A “Slow Normal” Developing a “Failure Morale”
Clinical Reports :Author: Sue H. Bean, A.B., University of Pennsylvania.
Richmond came to the Clinic near the end of the Summer School. Because he had failed his work in a regular seventh grade the previous year he was a pupil in the Demonstration Class, conducted by the University of Pennsylvania during the summer session. In the Demonstration School his work was no better than it had been during the regular school term. It was, therefore, considered advisable to have a clinical examination made to discover, if possible, the cause of his consistent failure in school work.
At the beginning of the school year the principal of the school he attended faced the problem of placing the boy. He had not been a success in the grade he had been in the previous year. There were two alternatives. The first was promoting him to the next higher grade, where several new subjects were taught. It was thought that these new subjects might claim his interest and attention and that with the assistance of a private tutor to give additional drill in the work covered he might be able to follow along in the grade. The second alternative was demoting him to the next lower grade. As he is a big boy of fifteen, very tall for his age and very sensitive and self-conscious, this seemed inadvisable. Putting him back into a class where the boys were much smaller and younger might have a very bad effect upon his general morale. So he had been tried in the higher grade, but the experiment was not successful. He continued to fail.
His greatest defect, as shown by the clinical examination, was a deficiency in persistence of attention. His intellectual level was very low, also, as was evidenced by the fact that he made a Binet Intelligence Quotient of only 80. Clinic teaching was recommended by the examiner.
The clinic teaching was begun with the idea of determining whether his deficiency, as shown in his school work and also in some of the clinical tests was a result of lack of competency or due to some other factors which might be overcome.
The first ten lessons were spent on algebra and arithmetic, as mathematics was his weakest point. The outlook at first seemed most unfavorable. His extreme fluctuation of attention, amounting many times to an apparent absence of anything in consciousness; his inability to do any kind of independent reasoning; his spineless dependence and absolute lack of self-reliance;’ the slowness of his mental reactions as far as mathematics was concerned and the absence of even the fundamentals in the subject; his poor retentiveness; these all made rather a gloomy picture. It was soon apparent, however, that all of these deficiencies were at least partly due to another cause. He was suffering from a mild form of fear psychosis?fear of failure, fear of being “dumb”?and this was paralyzing his mental efforts. The great problem was to overcome this long-established habit of failure by getting a habit of success started, and thus to initiate some self-confidence. It was necessary during the first lessons to continually jolly him along and to lay a great deal of emphasis on everything he did correctly and to cover up the failures as much as possible, very much the same as it is sometimes necessary in breaking a young colt to harness to keep him turned around so he can’t see his own shadow.
I would not be willing to make a final diagnosis or prognosis on the basis of these twenty lessons?a fifteen-year-old boy is too complicated an animal for that?but I feel sure these things are true: His deficiency in persistence of attention is not incompetency, but simply inefficiency; he has never been taught to concentrate or to study effectively.
When he entered school he was probably a normal boy as regards scholastic competency, but a “slow ” normal?that is, more repetitions were necessary to form the association bonds, and he has lost out, step by step, because he was hurried on to new points before the old ones were fixed and so never gained the fundamental background. In this way he has acquired also a habit of inattention through continually sitting in classes where the work was beyond him, and worse still, a habit of failure.
He must be helped, most of all, to build up a habit of success to replace the very strongly entrenched habit of failure for his moral as well as his intellectual good. The irritability, indifference and impertinence which he exhibited at times last year in school were exactly what one might expect. A boy of fourteen, very large for his age, placed in a class with boys much smaller than he (with the added fact of its being a co-educational school), and continually failing in all the work of the class; the natural reaction is nervous irritability, and a covering up of his sensitiveness by an assumed air of indifference. He is, like many boys of the early adolescent period, A “SLOW NORMAL” 283
a strange mixture of manly braggadocio and awkward self-consciousness and sensitiveness. His trainability is good; he can be made efficient?trained to get and retain knowledge and to reproduce it in an examination. He has a satisfactory degree of intelligence, but I am unable to determine at this time what is his possible ultimate intellectual level; he may have almost reached it, or it may be far above where he now is. He should not spend four years in a purely academic high school, even if he can be trained to do the work, for he will get very little real mental development that will help him in his life work. The process would be very much like training an animal to do certain stunts. Unfortunately it is rather difficult to find a high school that is suitable for this kind of normal wn-academic boy. There are enlightened spots in parts of the country, however, where educators are beginning to ask, not “How can this boy be put through this course of study?” but “What kind of a course of study must the school provide to fit this boy for life and service?” In such a school only can boys of this type get an education that will really function. He is the type of boy that offers a strong argument for at least three things:
1. The psychological examination of every child before he enters the First Grade, to determine his competency, and his assets and liabilities.
2. Auxiliary teachers, to give individual study and attention to slow normals and problem children that will save many of them if given in time. Salary for these teachers could be saved by the automatic cutting of the list of “repeaters” which would inevitably follow such a step.
3. A study of the psychology of success and failure practically applied as an efficient educational guidance and training for the boy who leaves school at sixteen years, that will send him out to his life work, not feeling that he is already a failure, but with the enthusiasm and will to do that comes from success and a knowledge that he can do something well.
Disclaimer
The historical material in this project falls into one of three categories for clearances and permissions:
Material currently under copyright, made available with a Creative Commons license chosen by the publisher.
Material that is in the public domain
Material identified by the Welcome Trust as an Orphan Work, made available with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
While we are in the process of adding metadata to the articles, please check the article at its original source for specific copyrights.