A Cincinnati Special Class
- Author:
Louise M. Doll.*
Eleventh District School, Cincinnati, Ohio.
My class was organized December 3, 1907, with a membership of twenty-four defective or retarded pupils, comprising ten from the first grade, ten from the second, two from the third, and two from the fifth. The number varied from time to time through dismissals and recruits, until altogether forty-nine pupils have received special treatment adapted to their individual needs. I desire to invite your attention to several particularly interesting and stubbornly resistant cases in which there seemed at first but little hope of progress, but which ultimately astonished and gratified me by the capability disclosed and the improvement made after their inertia began to give way.
Of the entire number of pupils whom I have treated, sixteen, after varying periods, were restored to their classes to take up the work with their normal mates; twenty were promoted to higher grades at the close of the school; ten others, who could not be so promoted, are prepared next year to perform intelligently and self-helpfully the work of the grade in which before they, were floundering or helpless. Three should again receive special treatment next year. Eleven were withdrawn during the year, owing to removal from the district or because of sickness. Case 10.?August S., aged sixteen, entered school last September for the first time in his life. lie is a victim of infantile paralysis and his father carried him till he was eight years old. ITe sat in a second grade room, doing nothing all day and making no effort to exert himself except occasionally to answer a question in number work, which power, though very slight, he had gained from experience. When the boy first came under my care, he had so little control of his muscles that I expected to see him fall ?Report submitted June 38, 1008, to Superintendent Dyer, of Cincinnati, O., on the work of a special class for defective and backward children in the Eleventh School District, December 3, 1007, to June 18, 1008. This class was organized under the direction of the Superintendent of Schools and the immediate supervision of Dr W. C. Washburn, principal of the Eleventh District School.?En.
every time he attempted to walk. When away, from home I think his self-consciousness aggravated this uncertainty of gait. His hands twitched and when he tried to use them, they would shake and jerk beyond all control. I put a pencil in his hand and asked him to attempt writing. lie had never written a letter. His hand flew off the desk and he could not confine his endeavor to the area of a sheet of paper. This one act involved a threefold process. He had to concentrate his whole attention and exercise to the utmost his inhibition in manipulating the pen; furthermore he must conceive form and reproduce it under terrible stress of attempted co-ordination; also he must control the pen with some regard to the size of the paper. In his nervous state this was impossible. I sent him to the blackboard where he was not harassed by lack of space nor by the thought of wasting paper, which seemed to worry him. From the very beginning I tried to make him feel free from all the worries due to his consciousness of utter helplessness, to convince him that every effort on his part was worth any material waste. In the absence of this worry, he bent every energy, toward accomplishing something, and in spite of the many twists and jerks, he produced the first day words that were legible. The boy was very often hopeless and ready to give up and it required constant encouragement and commendation to induce him to continue the struggle. He was much at the board, mastering letters, words and sounds. He would withdraw himself from the class and plug away. August’s improvement was astounding to me. That week was a revelation. He read the first reader and the greater part of the second. He could spell any word he read. At first, he had his own list of simple words, which ho would bring every morning, written on a typewriter at home. His father had bought him this toy machine as soon as the boy was able to recognize letters and words, with the promise of buying him a bona fide type-writer in the near future. He received every encouragement to exert himself. He worked very hard and was soon writing down words from dictation with the second grade pupils. He seldom missed a word. His arithmetic improved enormously. Consider, that in December, he could not use his hands, and in the spring he was weaving raffia mats and reed baskets as evenly and accurately as any one. Having been shown several times how to begin weaving a bnsket, he soon asked permission to try it all by himself. He measured tind cut his materal and with only a few words of direction now and then, he produced very pretty work.
Having been once aroused and assured of a bright outlook, the boy became ambitious even to a fault. He would so strive with mind and body to accomplish a task, that the cords in his neck would swell, his jaws would stiffen and success would often be accompanied by exhaustion, brightened nevertheless by a flash of exultant intelligence. I watched him closely and checked him by occasionally diverting his interest, and he grew stronger day by day. He also walked straighter and with more assurance; I no longer had occasion to fear his falling. It was my pleasure to plan for his future, but his father carried him off to a farm, which he bought out of consideration for the boy’s health. August has tasted of the joys of reading and the sweets of books, and were he never to enter school again, I feel it is safe to predict that he Avill become a book lover, with all that this means of mental enrichment.
Case 9.?William D., aged seven, is a pupil in the second grade in the second year of attendance. He was very slow in his work, his manner was indolent and indifferent, the “don’t care” type. He was given the freedom of the streets and associated with twelve and fourteen year old boys. William had dropped slowly into a comfortable lethargy and was insolent when I attempted to arouse him. He would not read except under my close and constant vigilance; I had fairly “to pull the work” from him. I directed all my energy towards inspiring him with a love for reading and a willingness to work.
William returned to his own class on March 18th. I can say with truth that the boy was at this time a delightful pupil. I was loth to give him up. His spelling and arithmetic were very good. His power to read was a rich compensation for all the effort required to arouse this boy from stagnation to burning activity in the school. William now devours all reading matter accessible to him. He also improved in his German reading and writing. He is a very, promising pupil for the third grade. Case 5.?May L., aged eleven, pupil in the second grade, had been going to school six years. She had spent three years in each of the first two grades. Her teacher stated that “she could barely read, did scarcely anything, in fact, was empty and very, flighty.” She was weak in number and phonics, and lacked the power of concentration. May entered the class on December 3d and was returned to her regular class on January 29th. She applied herself earnestly and without any constraint whatever. She worked diligently and was very ambitious to gain approval. She was made to feel that she was accomplishing a great deal and this lent a spur to her efforts. May’s improvement in reading, spelling, phonics and arithmetic was remarkable. Iier German also showed improvement. She loved to read and read everything that came within her reach. Her regular teacher reported that she held her own in the class to the end of the year.
Case 27.?Frank S., a boy who had spent two years in each grade, and who because of his hopelessness, age and size, was given an opportunity to get what he could out of each succeeding grade, is now at the age of sixteen, in the fifth grade, while in December last, he was unable to read in a first reader. Naturally, in his inability to do the work with his class, he had contracted habits of idleness. He did not recognize words like was, him, her, he, she, etc. I led him back to the essentials in phonics and reading and spelling. He has now read a first and two second readers and enjoys reading. Frank has been a failure in spelling. He improved greatly and at last it was a rare occurrence when he missed a word. A remarkable thing about him was his confounding words. He would recognize the meaning, without being able to pronounce the word and would find a substitute in a synonym. He would read “listen a while” for listen any time, “big” for large, “small” for little, “short” ,for little, “home” for house, “under” for down, “catch” for get, “tall” for high, “untie” for fasten, “wide” for broad, “talk” for speak, “save” for keep, “arm” for hand, “punish” for scold, “trembling” for shivering, “hearing” for listening, etc. The boy spells correctly, words that he has prepared. He does not read well at sight, although very much better than he did. He does not possess a natural power to spell. Known analogous words are not of much assistance to him. He learns every word as something entirely new and by spelling it. He does not conceive the relation between the letter and its corresponding sound. Frank has made remarkable progress this year. Case 22.?Katie L., eight years old, had been in the first grade two years, without evidence of having learned anything. The teacher stated that “she did nothing in English, grasped nothing, that she could not tell whether Katie was inattentive or lazy. She was very irregular at school, her mother treating lightly the rules of attending school. Katie was lazy at the beginning, but she very soon found it more interesting and gratifying to be active and busy. She aroused within herself a burning ambition and was a reliable, earnest, little worker, always anxious to assist others. She had a clean record of attendance while she was in my room. She was sent back to her mates on February 3d. She took with her a good vocabulary to build upon and a very receptive and hungry state of mind to feed.
Case JfO.?Leah B., seven years old, was spending her second year in the first grade. When she came to me on March 23d, her teacher stated that she was not sure of more than twelve words and that she was doing less in her class than the February entries. Her progress was very, slow. Her nature was strikingly peculiar. I am not able to say that any one of her faculties was defective, but I think I do not err when I state that the “sum total” was deficient. Leah is a most perplexing problem. She is a perfect wild cat, and indeed the expression of the eye is like that of a cat about to spring on its prey. She is very restless, very trying in her contrariness, extremely aggressive, will pout and in her obstinacy snatch and throw things about. She has a loud, uncouth voice; likes to tantalize and torture others, is cruel by nature, delights in causing pain and never regrets it. Leah is physically strong, in stature a large girl, but of a nervous temperament. She is very destructive, works by fits and starts, has no power of concentration, is- slow to comprehend and unable to retain what has been repeated many times. Leah needs taming rather than teaching. Kindness affects her not at all; she requires rigid treatment, stern and relentless. Her progress has been very slow, due to the fact that her attention, as well as that of her teacher, is directed to keeping her straight and suppressing her atavistic tendencies, which are constantly clamoring for dominance. She works well at times, but even in the midst of work loses no opportunity to stir up some trouble with her neighbors. She now writes connectedly and well. She still makes mistakes but correction is effective, which was not the case some time ago. She reads a part of Stuart and Coe. Her wildness of nature has not been entirely brought under subjugation and I fear that during the vacation, free from the surveillance of a teacher, her condition will not improve.
Case 19.?Isador I., who declares he is six years of age, which I doubt, entered school last September. He was a child who should have been kept at home a year or two longer. However, his home was not one in which a child could properly unfold and grow. His father is separated, from bis mother and while at home he beat her. The boy relates this in a matter of fact way, showing that he has been bred in just such an atmosphere. He is in a more wholesome environment at school, although his attendance is premature. Isador is a precocious little fellow, who prefers the sound of his own voice to any other pastime. He is extremely, clever and shrewd in what he sets out to do but correspondingly slow and dull in doing what is prescribed for him. His youthful powers of entertaining have been encouraged to his own detriment; he is forward and must be held in check. Isador is so shrewd that he evades answering one question by asking another. He frequently turns the point of attack from himself to the person who is in authority over him, or he leads the questioner into another channel by abruptly introducing another subject. Writing seemed to be beyond his ability, though I am inclined to believe that it was not so much inability as lack of perseverance. On June 4th he wrote his first words sit and me. He was happy when he accomplished this, but it involved so great a struggle that he was apparently satisfied and had no desire to exert himself further. He learned and memorized new words readily, and now reads nicely from Stuart and Coe. He will be a strong pupil in the first grade next year.
Case 32.?William B., aged nine years and six months, a pupil in the second grade, has attended school three years. His home influence lent no support to good impressions made at school. He had no mother and a pleasure-loving sister of sixteen had charge of him. William acquired a taste for the street and was very irregular and tardy at school. He was also very lazy, but I think all this resulted from his being sent from school to school, his several aunts having had the care of him after the death of his mother. William put forth some effort in his English class, but was very slow. There was discord between him and his German teacher, hence he accomplished nothing in that class. He was not loth to join my class, and before long worked with great zest and seemed very happy in his work. He found much pleasure in reading. I have about twenty-five little classics that I let children have when they, have finished their regular tasks. William read all these besides his regular second reader and a supplementary second reader. The little books he would ask permission to take home to read in the evenings. He showed aptitude in hand-work, and made some very pretty raffia articles. He would also take some raffia to work with in the evenings. The fact that in the evenings he remained indoors and occupied his time with reading and working in raffia, instead of running the streets till bed-time, effected a great change in this boy. He had also been drinking coffee three times a day and was now abstaining from it entirely. William had come to me January 29th and joined his own class February 27th. He had acquired wonderful power in reading. He was strengthened very much in spelling and phonics, and in arithmetic he was splendid. His German reading and writing also showed improvement. William came to be a very desirable pupil.
Case 21.?Tony K., six years of age, entered school last September. He came to me in December. His teacher said that he did absolutely nothing. He knew no difference between meum and tuum, and would help himself to other children’s apples and pennies. Tony’s brother was with us for three months last year, and then was sent to an institution for imbeciles at Columbus. Tony’s mother is a weak person, whose temperament would be more apt to encourage imbecility than correct it.
When Tony came to me, his face was at all times wreathed in a silly smile and his eyes had a roving, flighty, senseless stare, which seemed to work on my sympathies, so that I had to steel myself against it. Firmness of treatment promised to be more effective than suasion. I bade him close his lips tight and look right into my eyes. Thus I would hold his glance for a time and prevent the roving of his eyes. A week later he had already assumed a more rational facial expression. This having been accomplished, he astonished mo with his readiness in learning to read and write words. His work exceeded all expectations. Tony was delighted with his own progress and was at all times eager to read and write. The charge against him of helping himself to what did not belong to him suggested the need of a certain vigilance, but I am quite sure this charge could not be lodged against him while he was in my room. I did not doubt the teacher’s statement, for I knew he failed to indulge this habit in my room, not because he had already overcome his weakness or curbed his desires, or because no temptations crossed his path, but because of the fact that his mind was constantly occupied in some other way.
Tony had been absent eight days. His mother brought him back to school so that she might have an opportunity to express her own, her husband’s and her boy’s appreciation of the work. She told of the boy’s present eagerness to attend school, when formerly he had to be driven from home, weeping. The boy was seldom without his slate at home. When the father observed his efforts in writing and reading, he was very much astonished, for only two or three weeks before he had not been able to produce a letter. The mother was exceedingly grateful and said she felt sure that if her older son had been put in the special class it would never have been necessary to send him to Columbus. Before the mother left I commmended Tony’s work warmly, and sent her home grateful and happy. But to my utter amazement, when I had the boy read, I found that his mind was as vacant as it had been at the start. I made allowances for his absence, but no amount of repetition called forth the slightest recognition of any word. ITe also had the same silly expression about the mouth and eyes, did not seem inclined to attend to the work, and showed no interest in it. I then set about laying a second foundation as I had the first, with hopes for a longer duration. In this way his progress was somewhat retarded. But on February 3d he possessed a vocabulary of fifty words, wrote very well and was returned to his regular class. On February 15tli, his mother called to plead for his return to the special class. She was disheartened, for Tony had been doing nothing since he left. She had noticed the change in him at once and he again showed a preference for staying at home. He will have to do the work over again next year, but I trust he will make a strong pupil. I sincerely believe his stay in this class was terminated prematurely ; and that if he had stayed longer, he would have held the ground gained. It came to my knowledge that his brother Charles had been at home several days from Columbus. His condition was greatly improved on his arrival, but when he returned to Columbus he was very much worse. This seems to confirm my previous statement concerning the mother.
Case 20.?Harry K., aged seven, has been in school two years. He is one of six, in a very ignorant and rather poor family. He acquired absolutely nothing in his first year at school. When he came to me it seemed that he was bordering on hopeless imbecility. His eyes shone with a light that never changed and reflected an utter blankness. His mouth was always open in a kind of senseless smile. He never talked and would answer only with a shake of the head in a combined yes and no which was altogether unintelligible. I insisted that he close his lips firmly whenever I spoke to him and whenever he looked at me. This produced the first attempt to take himself in hand, for he had to watch himself and never look at me with open mouth. The silly, foolish look soon disappeared from his countenance. It was a task to get him to say yes; he invariably omitted the final “s”. He will do so even to-day, if one does not insist on the correct pronunciation. I felt that it was utterly hopeless to teach him to read. I wrote the one word boy on the board in several places, and repeated this for days till finally he recognized it in a list of words. When I saw that he was sure of this word I slowly added others, until he had a vocabularly of fifty words. He saw no similarity between the printed and written words. He had to be taught the printed words as new words, script for him being no stepping stone to print. At the close of school he was reading on the printed pages of Stuart and Coe. Writing was a matter of slower development than reading. On March 5th he showed the first glimmer of intelligence. Before this, he would write a word many times and with great speed as a mere combination of strokes. All words were uniform, showing he had a conception of form and number of strokes, but his power to imitate letters?to copy?was nil. He saw no curves; all was pointed. To break him of this habit of producing pointed letters, I let him practise following lines with his chalk without deviating in any direction. He accomplished this, but the production of a curve was still an impossibility. The German “s” and “t” seemed to me to involve less difficulty and I let him try to form them. This resulted more satisfactorily than any preceding experiment. From this there was but a slight step to “t,” which ho actually curved at the bottom. I was wild with joy, for I was never more discouraged in any undertaking. I feared he would make his straight lines forever. The boy was delighted in making “t’s” on the board and on his slate. In writing “1” and “b” he pointed the top for a time but curved the bottom. It was not necessary to practise writing many letters before he was able to copy a word. To-day he can write anything and has a good, bold hand. When Harry entered the class he was helpless, almost an imbecile. He was powerless to defend himself against any attack, even when made upon him by the smallest child. He would accept any amount of abuse, weep because of pain, but offer no resistance whatever. lie is now self-helpful in class, likes to read and write, and is ambitious to work without aid.
The one great power which this special class has developed is that of self-abstraction. The pupils, without exception, have acquired this power in a very marked degree. Each child in the twenty could pursue his own work regardless of what might be going on about him, whether there were recitations or some attractive exercises.
The children on entering my class were generally stamped by pronounced habits of idleness; a few were perfect babies, utterly helpless and dependent. ?Most of them had drifted into a state of lethargy, in which they were seemingly very content. They, were perfectly satisfied not to exert themselves in any way. Each pupil has now crept out of this state of lethargy and has taken the field of activity, of eagerness “to do”. Every child who was returned to his room in the course of the year, went back filled with a burning ambition to hold his own with his regular classmates. In the class the children would vie with each other to read first, they would boast of their having had so many “turns” at reading in a day, and there also arose among pupils a wholesome rivalry, which lent quite a spur to their ambition. When one considers that the children on entering were loth to read or to exert themselves along any line, the fact that they have waked up and that their desire to do things has been aroused shows the great value of the special class.
Slovenliness in reading, writing, and in fact, in all work, is a marked trait in these retarded and defective children. One might think that in their inability to do work requiring rational thinking, they would do well mechanical exercises, such as writing, cutting, etc. This is not the case, however. I have never known another class in which pupils would hand in such mussy and almost disgusting papers.
Their oral work was of the same nature. In reading, they would omit a word or several words, slide right over them, repeat the same thing once or twice, and when pinned down to the line and made to see the error, would correct it and continue without any apparent impression being made upon them. The final “s” and “ed” in reading might just as well have been omitted in the printing. In spelling, an a is an “o,” an i is an “e,” an I is a “b,” an r an “s,” and vice versa; they spell what seems most convenient and nearest at hand or uppermost in mind, and not the corresponding sound or letters of the characters before their eyes. They are as slovenly and loose in hearing things as in seeing them?for instance, spelling t-h-r-o-n-g-y for t-h-r-o-u-g-li, etc.
Another strong characteristic of this class is one of destructiveness. Their first impulse is to tear, crush and destroy whatever they take into their hands. Another common trait is cruelty. The children hit, stick and annoy each other for the pleasure they can get out of it. They will destroy each other’s work. Some were aggressive in every respect. In spite of this, however, they are very tractable. They obey very readily, but must be frequently corrected for the same offense.
At the beginning they were also prone to be tardy and irregular in attendance. This was soon overcome. These children show a lack of power of concentration; they need frequent change of work. This is the most difficult problem for the teacher?to supply wholesome material to the different individuals?to have sufficient resources in mind and on hand to deal out to them. The one great factor conducive to the development and growth of these children is perfect freedom. They do not thrive under undue repression. In their rational growth they need none. Not one child of my, class this year is a helpless dependent. With a little direction every child can go about its own work.
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