Gladys
- Author:
Beatrice M. McCully,
University of Pennsylvania.
One October day, a small thin child of five, bedecked in gala attire?white summer dress, white stockings, etc., was jumping up and down in the waiting room of the Psychological Clinic. Closer inspection showed that this fidgety individual was Jewish and blond (although one doubted very much if nature had given her light hair), with brown eyes and a pallid skin. A fretful, querulous expression rested around the mouth, giving the child an odd cynical look which one would scarcely expect of a five-year-old.
The mental examination showed that she was trainable on the basis of her performance with the formboard. The Binet results were: Chronological Age, 5 years 11 months; Mental Age, 3 years 6 months with an Intelligence Quotient of 59.
Impatient to do some task or other, and stubborn or blas6 when forced to keep at a given test, Gladys was essentially the product of her environment. Born into a fairly comfortable Jewish merchant’s family, with parents who knew nothing except making money, Gladys was allowed to have food which obviously did not agree with her until the result was that she had convulsions from the time that she was seven months until she was three and one-half years old. During that time she was apparently excused for everything that she did on the grounds that she was not well, and the natural consequence was that she now exhibits the behavior of a completely spoiled child. Even now, after she had been in kindergarten several months, she seemed to have no idea that she must obey orders whether she wanted to or not.
Her general health at the time of coming to the Clinic was still poor. Her teeth were in very bad condition, yet her mother would not allow her to be taken to the University Dental School, although the child specialist at the University Hospital recommended immediate dental treatment as an aid toward building up her general health. Along with this a careful supervision of her diet was recommended. Sweets and eating between meals (as she was accustomed to doing) were strictly forbidden.
The family history contains nothing significant except for the fact that the mother was ill during pregnancy. Another child who is now two years old is, according to the mother’s report, perfectly normal; in fact, she makes the deficiencies that Gladys has more noticeable.
The fact that Gladys was backward in walking (she began at two years), learning to dress herself, and taking her own part when playing with her little friends, as well as the fact that she had not responded at all to kindergarten work, were the reasons her mother brought the child for clinical examination. The results showed decidedly inferior mentality, yet the examiner was unwilling to give a definite diagnosis until clinical teaching had been tried. In four hours of teaching, I succeeded in getting but two definite results from Gladys: her colors learned, and an auditory Memory Span. Always she seemed to have such a “shifting” operative memory span level that she gave the impression that she could do much more than she was doing. At the same time, she showed such a definite lack of the ability of concentration of attention that I believe it was this that kept her from learning more. The examiner, noticing this defect, thought that Gladys might be negativistic. There was nothing that showed up in my work with her, however, that would bear out this idea. She was simply stubborn and spoiled and besides had this definite lack of concentration.
Her stubbornness showed up when I tried to get her Memory Span. After much coaxing and persuasion, I managed to get an auditory memory span of four digits. Since Goadys was six during the time that she was coming to the Clinic, four is a low score, and would indicate that she has poor association.
Her visual imagery too was subnormal, for, although we spent a total of forty minutes on Healy A, Gladys never once made a perfect performance. Her retention was so poor that she actually would forget the position of even the largest blocks from one lesson to the next. Occasionally she would work in spurts, and give a surprisingly good performance. She did this sort of thing when being tested with the formboard. My work with her would bear out the opinion of the examiner; that is, that Gladys is trainable, but in learning to do a given task, the child would need many repetitions. With Healy Puzzle B and the Knox Casuist test, although she finally solved the problems, she required almost innumerable repetitions and suggestions. In all these, defective retention, imageability and initiative seemed the main causes for her very poor performances. Nevertheless, given indefinite time and a teacher with unlimited patience, Gladys would probably learn to do tasks of this nature.
Since she seemed unresponsive to this sort of material, I tried work requiring higher powers of organization. With numbers, I could not persuade her to count higher than 14. (She would never count blocks in a straight row, no matter how often I repeated my directions, but always jumped around.) With this work I think she was just plain stubborn. She was quite used to being either bribed or rewarded when she did something that another child would be expected to do without any reward, and since I did neither she seemed to think that her feelings had been hurt. She always wanted to play, and when given something else to do for a change, she would say either “I don’t want to” or “I ca-yunt.” It was that way with the alphabet: she never once said the seven letters from A to G without help.
With learning to write letters on the board, however, it was different. She really seemed to like this work and tried hard to absorb it. She quite surprised the clinic teacher by remembering three letters over a week. When, however, the checking method, was tried it was discovered that it had all been guess-work. She really could not pick the letters out or identify them. The ones taught her were A, C, T, 0. She would remember little directions that had been given her such as, “Leave a little gate in the C”; or, “Down and across for the T.” She would repeat these to herself, but it seemed to do no good. When it came to differentiating between letters, she was hopelessly mixed up. Once in a while she would make something that might be recognized as an A, but it was not as good as those made by children in the first grade, and was generally an accident, anyway.
Indefinite time and patience, would be required to teach Gladys to read and write. Judging by the only standard that we have, however, the school standard, Gladys would be most surprising if she got through first grade even with many repetitions of the material she was to learn. The average school teacher would and could not give her the extra time and coaching that she would require. If she had a mother who could push her and help her, as well as discipline her, when she needs it, the prognosis would be more favorable. As it stands, therefore, Gladys is deficient socially, she cannot dress herself, take part in children’s games, nor do kindergarten work; and she is deficient intellectually, she does not seem able to learn the fundamentals necessary for acquiring an education. We can not say definitely that the cause of her deficiencies is poor stock, for her baby sister is normal. Perhaps they may be attributed to the neglect of her diet when she was a baby. She is the product of her environment, and is, I believe, no higher than a Low-grade-imbecile Barr classification.
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