Albert? A Lazy Boy
Diagnostic Teaching By Winifred B. Stewart, A.B., University of Pennsylvania.
Albert is an enthusiastic member of the Boy Scouts, and the leader of the neighborhood “gang.” He is a real “boy”?big, strapping, good humored and full of fun. I have known him ever since he was a little fellow in rompers and used to play on our lawn. He was then a very bright and energetic child. It was, in fact, not until he started to school, and indeed until the fourth grade, that anyone began to suspect that he was not as bright as he might be. Having entered the first grade at the age of six, he went through the first two grades with fair success. He repeated 3d A and when he finally attained 4B he remained in that grade three sessions. His parents, being intelligent people, had ever since he began school done everything to help him with his work and encourage him to study. When soft words and kindly assistance did no good they encouraged him with the strap. It all apparently rolled off “like water off a duck’s back,” and he did no better. Then, thinking that the fault might be with the school, and the fact that he had got a bad reputation there for conduct as well as work, his parents sent him to another school. There he did no better and is in the 5B grade for the second time, being retarded three years. Having received the permission of his parents, I brought him to the Psychological Clinic at the University of Pennsylvania for examination on March 18, 1922. He was examined by two clinical examiners.
He did exceptionally well with the mechanical tests. He completed the Witmer formboard in 22 seconds on first trial?25 on the second and 15 on the third. He used both hands and showed studied discrimination. The cylinders he completed first in 59 seconds and second in 42, showing good form discrimination. He handled Healy A extremely well. Upon first trial he completed the problem in 55 seconds. Upon second trial, he placed the two small blocks first and completed the list in 11 seconds. His memoiy span is 8 for visual and 7 for auditory. Neither could be raised even on four repetitions. On the whole, all the mechanical tests pointed to a normal if not superior intelligence.
On the Binet test, however, he showed a mental retardation of two years and five months, as his I. Q. is only 83.6. This classes him as backward but not feebleminded. The diagnosis given was that he is normal mentally but mentally lazy. He also lacks interest in his work. It was recommended that he be given special teaching and that this teaching should be of the nature of pushing him in his work with the aim of gaining his interest and causing greater mental activity. A possible explanation for his retardation is the fact that he exceeds the norms for fifteen in both height and weight.
Accordingly, I started giving Albert special lessons?I found his special deficiencies to be in spelling and arithmetic. After several lessons I found that the reason for his poor spelling was insufficient attention to the word when reading. His reading was careless and full account was not taken of all the syllables. I stressed the point that he must pay attention to the words and divide the longer ones into syllables. He grasped the idea and as I go over his spelling every week I notice a decided improvement. His marks in school also have been better.
His arithmetic is perhaps the most interesting problem. The work of the fifth B is fractions, and Albert had not been doing exceptionally well considering the fact that he was repeating the grade. He was able to do the problems mechanically if they were set down on paper, but he could do little with a written problem. This held true for his work in multiplication and division of fractions. In division he seemed unable to discriminate between the divisor and dividend and would invert either. I had to explain to him that one generally divides by the smaller number, puts it to the right and inverts it. This he finally grasped after several lessons but did not understand the reasons for it. I tried giving him problems to do mentally from ones such as, “John had six pencils and gave twothirds away, how many would he have left,” to, “if three boys can build a shed in six days, how long will it take one boy to do it? two boys? six boys? ” It is interesting to note that he did these concrete problems very well. He could do them very much better when I said them to him than when he read them from a book and did much better when the problems dealt with pencils, tops and railroad trains than when they dealt with yards of cloth and potatoes. He seemed to enjoy these problems. By this time he began to get better marks in both arithmetic and spelling in school and in order to encourage him I promised to take him to the movies as soon as he brought home a paper in either subject marked 90.
As he was showing marked progress in his fifth grade work I thought that I would see how he liked to work with geometrical figures and problems concerning them. I thought thereby to improve, if only slightly, his visual imagery. Accordingly, I taught him what a square, rectangle and triangle are, and demonstrated the relations of the lengths of the sides and how to find the areas. I also assisted him in proving?by Socrates’ method?the Pythagorean theorem. Naturally, before this I had taught him the elements of square root and told him how to find the square roots of whole numbers. All this took several lessons, as he was not very quick to learn and forgot every week what he had learned the last. He liked it, however, because there was something concrete to see and handle. I gave him a problem about the number of yards of canvas it would take to make a tent. His cry was as usual, “Aw, I can’t do that. How do you start? ” He never had enough confidence in his ability to do things. With some assistance from me he did the problem and seemed to enjoy it. I gave it to him again the next week. He had entirely forgotten it but attacked it anew, insisting that he couldn’t. Then his April report came out. He entered my house with a whoop and announced that he had got a seven, the first in a year. He was overjoyed. We are still continuing with arithmetic and spelling.
He told me that he had made a radio receiving apparatus out of an oatmeal box. His parents assured me that this is true and that it is successful, moreover; from the way he talked to me about it he seemed to know what he was doing?although he is not at all fluent in expressing himself. His aim in life is to be a civil engineer, as he likes the idea of doing big things out of doors. From my teaching, although it is by no means completed, I should say that he will probably not be able to go through the strenuous college education which prepares for this profession. Albert, though not actually mentally deficient, is not what one would call bright and I doubt very much whether he will attain a very high intellectual level. However, he has a very marked aptitude for mechanical things, and probably will be most successful in some work along that line. I should recommend that he be put in some private school where more individual attention could be given him and where he could be given the encouragement which I have shown to be necessary to spur him on to work. I am also suggesting to his parents to send him to summer school so he will be able to catch up to children of his own age, as I think association with those so much younger has a very bad effect on him as it encourages his lack of initiative and dulls his interest. He will also get out of the mental rut in which he is at present and develop more self assurance if he gets in a new atmosphere and is pushed ahead. His attitude is that everything connected with school is hard. I said to him once, “Al, this problem is easy?it’s just like a game.” Said he, “It may be playin’ for you?but gosh!” and scratched his head.
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