. Finding the right teacher is like an adult finding the right job. If a child is seriously not happy at school then something needs to be done about it. It is not something that you can ignore. If the school does not have the child’s needs at heart then you simply have to find another school for your child. Some parents simply do not care enough about their children to change their school. Usually the only factor of choosing a school is the location.
Child should have choice of going to a mixed sex school. Every work environment needs an exotic balance of male and female. This is very important for making it easy for the child to develop healthy relationships in preparation for adult life. Otherwise developing relationships can be more challenging as members of the opposite sex may appear like creatures from out of space.

Teaching Strategies for Learning Disorders

Learning styles and classroom behavior

All children are good at something. All children have their own unique interests and talents. Schools and teachers need to identify a child’s strengths and what that person it good at, and then focus on that. For example in the last 3 years of high school, children often are put in the lowest set, where they are deemed to fail. At that stage there is no chance they can ever recover by coming out with good grades, since the school has already failed them. So the school needs to find out what they are good at.

I know special needs children who have failed school and grown up to work as mechanics on buses and are earning 5 times the average salary. Some children go through school without learning anything, when they could be learning a valuable trade- doing something that they love and enjoy- something for the benefit of mankind.

When I was 6 years old I used to come home from school crying saying, “I’m stupid, I can’t read or write”. This is because one of the teachers actually told me I was stupid. When I was at school in the early years I did not learn very much at all. I only learned the months of the year in order when I was 18 years old, which is something I should have learned when I was 6 years old. I had to buy a baby handwriting book to learn joined up writing for taking notes at university. I used to find typing so much easier and have since learned to touch type. Apparently I was labelled as having dyslexia and dyspraxia. I had trouble learning because I could not see the point of what I was learning. It was just random stuff.

I had a terrible time at middle school. After that I ended up going to a school that recently had been deemed the WORST school in the country. Currently it is the worst performing school in the league tables, and it is renowned for it’s violence. I actually fitted in nicely because there was so much autonomy and variety, and it was a big school. Because of the autonomy, independence and being treated more like an adult (not being bothered about and left to it) and left to have fun- I began to excel! I found alternative ways to build self esteem by learning to love my self even though I was not perfect. After learning to Love myself then other people started to Love me and I become a popular person at school. I was lucky. In a few months I began to achieve average grades. I managed to fight off the special needs teachers and turn it all around, and I finally managed to become successful and when the school started dividing people into sets, I started to move into the top sets. When I finally achieved my GCSE’s I came out as one of the top 20 pupils in the school. With determination, motivation and associating with some of the top achievers in the school, I became a success. Teachers were taken by surprise at my results.

Memory techniques and retaining information

My experience in education has taught me that success in exams is proportional to how much unnecessary useless, but potentially interesting information you can retain in your memory. This is where children with anxiety, depression and concentration issues suffer. Most of what children learn at school does not have any relevance, such as battle dates and strange unnecessary mathematical equations. But in order to be successful in education a child needs a...

willingness or determination to be successful
belief that he/she can do it
genuine interest in the subject matter
concentration- with ability to listen
(from achieving first 3 points)
the ability to retain information

Points 1-4 are necessary for achieving point 5, which is to retain information. This applies to any type of exams in education including universities and colleges. Anyone can improve their grades substantially by learning memory techniques. One memory technique that I know is to string together information into a story or scenario that you can play like a video in your head.

For example take two minutes to try and memorise some random words in order from this list.

woods
castle
cow
pizza
toaster
ball
woman
sandwiches
milk
snow

If I ask you in one hour whether or not you can still remember and recite these words in order, you will probably say no.

Here is a little technique for remembering useless information, for passing exams. Try putting these words into a story with a time line. For example, you are walking through some strange mysterious woods and then suddenly you stumble upon an old deserted castle. After exploring the castle you find a cow. It is not a normal type of cow. It appears to be juggling a pizza in its left hand and a toaster in its other hand. The image is so bazaar and comical that you know you are going to remember this :) After a few minutes you notice that the cow is also kicking a ball around as part of its act. It has a lot of skill, does a shoot and scores a goal. You can hear lots of cheering. Then a woman comes out screaming and shouting and then she starts offering you sandwiches, which are cheese and pickle sandwiches. After you have taken and eaten these sandwiches you start feeling a little thirsty so she offers you a glass of milk. Finally you go outside and it starts snowing. The snow is really cold and brings back lots of past memories of playing in the snow as a child.

If you spend 2 minutes memorising a little story like this creatively making it as memorable as possible, seeing it, feeling it and hearing it, then you will remember this for as long as you like. Having made up that silly story, I will be able to recall that list in order for ever. This is one of many memory techniques that you can study. These techniques will do wonders for your exam grades. Because that is all it comes down to- memorizing stuff.

The brain can only remember and retain stuff that is meaningful. The brain is good at filtering out useless information. If there is no meaning applied to what you are learning then it just doesn't get retained. To a child with big anxiety and depression, this type of useless information that people learn at school is classified by the brain as being useless and less important in comparison with the struggles and problems that child is facing.

If you want to be successful at exams then you need to be able to memorise references, names, dates, formulas and equations. At school I achieved an overall B in Maths (even though I do not even know my times tables). As you are allowed to take a calculator into exams all I had to do to be successful was memorise strange mathematical equations and formulas. I examined the previous years exam papers and answers that were published, which contains the same type of content every year. Once I learned the answers to those questions I could easily answer the questions in my exam. This is the reason for getting high grades in Maths, even though I am poor at maths. It is all about using creativity to memorize information.

Schools are an illusion. Education is a complete waste of time. Children need to be learning real skills, such as health, wellness, positive thinking, real jobs and real trades, parenting and spirituality.

You can not force learning on a child. It is down to the child. The child needs to be learning something for the reason that he or she has chosen. I discovered that the more I achieved at school the better I felt and the more my self love increased. I began to feel normal, instead of believing that I was stupid or that there was something wrong with me. You can not force education onto someone, it will not work. You can not make a plant grow, you have to water and nurture it- and give it sunlight for it to grow on its own.
In order for schools to be loving, teachers need to first drop their titles and be known by their real names. By setting themselves up as being ultimately superior to pupils they are setting themselves up for failure. Children should not be treated as inferior people just because they are small. Children need to be treated as real equal people. There needs to be mutual respect between teachers and children. Children are not young people. Nowadays children are spiritually and psychologically more older than adults. A child is an adult soul in a growing body. If children are treated like adults they will act like adults. If you undermine children then they will undermine you, which is something that is happening in most schools nowadays.
People are in education far too long. A child should be prepared to go into an apprenticeship or working life as soon and he/she leaves school. The best form of education is learning on the job. What happens now is that people go to university to avoid working and to waste 3 years of life. When they leave university they realize that they have fallen 3 years behind everyone else, and that their degree is actually useless. Everyone else has been learning their trade and is moving into high earning brackets and the university person ends up doing administration work. The university person usually thinks that he or she is too good to do real work.
From what I can see, the happiest people are those doing real jobs for the benefit of mankind, such as farmers, doctors, rubbish collection people, mechanics, construction workers, rescue workers and hairdressers and teachers etc. Even though they may be be working very hard and getting their hands dirty, they are the happiest people. They know they are giving all they can. They know they are making a difference. They know they are the stronghold of society. They know they are NEEDED by others. They can go home feeling good because they are doing something for the benefit of mankind.