Orthogenic Cases
Vol. XVII, Nos. 6 - 7 November - December, 1928
George: Mentally Restored to Normal but Intellectually Deficient
- Authors:
Emma Repplier Witmer; Lightner Witmer
- Degrees:
Ph.D.
One of the most appealing ages in children is surely between four and five years, when a little of the adorable quality of infancy still lingers to lend an added grace to the self-possessed air of childhood. But any such appeal was singularly lacking when we beheld George for the first time. True, he was four and a half years old, but he lacked all the endearing qualities associated with that period. Even his hair, which was abundant, and light in color, was marred by one of those barbaric hair-cuts which pitilessly exposed his rather large ears and rendered grotesque his narrow but not ill-shaped head. His eyes were light blue with long, curling eyelashes,’ but they looked strained and they flickered from spot to spot, never lingering for more than a second’s attention. His color was high but blotchy, and around his mouth were the red, chapped places?tell-tale marks of his habit of sucking and eating many extraneous objects not intended for human beings’ daily food.
He did not talk, but made his wishes known by squeals, grunts, and other strange sounds. His gait was jerky and uncertain, like that of a child between one and two who is learning to walk, and at any unevenness of the ground he fell headlong. His hands were babyish, the fingers flaccid, with no grip or power in them. He was able on command to point to his eyes, nose, mouth, ears, hair, feet and hands, but not knees, and he could obey simple directions, like ‘’stand up,” “sit down.’’
At his first meal, he wholly rejected the difficult feat of wielding a spoon, and dug into everything with his fingers, cramming the food into his mouth, spilling a great deal, and swallowing the rest without apparent mastication. He drank water from a nursing bottle, and it was his custom, as reported by his mother, to take such a bottle filled with milk to bed with him.. He had no control over his sphincters, wore diapers, and had to be changed a dozen times a day. If left alone, he would smear the faeces over himself, on the wall, and even put them in his mouth. Such was George on June 21, 1918, when, at the age of four years and seven months, he entered Dr Witmer’s School of Observation and Diagnostic Teaching.
Was there, then, somewhere hidden in this distortion of childhood, this small animal in human shape, the material out of which a normal boy could be created? On that very first day of his arrival, he revealed one human trait, and one which proved afterwards to be a strong and fundamental characteristic. The laundress was hanging up some clothes, as George came out of the house. The box with the clothes pins was on the ground at a little distance. With his uncertain, wobbling gait, George made for this, picked it up and handed it to the woman. In this one act he had revealed that combination of helpfulness and desire to have the right thing in the right place, a sense of order and neatness, which amounted later to a passion. He had so little initiative that it required some such strong feeling to force him to display it. His love of candy would usually provide this stimulus. On his second day in the school, he stole a caramel from a bag in his teacher’s room. When asked where he got it, he took her hand, drew her into the room, and pointed to the bag, which was hidden far back in the corner out of sight.
Diagnostic teaching is a peculiar method of teaching, first employed by Dr Witmer at the University of Pennsylvania, in the year 1896, when he began to examine and teach children who were brought to him because they were not making as much progress as their teachers or parents thought they should. Diagnostic teaching is a method of teaching which develops as it goes along. First, as much is discovered concerning the child’s ability as may be found out at one examination and in consequence of one attempt to teach. If the teacher is an expert psychologist, he learns more about a child’s potential abilities the more he tries to develop whatever ability the child has or, in other words, he discovers how educable a child is by observing the response he makes to a prescribed course of educational treatment.
The aim of diagnostic teaching is to use whatever ability a child has most of, in order to get him to take the next step forward in the right direction. George’s best ability was his sense of order?an orderliness amounting almost to a passion, and very nearly his only talent. His history was as follows:
He was born in November, 1913, and, until he was a year and a half old, he was apparently normal.
His mother reported that he had begun to walk and say a few words.
In the summer of 1915, he began to chew wood.
He chewed the edge of window sills, the edges of doors, and would pick up chips and trash from the hearth and eat them.
It is not surprising that from this time he was never a well child. He had diarrhoea and vomiting.
When he was two years old, he stopped walking.
He was taken to a well known children’s specialist, who diagnosed the case as nervousness and anaemia, and prescribed cod-liver oil and iron.
After taking one dose of this, he vomited for a whole day; after that he stopped talking entirely.
He was nearly four years old when he learned to walk all over again, but he said nothing intelligible except ‘’mamma.’’
What had hit him remained a mystery. a touch of infantile paralysis, of encephalitis, an arrested development due to poisoning and malnutrition.
The exact cause will probably never be known. only the tragic results were there for all to see.
George had apparently little or no play instinct. He would take handfuls of blocks out of a box and put them back again. By actual count, he did this twenty-nine times, and only once did he vary the performance by piling six blocks on top of each other. Except for the fact that he was contented so long, the performance was that of a child of less than two years.
On July 10, three weeks after he came to the school, he was given the Witmer Formboard. The square, circle, and oblong blocks he put into the proper grooves the first time. On the others, he made several wrong tries. The next day he was taught how to place all the blocks, and the following day he put them all in place, without help, in four minutes on the first trial, and two minutes on the second. On July 14, he put them all in position at the first attempt, in two minutes.
The first time he was given the peg board his teacher put in the first two pegs and told George to put in the rest. He did not stop until he had put in place every one of the fifty pegs. This was a congenial task for him. Repetition of something he could do without much effort always gave him pleasure.
These performances with the form and peg boards showed promise, but six months later, George was still monotonously put156 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CLINIC ting pegs in and taking them out. However, in August, after a memorable struggle, he put together slices of pasteboard to form animals. He began with the picture of a cat, composed of three pieces. He hated doing it, and for a long time the only evidence that he knew how the pieces went was that he never by any chance put them together right. Even after he had fitted the pieces properly many times, he would again and again put the head of the cat on upside down. This stubbornness of George’s was more than obstinacy. It was not even the “noble firmness of the mule.” It was stronger than he was. It was a pathological state, an exaggerated resistance to suggestion from without, which is called “negativism.” It was always lying in readiness those first days. The moment anyone tried to get his full attention the fight was on. He resisted with all his puny strength. If you forced him; his face became set and stubborn, the eyes blood-shot, and the tears literally streamed down. He appeared to manufacture an extraordinarily large variety of tear, and in a few minutes his face was fairly submerged. This deluge did not at all mean that the fight was won. Often it was only the prelude to a morning’s battle. Sometimes, if you let him move freely about, this resistance could be taken off its guard. If you then put a question to him or asked him to imitate a sound, you might get a quick response. This was proved once when another child in the room was being taught to say “and.” Suddenly George, who was busy with a puzzle, said “and” clearly, but when asked to repeat it, could not or would not do it. After a month, he put all the sliced animals together without trouble. He was then promoted to jig-saw puzzles, and, after the usual determined balking and tears, he made progress. Two months later, he was putting together, without help, a puzzle of fifteen pieces, though his motor control was often so poor that his trembling fingers would displace one or more pieces while inserting a new one.
The Witmer Cylinders George enjoyed, taking two minutes to the task, and using judgment, not trial and error. After this, he learned with wooden letters to put together the words cow and cat, though he was not always certain which was which, and though he could neither name nor sound most of the letters.
He had now been at the school six months. By this time, he had made some improvement in his behaviors. He ate and digested better, and he was house-broken. Physically, there was no reason why George should not talk, and his performance with puzzles and letters tends to establish the fact that he was not feebleminded. He apparently lacked one of the essential characteristics of a human being a desire to talk. For the first month of his stay, he could not be induced to even try to imitate a sound. After two months, he could say, o-oo-ah-bah-no. For two weeks, liis teacher, Miss 0., had tried in vain to get him to say ee. At the end of six months, the difficulty of learning a new sound was so great as to seem to his teacher insurmountable. It took a month of hard, daily drill to get him to say the word shoe?and then only as two syllables?sh-oo. And, added to his very real difficulty in making a sound, was his negativism. He hated and opposed this work with every fibre of his nervous, jerky little body. After nine months of training, he could say I and Do, but not I do. About this time, Miss 0. wrote in her notes:
“Today I feel that there is only one word to use as far as George’s speech is concerned and that is ‘impossible.’ “
Yet the daily grind went on, and, imperceptibly, with slippings back and creepings forward, infinitesimal progress did take place, though to his teacher this progress seemed so doubtful that she could only just make herself go on. It took months to get the word we, but, a few days later, by holding out a piece of candy, for which he had a passion, Miss 0. got the first sound or word out of him without a struggle?ee and then t-ee-t. For a long time, he confused a and o. With s, he had a six months’ struggle, always sticking his tongue out to form the sound instead of placing it against his teeth. With b and p, he also had great difficulty. After putting his lips together to make the sounds, he couldn’t open them, and finally exploded the sound with violence, getting red in the face with the effort. After he had been in the school thirteen months, his teacher wrote:
“If anyone asked me this morning about his talking, I should say he would never talk. The only words he uses voluntarily are ‘morning’ and ‘hello.’ He never points to anything and names it. He knows Don’s name well, rooms with him and hears it constantly repeated, yet he has never called him.”
Just one month after this seemingly justified prophecy, when out walking, he pointed to and named, “car, boy, lady, baby, horse, and man.” At this time he said his first complete sentence without assistance. In answer to the question, “What do you see?” he replied, “I see a ball.” He had now fifty-five words in his vocabulary. A month later, he surprised his teacher by saying very slowly au-to-mo-beel. He then asked how to spell it. It was written on a piece of paper, and he put it in his desk, and after158 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CLINIC wards learned it without help. When out walking another day, he made his first spontaneous and complete sentence, “I like that Christmas tree.’’
After a little over a year of this gruelling fight?gruelling for both pupil and teacher?the resistance began gradually to lessen, and there were even days when George could almost be said to enjoy his speech work. His manner of talking at this time was an elliptic masterpiece. He omitted articles and prepositions, used inverted word order, and always said “mine” for “my.” Usually, he would only say the key words which clarified the situation, discarding all adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, articles, and conjunctions. For instance, he ran in one day, crying, ‘’ Tooth-my-out.” When asked who did it, he replied, ‘’ Me-cry-pull-bleed,’’ thereby covering all the major points.
“Little Boy Blue,” he would recite thus: |”Boy Blue-blow horn, Sheep-meadow; cow-corn.”
George’s handicaps were many, one of the chief ones being his defective motor control. Right and left arm drill took two months of training. He hated it, and, after being in the school over two years, it was always a matter worth comment if George knew which was his right or left hand or foot, in spite of almost daily drill. He had to be trained to walk up and down steps, to hop and jump, all of which presented dreadful difficulties to him. He was always falling down and hurting himself, often cutting his head or face as he lacked sufficient motor control to save himself by putting out his hands. These accidents continued, though less frequently, even after he was seven years old. Six months after he entered the school, he tried without success to button a Montessori buttoning frame. Five days later, he buttoned the frame in ten minutes. However?his poor, fumbling fingers were bad servants to him. Teaching him to dress himself was a matter of months. It took one hour and ten minutes to teach him to lace one shoe correctly. He used scissors very awkwardly. After many months of trial, he could only cut roughly around an outline, and even up to the time he left the school, he was never able to follow an exact line. In playing croquet, he could never knock the balls in any required direction. In January, 1922, a year before he left the school, it seemed quite miraculous to see George, in coasting down the hills, steer his sled without mishap.
Initiative expresses itself in an ability to respond?that is, to take cognizance of one’s social and material environment, and, with the knowledge thus gained, to direct and control a performance. George, however, had very little ability to respond. He had to be trained to form habits of responsiveness. He lacked motivation, in other words, strong desires, aversions or emotions. He also lacked another expression of initiative?originality, intelligence, invention, the doing of something new. George hated a new or different task. What he enjoyed was doing things?things which had become easy with practice?over and over. And yet, while he possessed this one requisite to efficiency, he was far too handicapped by poor motor control and memory to be efficient. Teaching consisted in forming certain habits of response, then using those habits to build up his initiative and, if possible, his motivation. That he had some initiative was shown those first days by the two incidents of the clothes pins and stealing the piece of candy, but it required a very powerful motive to make him display it. Besides his love of candy and his passion for putting things in their right place, he had a great desire for new clothes. Several weeks after his coming to the school, he was taking his daily afternoon rest in bed. He had been wearing everyday brown shoes and stockings. This particular day, when the nurse came to get him up, he had a pair of white socks in his hand, which he was trying ineffectually to put on. In order to get these,/ he had to stand precariously on the very edge of his bed, reach up to a drawer in the chiffonier, open it, find the socks and take them out. It sounds a simple enough proceeding, but to anyone who knew George at that time it was so unusual as to be almost unbelievable. Apart from the initiative required, the fact that he noticed the difference m color was surprising. He was especially difficult on color cubes. When he arrived, he did not know the colors by name, and could not be induced to match them. Six months later, he could not copy a triangular design made with two blocks. After seven months, he could turn up the blue side of a block to match his teacher’s model, but apparently could not produce a red block at command. After a year, he was able to match colors, and could shift the blocks around in different arrangements, following his teacher’s example, but he was not able to make the designs by himself. At this time, though he could match red and green perfectly, and even say the two words in a fashion, he refused as a rule to give red or green in command. This work bored him and seemed to deepen his resistance.
George’s attention, when he came and for a long time afterwards, was as distractible and fleeting as a monkey’s. It was pos160 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CLINIC sible to hold it for a few seconds or a minute; then it was gone. He did not look and did not listen. He had to be taught to do both. The next step was to teach him to remember.
He was thought at first to have a memory span of one. In January, 1920, when he was being taught to spell, he had to deliberate a long time on each letter. Even if the word was spelled over beforehand, it did not increase his speed very much. This would seem to indicate that he had no real after-image. Apparently, the after-image was only two, but he was beginning to develop an operative span of three and sometimes four. He could give two letters in rapid succession, but he could not give three. If forced to give three rapidly, even in words he knew how to spell, he would drop one of the letters. If a word was written on the blackboard as he named the letters, he could not spell it. If merely auditory stimulus was used, he forgot what he was spelling and lost all continuity, even though he pronounced the word first. The same was true of arithmetic. When he would give persistently the wrong answer in oral drill, his teacher would say, “Go to the blackboard and write it down.” Sometimes, before he got there, sometimes when he picked up the chalk, he would call out the right answer, as if even the idea of writing clarified his visual images. If given 2 and 2 and 4 to add, he could not carry in his mind the sum of the first two, but if allowed to write the additional 4 on the board, he could then complete the sum in his mind, and say 8. In January, 1921, he was adding and subtracting numbers 1 to 10. If written down, these were generally correct, another proof that his visual memory was the least defective. In two weeks, with a little drill every day, he had learned to play Dominoes, as far as recognizing and matching the pieces were concerned. The first time he played parcheesi, he was able to transfer his visual memories of the spots on the dominoes to the dice, and did very well, though in counting the spaces, his fingers would go faster than his tongue. His memory was constantly improving. On March 18, 1921, he was given a spelling review of 92 words of two to seven letters, and missed only six.
In October, 1921, he memorized a poem of eight lines in ten minutes. The following month, he learned to name the first four days of the week in succession. A four letter word was learned generally in four repetitions. After a month’s drilling on days of the week, he surprised his teacher by applying his newly acquired knowledge, and announced, “Friday, Miss A.” on her arrival that morning. The strain of teaching George in those first two years was not only his wandering attention, lack of persistence, his fits of obstinacy, his poor motor control, and defective speech?his hands and body were hardly ever still. He would squirm and wriggle, pull at his clothing, fuss with his stockings, bite his nails, put his fingers in his mouth, chew his tie or handkerchief, but never would he keep still! Around his mouth were always the telltale marks?a chapped area?the result of sucking or chewing something; in the beginning, things he would pick up; later on, it was his fingers, his tie, the ends of his sleeves, his sweater. Towards the end of his stay, he made noticeable efforts to break himself of this habit, especially when he was told that he would stay in the baby class until he did stop.
He learned to read at the same time that he was learning to talk, the two processes going on together, but speech was so difficult for him that he knew words and their letters some time before he could articulate the sounds. It could therefore be said of him with truth that he read before he talked. His reading lessons began by making him pick out certain letters at command. These letters were the large wooden kind, which, by their size and shape, offered the least difficulty. Nevertheless, he opposed this phase of his instruction with all the will he possessed. Given this pathological resistance and a very poor and fleeting attention, it was not surprising that his teacher was often in despair, and the improvement almost imperceptible.
It took him half a year to put together his first word, cow, with these wooden letters. It took him two weeks to make the big advance from one word to two?cow, cat. Even after he had given every proof of knowing the name t, and after he had used this letter in the formation of words, it took ten days to make him pick out the letter t from a pile of letters on the table.
The transition from wooden to small cardboard letters was made without difficulty, and again later to printed ones. After nine months, he could spell with cardboard letters the words cat, rat, hat, on, cow, boy, pig, man, see, and eye, but only three of these could he pronounce, and then very imperfectly. At this time he could* point at command to any letter of the alphabet. One year and eight months after entering the school, he was reading daily in Monroe’s Primer, and, what is more remarkable, he showed evidence of liking it. He read very slowly and painstakingly in a voice devoid of inflection or expression. It took a little over a Month’s drilling for him to read “The Little Red Hen,” but his next story, “The Gingerbread Boy,” he learned to read perfectly in fifteen days, showing how rapidly his reading ability improved. The absence of resistance, and his growing interest in reading helped to overcome his handicaps of poor attention and deficient imageability. Seven months later, he took just a week to learn to read “Billy Goat Gruff,” and spelled easily the most common words in it. He continued to read with extreme slowness and often skipped words or whole lines, due to his poor attention, so that it was a long time before he could read without his teacher’s pointing pencil. Once he mastered a story thoroughly, he could always read it well in a review, showing he possessed a retentive memory.
George was always subject to sudden fatigue. His eyes would fill with tears, and he would stammer and give the same answer to every question. This was a signal to his teacher to quit work for a play or rest period.
Subject to attacks of mental confusion, these would often occur if any new demands were made of him. Drilled a long time on “may I have,” and feeling sure he had got it, his teacher then gave him “may I sit.” This change temporarily upset his mental balance so that he could say neither one nor the other. Given a drill in the days of the week, followed by a drill in telling time, he twice answered questions as to time by days of the week. He was given this problem, “You have six pennies in your pocket. You lost two. How many have you left?” Even when this was acted out with real pennies, he still had great difficulty. The insertion of the several ideas of a pocket, of money, of losing, put him all off the simple sum of six minus two, which he knew well. Four months later, he solved orally sixteen simple problems like this one, although he was greatly fatigued at the end. On account of his weak motor control, the trembling, inefficient fingers had great trouble in handling chalk, and later a pencil. At first, it was impossible to get him to make a vertical or horizontal line. It took weeks to teach him to print the letter k. He was in the school a year before he could print with incredible slowness and difficulty a few short words. Often, unless held and directed by his teacher, his pencil would slip about and wander at random over the paper. Those early efforts looked as if the writer had held the pencil between his toes instead of his fingers. More than two years after his education began, any attempt to make him write on a line was an absolute failure. Yet, two months later, he was given his first lined copy-book, and, stimulated by this novelty, he made quite a creditable effort at following the lines. It was natural that he should hate writing considering the enormous effort it involved, and in this work he fatigued more rapidly than any other. One day he said, “I sick tired writing, Miss A., no more.” His dislike of the task had forced this unusual initiative of speech. In his third year at the school, he transcribed two or three sentences from his reading book. A month earlier, unless prompted, he could not copy words in their sequence. The letters were very large and straggling, but recognizable. At this time, July, 1921, he began to compose a diary every morning in class. He did this at first with anagrams, so that he would only have to struggle with one difficulty at a time?that of expressing a thought. When he mastered this, he was given a pencil and a book in which to write the thought. Seven months later, he wrote his first letter. It consisted of four words and was a triumph of effort and training over disability. It read?”Mother, I love you.” It is interesting to compare this feeble production, the top-notch of his ability at the time, with his Christmas letter the year he left the school. He wrote it himself without any help or suggestion from his teacher. “Dear Everyone?Thank you for the books, Tinker-Toy, Erector, Screw Driver, and the candy. Santa Claus brought me a little gray racer car, some boats. In my stocking he put a horn and a horse. I got some candy and I got an apple and candy cane. Love from me. George.” To hear George talk or read at this time was to get the impression of a mechanical human boy in operation, an infantile ‘robot.” He had not yet infused these processes with personality. Nevertheless, he was developing a marked personality.
His love of order and his desire to be helpful were fundamental. Before he knew how to put on his own clothes, he tried to help a little, crippled girl put on her sweater. He hung up his teacher’s hat and coat without ever being asked. On walks through the woods, George could always be depended on to hold back the branches of trees so that the others could go through. He was excellent at helping to clean up a desk, tidy a room and arrange details. He would spend many happy hours putting weeds, stones, aud leaves into his little wagon and dumping them in the right place, returning with a smile for more. One day, before he had learned to talk, he came agitatedly into Miss P’s room, took her by the hand and drew her swiftly down the hall to the bathroom. Miss hurrying anxiously along, thought that one of the pipes had burst or that some untoward situation had aroused his dormant initiative. Arrived at the bathroom, she could see nothing amiss, but George pointed excitedly to the mirror on the wall which hung crooked, and made signs for her to straighten it. Never did George have to be reminded to fold his napkin at table nor to put away his belongings. Writing about coasting in his diary, he ends up, “I put away my sled.” What is to most of us the “fly in the amber” and “the rift within the lute” was to George the culminating point of satisfaction. His diary, written in October, 1921, reads, “Friday night I played ten pins with Miss P. and Don and Calvin. The little baby children went to bed first and I put away the chairs.” The following month, he wrote to his mother?”Dear Mothers, Thank you for the new coat. It fits me. I put it away in the closet. Love from me. George.” Dates and their exactness gave him great pleasure. He never made a mistake in dating his diary, and, perhaps because it was a daily task, he grew to love it, and was most upset if it was ever omitted. He learned by himself to use an index and liked wherever possible to make use of one.
Imageability is the great expression of initiative, so it was not surprising that George was most deficient in this quality. Lacking imageability, he lacked imagination, good after-images and a power of imitation. At first, he seemed to have no imagination at all, but in time developed a small amount. In December, 1921, when asked for an oral reproduction of the story of Cinderella, he had a lapse of memory and was obliged to trust to his invention for the rest. ‘’ Once a woman had two daughters. Her daughters were proud and selfish like herself, and her step-daughter was sweet and lovely. She made her do all the work and sleep in the poor, hard bed. The bed was in a dark garret. Now, the Prince gave a ball, invited all the great people to come. The sisters invited to the ball. The people went to the ball. The sisters planned, ‘ I wear my red velvet gown.’ ‘I wear my dress with flowers of gold for the party.’ (Here his memory failed and he had to improvise.) ‘When the Prince is gone, not let us kill the girl, and the girl like him and he like the girl,’ and the girl said, ‘I will go too and we not chop wood,’ and she said?’Don’t kill no girl,’ and the girl said, ‘Please don’t cry, little girl.’ Her godmother is not dead. She is in the purple house and the house was near the woods and the house was a nice baby house and the house was in the dark corner and the corner was the chimney corner and the Prince went into the little red house. No one was in the house. A dark big bed was in the house ” It reminds one a little of the most iconoclastic type of modern literature?say an extract from Gertrude Stein. In spite of its repetition and incoherence, it does show a greatly increased vocabulary and some imagination.
In the spring of 1922,’he was given four objects to weave into a story?fox, duck, blue sky, pond, and he produced the following: “I saw a little red fox. I saw a little red duck. I saw a blue sky. I saw a pond and a white bridge. The fox went for a walk. A duck went for a walk?not (here George laughed) the blue sky went for a walk. It can’t walk. They went to Valley Forge Road. When the fox saw the duck in the pond, he wanted to eat him. The fox jumped right into the pond; he wanted to eat him. The fox jumped right into the pond and was drowned and a big frog will eat him up. The duck swam in the water for an hour. Then he went home.” Though some imagination was required to produce this, the white bridge and the Valley Forge Road were well-known sights in his daily walks. George was the opposite of the dreamy, imaginative type of child. He had a good bump of locality and knew the roads around the school well. What ability he had was practical, and his chief pleasure was to apply any bit of knowledge he obtained. The plus sign in his little arithmetic sums was always called ‘’ and.’’ One day, before he said more than a few words, he was out walking, andy as they passed the Catholic Church, George pointed up at the gold cross which, at that particular angle, looked very much like the plus sign, and asked “and?”
Without ever appearing alert, George developed a very keen observation. We find traces of this in his diary: “Friday afternoon I went with Miss A. to get my arctics. My arctics are 3Y. I can put my arctics on all myself.’’ One day, coming in for dinner, he said,
“I smell fish. I hate fish. I love ham. Ham on Wednesday.”
Very little escaped him that went on in the school. He not only knew where his own things were, but the whereabouts of all the other children’s belongings. He could generally tell you which of the maids had her day out, what teacher was on duty, where any given person was and what they were doing. He came to be known as the School Detective. Once his new overcoat was borrowed with great secrecy for Don, whose own coat was too shabby to wear in town. All went well till just as Don was opening the front door, a forlorn voice with a rising inflection drifted down the stairs, “You bring back my new coat, Don?”
Devoid of affection at first, he had been in the school about a year before he evinced a sign of it. Then, one day, he was discovered dissolved in tears, watching out of the window the departure for the day of his extremely undemonstrative nurse. He did not bestow his affection lightly, but, once given, it was never withdrawn. Miss A. was the only other person in the school to arouse this strong feeling. He has cherished every line she has written him, and, though he has not seen her now for nearly two years,j he still writes to her and talks of her. George could even wax sentimental on occasion. Once, when a very pretty little girl visited the school, he followed her around everywhere, never taking his adoring gaze away, nor was the young lady averse to his attentions, for George had developed into a noticeably handsome boy with blond, curly hair, a pink and white skin, regular features, and large, innocent eyes. Another time, he spied a red poppy that had withered and begged his teacher to come and look?”The poor, dead poppy, the red poppy?who killed the poppy, Miss A. ? ” He appeared as grief-stricken as once when he saw a dead robin. Where his affection was bestowed, he was extremely generous and unselfish. This was shown in his attitude toward his roommate, Don, for whom he fagged unceasingly, and to whom he gave his most cherished possessions.
Though his negativism was practically conquered, he was still subject to fits of obstinacy. After he acquired a small vocabulary, he would put this mood into words, and, one day, when told to read, said, “Not I like to read. No, not I read. I not like that story. Not I read.” Held to the task, he wept, but finally gave in. For five minutes on another day he resisted doing a simple problem in arithmetic. Finally, he remarked: “I show Marie my new suit after dinner,” and thereupon answered the problem correctly. Thus a change of ideas would break the spell.
George’s progress in school work in the last two years was noticeably “more rapid. He began to make use of words that occurred in his reading lesson, and bit by bit a faint originality entered into his speech. He had a bad cold and was overheard praying?’’God, take that cold away from me”; thus making up an original sentence which he had not read or been taught was a marked improvement. Pointing to the belfry on a church, he exclaimed, “The chimney to ring.” When the wheel-barrow got stuck in the snow, Jack cried, “Will you un-stuck it?” And one morning he announced, “I sleep so fast, so fast as a beaver under the covers.’’ When the waitress told him that it was her birthday, after a moment’s thought he said, “Merry Birthday, Catherine.” His first oral reproduction of ‘’ The Goose who laid the Golden Eggs” was as follows: “I read about the man and the goose. The goose laid a egg and the man killed her. And in his haste to get gold he lost all he had. He wished he had not been greedy again.’’ Before he left us he could give clear oral reproduction of quite a few familiar stories.
His power of concentrating increased and he developed an ability to reason. Asked how many days to Christmas, he could not answer. Miss A. wrote on a piece of paper?”Today is December 20th. Christmas is December 25th,” and gave the paper to George. He replied at once?”Five days.” He displayed this ability in solving his little arithmetic problems. Looking out the window one morning at the snow, he said, “They can’t use the gig because it snowed. They want the sleigh.”
In his reading lesson one day, he came across the new word? “snow flakes” which he promptly called “corn flakes,” an article of food which he loved. Each time he read it he would call it corn flakes to the end of the lesson, in spite of being corrected every time. Often he would avoid saying a word he found difficult to pronounce, for instance, the word “spider” was very hard for him, so each time he came to it in his reading he called it’’ bumble bee.’’ One day, he was reading the story of a little Indian boy, called Hiawatha. He was very much interested and asked his teacher how to spell many of the words in this story, but when they came to “Hiawatha,” he said, “Let’s leave it, Miss A.” He had completely forgotten the long, agonizing struggle of learning to read and each day augmented his pleasure in the exercise of this hardly won accomplishment. In the Book Department at Wanamaker’s, he went into ecstacy over all the Primers and Readers, and wanted to buy them all. In class the next day, stimulated by his interest, he read the first twenty-seven pages very well,’ although quite a few words were strange to him. He began this reader on January 26, and finished it on March 23. “When he left us, he had read about fifty pages in Winston’s Third Reader. This reading proved difficult on account of the many new words, and at first he did only three or four pages a day. The last story he read was a long one about the Biblical David. Seeing it was long and difficult, his teacher suggested that they should skip it, and go on to the next, an easier and shorter one, but George wouldn’t hear of it. His sense of order was outraged, and so he was allowed to read it. His oral account of the story, when questioned, shows an increasing ability to understand, as well as to incorporate new words into his speaking vocabulary, like “troubled,” “sorrow,” “ill,” words perhaps heard, but never before spoken by him. Question?’’Who was David?’’ Answer?’’Jesse’s son.’’ Question?”What did David do?” Answer?”King Saul, King of Israel, became ill. David played his harp. He said to David he was well again.”
Question:”What did David do then?” | Answer?”Went home.”
The servants said he sang away the King’s sorrows. The King said I can never go to sleep.’’
Question?”What did David do when he went home?” Answer?”His father said?I am troubled about your brother. Take some food and visit your brother, and he hurried away.” This shows a great advance over his first effort with the ‘’ Goose that laid the Golden Eggs.”
The first of June, 1922, when he left the school, George was eight years and seven months old. He knew all the plus and minus combinations up to thirteen, and could add and subtract any numbers providing there was no carrying. He had developed an excellent mechanical memory. If he forgot a combination, he could always solve it on paper by using strokes for counters, but he could not reason out the correct answer mentally, no matter how simple the question. He had acquired his two and three tables and knew them unless tired.
His numerals and his writing were steadily improving, and his last diary, if shown as the work of an eight year old boy, would have been accepted as about average,?’’ Tuesday afternoon I picked up stones and weeds and the sticks. I said to myself I should put on my summer hat. Miss 0. packed my box. I am going home tomorrow.’’
To sum up George’s defects is to realize what a tremendous number of handicaps had been met and either reduced or overcome. He had lacked a desire to talk, he had a delicate body, defective motor control and was deficient in both attention and persistence. He was negativistic, and had a memory span of one or two at the most; he had poor initiative and imageability, thus lacking imagination, good after-images and the power of imitation. In other words he would have been called feebleminded by most doctors and all laymen.
It was unfortunate that at this point in his training George had to leave us and go home. He was out of the darkest, densest woods, but he had still some rough, difficult ground to traverse, and he needed expert physical and mental care. His family engaged a special teacher, who came to his home and taught him. She reported after nearly a year’s work, that at times she felt he had not made one single bit of progress, though at other times she felt greatly encouraged. It was to be expected that he would show a great falling off, due to the general laxity of family life as opposed to the steady, watchful care and discipline, the regular hours and habits of school life. This marked deterioration took place. His hands shook so that his writing became almost illegible, and he displayed many signs of acute nervousness. Gradually, he became better adjusted to his environment and evinced greater control. His diaries of 1923, sent to us by his teacher, show improvement in variety of subject matter and wording.
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