Refusing to Accept what is Witnessed in a Child’s “said” Ability.

In education, a student is judged or evaluated on two factors. How well they present their mind and how well they can remember the information they were given to learn. Yet, we often fail to teach them the strategies they need to know clearly, in order for them to demonstrate competence in these two factors. Consider, the example below.

We can see in the first image a chart made by a boy of 10 years old. The child had no understanding of scale, in order to segregate the page into clear divisions. He had no understanding of letter relationships. Capital and lower case letters are mixed up in each word, and the “p” and “g” are not lying on the line as they need to be. The teacher has taken this work with the effort of the others in their class and commented WOW! , to give him confidence. But there was no effort by the teacher to teach the boy how to correct what he had not learnt by other teachers in earlier years.?

This is the greater problem a teacher faces with the start of each year. How to help all their students catch up with the numerous rules they should have learnt and practiced in earlier years. When they fail to do this, the effort of the student is simply accepted as “their way.” So, they are marked, eventually graded and school is seen to have done its job, without the student being corrected and developed as they should have been. In other words, they could have learnt far better and so been routed to better opportunities in work and life, but they were not because their teachers failed them. I offer an online course: “The Andersen Attitude Methodology” that can help teachers to learn how to teach better and so help their students to keep up better in their learning.?

However, the boy had been in school for 5 years and had been so educated by his teachers. I sat down with him and in a few very short periods, I taught him how to divide the paper into equal segments. I taught him how to write letters with the appropriate size and scale by understanding the rule of relationships. But before I began this, I taught him how to believe in himself. Not by telling him to do so, but by creating a fun happy talk. You can see how his whole progress in school, and so in life, has been dramatically improved by a teacher who gave time, security and a little bit of love.

Roy Andersen.