Lester: A Study in Diagnostic Teaching
- Author:
Samuel Lipshutz, and Lorraine McNally, Clinic Teacher,
University of Pennsylvania,
To start a clinical study of Lester with a recital of his scores
in the various psychological tests would be to start at the wrong end. For Lester is one of those fortunate individuals who are born with the uncanny ability of confounding psychologists by amounting to so much more than their test scores would indicate. In contrast to those elements of his personality which make the, above statement true, Lester has, I must admit, his defects. The business of weighing these and trying to determine how much they will mean to Lester when he is full grown and ready for the world is a delicate one.
To begin with first impressions?which is the only logical way to begin anything?there can be no doubt that Lester is as healthy, as well-developed, as full-grown, and as active an American boy as could be found anywhere. He likes to swim, to shoot, to ride, to drive a car, to run a motorboat, and to play ball. He has done all of these things, though his fourteenth birthday is half a year ahead of him. He hates to go to dancing school, does not like girls, does not like to go to prep school, or to church. In all of these ways and in many more he demonstrates his complete balance?
his almost perfect adjustment to his world. His family background is of the best, with a history which starts with William the Conqueror and comes down to the D.A.R. With the advantages of health, education, money, and position, it is not surprising that Lester has turned out to be so completely normal in almost every respect. It is a bit surprising that he should have failed to be normal in two ways. One of these is the defect which brought him to the University for clinical examination and teaching; the other is a very real ability?a very important talent. The second of these more than makes up for the first.
Briefly, Lester cannot spell. He has improved much in this respect in the last few months, but he can still read much better than he can spell. Furthermore, he is not very good at the arithmetic which he should be doing at his age level and grade. These are his troubles. The talent I mentioned will be discussed in full later.
The brief introduction to Lester finished, we may now proceed to look at him in greater detail. He was born in October, 1914, which made him thirteen years and two months old when he was examined in December of 1927. He was brought to the clinic by his teacher in a private school. He was in the sixth grade at school; had no significant medical history; the family health was good; and he had two sisters, aged eleven and four. The reason for the examination was given as inconsistent school progress. The diagnosis was normal mentality; the recommendation was clinic teaching. The Intelligence Quotient was 104. He completed the Witmer Cylinder test in 70 seconds on the first trial, and 47 seconds on the second trial?about the 30th and the 40th percentiles of the fifteen year group. Since his own age was 13, these results are about average, perhaps a little low.
In the auditory memory span, he scored 6, and 7 on two repetitions. In the visual, he scored 9, with 10 on five repetitions. In the auditory reverse, he scored 3; in the visual, he scored 6. The difference between his visual and auditory performance gave the final clue, both to his difficulty and to its treatment. He could read with astonishing rapidity. He was diagnosed as the visual type, with underdeveloped kinaesthesia. His auditory imagery was particularly poor. It was patent that this accounted for his inability to do spelling and arithmetic. In the spelling tests the words were spoken aloud; Lester could not form a picture of the word from the sound. Nor could he retain a kinaesthetic memory of how the word was formed. It was visual?or nothing. The clinical examiner further reported that his I.Q. was at the thirtieth percentile for high school boys; that he had marked inadequacy of feeling where the spelling field was approached; and that he be started with second grade work.
The spelling deficiency was so much more marked than the arithmetic that I decided from the start to devote the whole term to it. It was plain that whatever good might be accomplished with this case would be through practice; through the gradual development of auditory and kinaesthetic images by means of drill. To attempt too much would have spoiled everything, and if I have erred at all, I have erred in attempting too little, for Lester has succeeded in learning everything I have asked him to learn. We started at the second grade level; he is now doing sixth grade spelling with intelligence.
I noticed at the first meetings of the term that Lester invari206 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CLINIC ably brought a different magazine to school each day. These were of the popular type?the Saturday Evening Post, Liberty, Collier’s, and so on. He read the stories with comprehension. I asked him to read aloud to me; his reading speed was remarkable. He read so fast that he gave me another clue to guide me in my attempts at teaching. He could not spell the individual words because he had never taken a good look at them! It was literally so. Lester had the ability to read almost a page at a glance. He had a vague idea that a certain group of letters formed a certain word, but the exact position of them in order was not important to him. The most fleeting glimpse of the combination of letters gave him the meaning of the word; but when he attempted to spell the word later he could reproduce only the letters; never the correct order. Our first drill then, was, strangely enough, on slow reading. I wagged my finger judicially and had Lester read a single word to each wag. This slowed down his speed. We continued this until he got into the habit of looking at words as words, not as parts of sentences.
He was intelligent through it all. He realized he had a problem on his hands, and he worked with me. He knew what the goal was; I had even gone so far as to explain kinaesthetic and visual and auditory imagery to him, and to tell him what we were trying to do. I think the procedure was a wise one, for he grasped it instantly. We had to develop the kinaesthetic and the auditory images, and we entered upon the harassing business of doing so. We started with a list of twenty words. I carefully selected second grade words which he could not spell, together with a few at the third grade level. These included “wishes” and “whistle” and other similar combinations. He would spell one for the other every time, because of their visual similarity. We drilled perhaps four hours on those twenty words. As soon as he learned to spell one he would forget the other, so that results were not immediately encouraging. I would pronounce the word. Lester would try to spell it. After he had failed, I would spell it for him while he wrote it on the blackboard. While he wrote it he would call off the letters. This was the form of our drill during the whole term. In this way we combined the kinaesthetic and the auditory elements of spelling with the visual, and we made progress. At the start I consulted several texts on the subject of the psychology of spelling. Without exception they gave me no help at all. They were all beautifully general or else uselessly introLESTER?A STUDY 207 spective; I think there is room for a practical manual on the teaching of spelling to deficients. The weeks of the term passed. After a time Lester could learn ten new words an hour and remember seven or eight the next time. We reviewed and reviewed and reviewed, keeping a record of all the word lists from the beginning of the term. Constantly we went back to the very beginning, to see how much Lester could remember, and to see what progress he was making. Noticing his intelligent interest in the problem, I next proceeded upon what normally would have been a very doubtful step. I taught Lester various rules, one at a time, about the long and short vowels and where they came; about the sequence of vowels and the sequence of consonants; about the doubling of consonants, and so on. I did this experimentally; the experiment succeeded. He learned the rules and slowly learned to apply them. The fact that there were rules was a complete surprise to him, and they aided him enormously in that they taught him to look upon words as problems. A problem challenged him at once, and he never gave; up. It needed urging at first and a great deal of pounding. I do not wish to convey the impression that Lester was an intellectual giant, despite the average I.Q. He was an average boy?but he did have a certain acuteness.
It helped greatly to know that he was cognizant to the difficulties. He was slightly under the influence of an inferiority complex in the field of spelling; this wore off as he progressed. And now, after four months of drill, he is doing his school spelling at a very high level. His spelling average cannot be less than ninety now?and it may be ninety-five or more. When the term ended Lester could learn twenty Sixth Grade words one day, come back a day or two later and remember eighteen or nineteen. These he would learn, by the drill method I have described, and then he would know them for good.
There was one fortunate circumstance that helped me greatly. It was more or less of an accident. We had been drilling along until there were about one hundred words and a half dozen rules fixed in Lester’s mind. He knew them, but his performance was spotty. Sometimes he knew them better than at others?a very annoying situation. Just then his Easter Holidays broke, and after them, ours, so that he did not see me for almost a month. When he returned, though he swore he had not studied, he knew every one of the words and all of the rules. He had needed the rest, and the cessation in drilling. After that and until the end of the term we proceeded at top speed. The very end of the course brought corroboration from his teacher that his spelling was much improved.
And that was that. On the surface, Lester had learned a few hundred words and a handful of rules. But really he had learned a great deal more than that. He had learned how to look at a word steadily; how to analyse its difficulties, and how to fix it in his mind. He was “spelling conscious”?it meant something to him. Just before the term ended we had a talk about it. He promised faithfully to bear his rules in mind, and to apply them to all the words he would have to write or spell in the future. He seemed serious about it, and I am of the opinion that Lester’s period of clinical teaching in the field of spelling is over for good. He has learned his lessons, and he is the sort of boy to realize that he has done something?hence to value it and stick to it. I have discussed his defect and the course of training he underwent in the effort to rid himself of it. It will be recalled that I mentioned at the beginning a certain great talent he had? a talent which outweighed his deficiency. It is this talent I would talk about now, for the clinical picture of Lester would be woefully incomplete without it. To understand this talent it is necessary to get a picture of Lester as he carries himself and as he behaves. Perhaps the most outstanding characteristic of the boy is his ease?his poise. He is always jaunty, always sure of himself. In fact, during our first few meetings, he was much more at ease than I was. He has the sort of personality which is valuable to a salesman, or to any man of business, and added to this he has the talent I have mentioned ?the talent for business.
He is a master at the delicate art of buying and selling. He deals in old coins, in all sorts of curiosities, in knives, and has a small armory of pistols and rifles. He buys such things as cigarette lighters and sells them at school. He does all of this in a thoroughly commercial way, with little of the amateur about him. In the case of the cigarette lighters, he sent to a firm in Connecticut for 100 of them, paying fifteen dollars for the lot. To sell them he worked out a plan which is identical with the famous demonstration method of present day business. He gave five of them away. The five lucky boys went about the school, lighting the things. Others asked where they had obtained them, and were referred, of course, to Lester. Lester proceeded to sell the ninety-five remaining lighters at the price of thirty cents each, cleaning a substantial profit. Agents sold some of them for him; these he allowed one cent per sale. I remarked that the commission was rather small, but Lester pointed out that they would rather make that than make nothing, and the point seemed to be well taken.
In a hundred other ways has the boy shown his ability in this direction. At the advanced age of thirteen he has decided to go into the real estate trade, and believes that there is more money to be made in that than in anything else. He may be right or wrong, but the fact remains that Lester will get ahead. He has the ability, and he has the influence to give him the right start. The way is smoothed for him, and I look for a career little short of meteoric. He bites into his problems in a way which belies the I.Q. of merely 104; bites into them the same way he bit into the annoyance of his poor spelling. Probably the best argument I used was the one that he would need spelling in business. That was speaking the language he could understand, and the ambition it gave him lasted almost a full week.
He spends money foolishly, sometimes. He spends it fairly well, at others. But he knows how to make it, from what he has told me, and that is a great merit these days.
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