Ever wondered why your child is not getting the grades you hoped for them, or why as a teacher your students never seem to understand what you are explaining to them? Teacher, Parent, Child is a game changer for education. It explains, through stories of real adults and children, why we are wrong to assume that learning capacity is dependent upon intelligence, and why the apparent ability of any student in school is only their history of understanding. When the parent or the teacher applies enough sensitivity to restructure the child’s understanding, then dramatic improvements follow.
He half laughed to himself. “Some did,” he told me, “but others did not seem to know too much. Some students knew more than the teachers. They would just tell us to work from textbooks or give PowerPoint presentations. But! Nothing really made much sense. I mean, it was boring just to sit in the class, and be shown slides and told points to remember.
Anyway, lessons were always boring, because we never learned anything interesting. Everything was just about how to answer exam questions. Lessons were only about the types of questions we could be asked, and the best way to answer them. There was never any interest as to why we should learn the subject, just to pass exams often,” he continued, “I did not understand what I was doing, and if I asked the teacher they didn’t really explain it to me. We were, more or less, left to make our own sense of what was in the textbook. So, we kind of relied upon one or two in the class to tell us the answers in the break or after school.”
Nothing has changed, I thought to myself. It was the same when I was at school. I remembered then reading a letter that a 16-year-old girl had recently written in America.
“I can go weeks in most of my classes,” she wrote, “without doing homework and still maintain a grade of ‘B’. The curriculum is not challenging so no one is trying. Teachers don’t care, and people constantly say we can’t do it. So we no longer try.”i
Moving to another thought, I mentioned to my new friend, “You know, the big thing now is to look for any student who does not keep up with the rest and suspect them of dyslexia.”
“Tell me about it,” he said. “Mind you, we look forward to being told we are because then we get extra help in the lesson by an assistant teacher to understand what is going on. But the big thing is that we get an extra 25 minutes in an exam. This really makes a big difference.”
“Are you dyslexic?” I asked him.
“Well, I went to the teacher in my last year and asked her. They gave me some tests and said I had a small learning problem. The first time in my whole life anyone has said this to me and this in the very last year. So, I was really glad they said this. It gave me the time I needed in my exams to get a better grade.” (And for the school in the league table, I thought.)
“Tell me,” I asked him, changing the subject, “was there a lot of bullying going on? …… ”
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