The Whiz Kid

Tomorrow I have a meeting with my eldest son's class teacher. If you are new to my blog, you probably didn't know he has learning disability, so he is in a special class. The meeting is nothing out of the ordinary, it's for the mid-year assessment result and also to pay the balance of the school fees. There goes my money...

Being in a special class means he's exempted from taking the normal school syllabus. From what I gathered during the special class PTA meeting earlier this year, the teachers are concentrating mostly on teaching them how to function daily, going for study trips to chocolate factories, the National Planetarium and even a game of bowling. The objective is to expose these children to everyday things in the hope that they can at least be independent later in life.

For example, they're taught about making the beds, making simple drinks and food, gardening and all kinds of things that are mostly hands-on and is part of their daily life. That reminds me of the Kueh Ondeh-Ondeh he made a few months back. They tasted real yummy! These special kids are taught simple stuff because most of them have short-term memory.

There was this parent during the meeting who voiced out against teaching these to the kids and wanted emphasize on studies. He was comparing the results with the private training school with these lowly funded government school. I was so tempted to tell him to bring his son/daughter to that private school and don't expect miracles from the teachers who are already overloaded with work and spending most of their time 'babysitting' these children. How annoying!

I mean you can't expect these special kids to learn complicated stuff like computer network security, physics, science and remember everything when they can't even remember what you told them just a few minutes ago. I think some people even the parents themselves do not really understand the kind of problems special kids go through. It's a pity that sometimes they are being labeled 'stupid' and often times end up being bullied. These children can succeed too but we must never force them things they are not capable of.

Even doing simple stuff is already an effort to them. They need to really learn over and over again how to do things. And let's not forget that a learning disability or learning disorder is NOT a problem that has anything to do with intelligence at all. It is caused by how information is received, processed and communicated by the brain. People afflicted with learning disabilities find it harder to process information cos they see things very differently from the rest of us.

I hope with more awareness people will start understanding children like these and not just label them stupid, slow, blur cases or anything so demeaning and most importantly, I hope the parents of these children will not expect miracles of them and let them grow at their own pace cos with proper guidance, these children can and will be able to function alongside the 'normal' people in this world.