Jack: Feebleminded or Normal
The Psychological Clinic Copyright, 1929, :Author: Lightner Witmer, Editor Vol. xvii, Nos. 8-9 January-February, 1929 ORTHOGENIC CASES XVII?
By Lightner Witmer, Ph.D., and Mary E. Ambler Jack was five years and eight months old when he came to Dr Witmer’s school as a day pupil. He was a stocky little boy whose short haircut and narrowly cut trousers tried to conceal the two evident infantilism. Jack’s head and face were not symmetrically oval, but his features were well-proportioned. His eyes were handsome brown ones guarded by the longest and blackest of curly lashes. (These lashes, Jack informed us, he bought in New York.) His cheeks were radiant with bright color and his white skin was of very fine texture. His dark hair was coarse and straight.
During the year that Jack attended Dr Vfitmer’s school, he practically never entered upon any spontaneous activity. His muscles seemed tight and bound. He walked stiffly and possessed no charm of childish grace. However, aside from his good looks, Jack’s unique mixture of childish and old-fashioned ideas, which he expressed with such a lack of self-consciousness and with an engaging infantile stammer, lent him sufficient charm to win from almost every one some flattering exclamation.
Jack, it soon appeared, was a dreamer. The immediate world about him was a matter of general indifference to him. He regarded it only when it thrust itself upon him. Indoors, he could lose himself for hours at a time in a picture book. Out of doors, like as not, he would wander off and literally lose himself. He might not go further than “just down the road,” or the nearest arc light, or his cousins’ sand box. Once, however, stirred either by some gregarious or an early religious urge Jack ended his wanderings in a little Sunday School, two miles from his home. It is not hard to imagine how for three hours the country side was excitedly scoured. Jack was found praying for the safety of his soul with twenty little Italians.
And yet, there was one interest which Jack had always displayed when he was allowed to indulge it. That interest was any electric light! To turn on an electric light and gaze at it filled him with unmistakable ecstasy. At times his mother reported he would become hysterical and unmanagable if he were not allowed to play with the electric switch. She and Jack’s father had tried all kinds of discipline in an endeavor to check this mania.
Six months before Jack came to school he was cared for part of the time by an English governess. She reported that Jack at first had seemed to her/’just something living.” He almost never talked, and when he did, it was a whisper. He never ran about or played but wanted to sit, in a chair with a book and be let alone. He didn’t play with his younger sisters or with any children. When he was forced to do something which he did not want to do he often displayed hysterical outbursts for which he was spanked, shut up in closets and in other ways ‘’ conquered.” Later, when he would throw all the nursery toys down the colonial staircase or turn on the shower bath for an hour or two and flood the bath room his activity was looked upon as encouraging signs of latent boyish mischief.
His mother said Jack had been a very lethargic baby. He was slow in learning to walk and talk but he did not seem ‘’queer” to her until after his younger sister had begun to walk and talk. Then the contrast between his and his sister’s physical and mental development made her conclude that Jack was “backward.” She took him to a psychiatrist who diagnosed him as a low-grade imbecile. Discouraged, but still hopeful, she brought Jack to Dr. Witmer for examination and educational treatment. He proved to be conformable, trainable and educable. In Dr Witmer’s opinion, his mental and emotional condition was not the result of encephalitis lethargica. The conduct disorders were similar to those following encephalitis lethargica, but the symptom-complex was a picture of “hysteria.” Rapid improvement under educational treatment is not to be expected in a case of post-encephalitis.
For eight and one-half months Jack came to school five mornings a week to be started on his educational career. One day each week he lunched at school and stayed to play in the afternoon with the other children.
In a short preliminary examination on the first morning of school Jack did the Witmer Formboard in sixty, thirty and forty seconds. He failed to solve the Witmer Cylinder Test in fifteen minutes, but he could replace all the blocks in eight minutes after he had been taught. He pegged with a plan. His motor coordination was poor and his rate of discharge slow. His auditory memory span for digits was five with not six on five repetitions. (The examiner could not get sufficient attention for further trials.) He knew and could identify the primary and secondary colors and all large and small print letters. His governess had taught him the colors and letters during the previous summer. Jack was very slow in comprehending language, and talked in a monotone when he talked at all.
Reading
With the use of anagrams Jack quickly learned to read. After six days of twenty minutes’ teaching each day (two ten minute periods), he could build and read the following sentences:
I see a man. A cow can moo. I see a cow. A cow Tan. A man can see a cow. A man ran. We then gave him the “Monroe Primer” to read. He read the first three pages, familiar words, without error. At the end of the month he had read fifteen pages of this primer besides being able to build any of the words with anagrams at dictation. At the end of the second month of teaching, Jack had finished the “Monroe Primer” and had read twenty-two pages of the “Sunbonnet Babies Primer.” He read with understanding and was able to answer simple questions about the context. During the third month Jack read from the “Winston,” “Sunbonnet Babies,” and “Brownie” Primers each day. He read through these primers from start to finish and wanted to read every other book he saw. For independent occupational work Jack liked and used the “Milton Bradley Silent Reading Cards.” He always read with great accuracy. A “the” was always a “the” and never an “a.” At the end of the eight and one-half months of school work Jack had finished the “Winston” first and second readers; he could read practically all of “A Child’s Garden of Verse” which he loved; he had read “Little Black Sambo,” “Grizzly Bear and Bunny Boy” and two little books of the “Peter Rabbit” Series, not to mention his earnest attempts to read a cook book, Kipling’s Jungle Book, and a favorite “National Geographic Magazine.” In his diary on February 29, 1924, Jack wrote: “Thursday I read a cook book. I read about vegetables and corn flakes. I read Molly.” (Molly was the cook).
The only difficulty which we met in teaching Jack to read was to get him to use and inflect his voice. He wanted to read in a low monotone. After some drill with Dr Twitmyer’s breathing and speech exercises, Jack’s reading and speaking voice improved, and by the end of the eight and one-half months he read with very good expression in a normal speaking voice. Without doubt Jack had second grade perficiency and third grade competency in oral and silent reading.
Spelling
Just as Jack became an omnivorous reader, so too, he became an omnivorous speller. At the end of the first month of school work he could spell orally on command eighteen words. We did not formally teach Jack to spell. After he had been building sentences with anagrams for a week his teacher said to him, ‘’What anagram do you pick out first to make ‘man’ “? “What one do you pick out next?” etc. He could tell the names of the correct letters without using the anagrams. Thus his visual, auditory and kinaesthetic images were called into constant activity. He soon learned to react in this way to the command “Spell ‘man.’ ” He never made a mistake in spelling if the word was a familiar one, that is, if he had ever learned to spell it. At the end of the second month he had added thirty-six new words to his list. Just at this time, too, he wanted to spell every new word he encountered in his reading or used in his conversation. His desire to spell grew so intense that we stopped all work in spelling for the next month and refused to spell words for him. At home the household grew tired of this persistent spelling bee of Jack’s and likewise ignored his questions beginning “How could you spell??”
He didn’t stop learning to spell new words for himself, however. Just to see that he wasn’t completely discouraged we selected twenty-three words at random from his reading lessons and dictated them to Jack. He wrote them on paper, every one right, with the exception of “began” which he wrote “begin.” The words were, “hen, grass, green, are, cap, coat, red, pretty, girls, blue, yellow, your, plaAj, work, poor, now, who, goose, make, help, began, cry, this.”
During the fourth month we used the First Grade Spelling words of the Horn-Asbaugh Speller for spelling drill. Jack was able to spell 90 per cent of these words either from former teaching or from some previous experience with them. In the fifth month we continued to use the same spelling book. He spelled orally three hundred second grade words (some four hundred are allotted to the grade) and of the three hundred words, only sixty-seven of them had to be taught. Jack seemed to develop his own system of phonics and applied it very well in both his spelling and reading. He required almost no instructive drills.
At the end of his school year Jack had reviewed the first three hundred words of the Buckingham Extension of the Ayres Spelling Scale. In addition he had learned to spell a great variety of words from his diary work. Once Jack learned to spell a word we could safely depend upon him always to write or spell it correctly. Certainly Jack had second grade perficiency and third grade competency in oral and written spelling.
Writing
Writing Jack found much more difficult to master than reading or spelling. He was handicapped by poor motor coordination. (His motor control was better than his motor coordination. He learned to form letters quickly but they were rather poorly made.) For a month he worked with chalk and wax crayons. He could make script “a, b, c, d, g, I, m, n, o, w” and the words, “am, cat, cow, dad, man, moo, moon” with disconnected letters. By the end of the second month he could make all of the small scrip letters with the exception of f, g, z, which he had not been taught. He now insisted upon learning to write with a lead pencil. In the third month he learned to connect his letters and write a cursive script and by the end of the eight and one-half months he had learned to make almost all of the script capital letters. Again Jack displayed great accuracy of imagery. He never made an “i” for an “e” or omitted to cross a “t.”
Since Jack found writing more difficult he was less interested in it. After he could write fairly easily we had him write a letter each day on formal stationery to some member of his family or household. He enjoyed this but chiefly because of the praise or present he won when he presented the letter. Then later Jack wrote a diary each day in which he related the happenings of the previous day.
It would have been unintelligent to have demanded copper plate work from a six year old, let alone a six year old with faulty coordination. However we held Jack to a high standard of legibility and saw that his writing served him successfully in expressing his thoughts. When he stopped for a vacation in June he had second grade proficiency in writing, the competency of the lowest 20 per cent of the grade.
Composition
Jack’s written composition work took the form of a personal letter and later of a diary. During the fourth month of school work he wrote a letter each day. After he had decided to whom he intended writing on the day (his mother, father, little sister, nurse, cook, and butler were favored with these daily missives in accordance with their position in his variable graces), he would recite orally to his teacher what he wished to tell the fortunate recipient. One sentence composed the body of the letter. This sentence usually was about something Jack had done, for example on February 5 he wrote:
Dear Daddy I played with the radio. Love from J acky.
These letters Jack folded and carried home in his blouse pocket. One morning we noticed his pocket still bulging with the letter he had written the previous day to his mother. When we asked him why he had not given the letter to her he looked very solemn and said with clear conviction, “Mammy’s bad. Mammy teases Jacky.” “Tease” was Jack’s synonym for “scold.” Thus Jack’s letters were a great satisfaction to him.
On February 11 Jack wrote his first diary and from then on he wrote a diary every day. These diaries were never dull. Jack had always more happenings to record than he had concentration and physical endurance with which to record them. Their content revealed much about the world he lived in and showed a steady growth in the complexity of Jack’s mental development. On February 27 Jack wrote: “Today is Wednesday, Tuesday I played with a tea set for the doll. I gave dinner to the doll and I said doll eat your dinner.” On May 19 Jack wrote:
‘’ Today is Monday. Sunday night I got a cold because I sat in the wet sand box. I heard Maisie going bobobo in the middle of the night it keeps me awake. Then morning came.” Jack’s mother had been visiting in the South and returned unexpectedly in the early morning so on June 16 Jack wrote this diary:
‘’ Today is Monday. Mammy came home this morning and I went in and I woke Daddy up and I runned Mammy’s bath for her. I would like to go to Ardmore to get a watering can and water Mammy’s garden. I was very busy yesterday.”
All Jack’s diary work showed a gradual trend from descriptive to purposeful, observational and reflective thinking. Very often Jack forgot all about punctuation, especially when he was working independently and his diaries then reverted to the long compound sentence form.
His oral composition work consisted chiefly in answering questions in reference to the content of his reading and in short reproduction of stories he had read. These reproductions were more descriptive and less generalized in nature. Jack liked to memorize nursery rhymes, little poems from his reading books, and selections from “Child’s Garden of Verse.” For some reason known only to Jack he chose as his favorite “A Thought.” (“It is very nice to think the world is full of meat and drink, with little children saying grace in every Christian kind of place.”)
In oral and written composition, Jack had second grade proficiency, the competency of the median modal group.
General Development
A general improvement in Jack’s development accompanied his acquisition of the first rudiments of an education. Jack began to grow up!
Delightful as his stammer was, it had to go. It was a simple infantile stammer and easily eradicated. One day while playing near a rose bush his sweater sleeve caught on a thorn and Jack observed to himself, “You must say ‘stickers’ at school. You could say ‘tickers’ at home.” At the end of three months of school training, however, Jack could be depended upon to say “stickers” at home, too! He always used the second or third person in referring to himself. He would say “You could play with the little begs (pegs) if you made a nice ‘m,’ ” or “Jacky could stay to luncheon if he is a good boy.” Very soon he knew himself as “I.” He had not been at school long before his mother reported a marked improvement in the way he talked. She said not only did he talk twice as much as formerly but he would occasionally address you and look at you as well. It was very true. Jack would never initiate a conversation nor look at you when he talked to you when he first came to school. He did not pay attention to conversation unless he happened to be addressed. He lacked vivacity and alertia. His attitude of dreamy preoccupation which produced the effect of extreme boredom made one suspect that Jack listened without hearing or that he saw without seeing. But more often than not Jack was attending. One day after Jack had finished eating the meat course at dinner and had wandered off in a dreamy state, apparently completely off guard, he was asked if he would like anything. Without change of expression or hesitation Jack replied, “I’d like a piece of apple pie.”
Until Jack came to school he did not play with other children; he preferred to play by himself. However, he learned to like and to play kindergarten games with the other children and grew so well oriented that he became quite a tease. He would run off with the little boys’ hats or would twist the little girls’ noses or run and hide when some one called him.
One of the most interesting phases to watch in Jack’s development was his control of the obsession or mania for electric lights. On the first morning at school this mania ran rampant. He wanted to see and turn on every electric light in the house. After a tour of inspection of all the lights he quieted down and tried hard to make “o’s” on the blackboard when he was promised that he might turn on one light. For two days, as a reward for effort, he was allowed to turn on one light. On the third day and thereafter any reference to lights was ignored. In the first two weeks he was called away from the electric switches perhaps three or four times with a reprimand and given something to play with. After this he never touched an electric switch or asked to turn on an electric light at school. But lights remained one of his chief interests. His diaries revealed many references to them, “The doctor had a little ear-light,” he read, “about a man fishing with a light,” and again, “I drawed Maisie an umbrella and myself a flash-light.” When he was asked what he wanted Santa Claus to bring him he said, “An engine,” and in a whisper, “with a little light.” When he was given plasticene to play with he molded “a little globe.” For a time this light mania seemed entirely displaced by a mania for a magazine in which were pictures of Holland scenes. After this book was actually tucked in bed for a “long rest” it was apparently forgotten.
As Jack learned to read and spell and write with greater ease and to play with other children his interest in lights and ‘’ Holland men” became more and more submerged until during the last month he was at school he made no reference to either. Thus control was effected by directed motivation. To date, it is only fair to add, Jack has a kind of passion for a single light, his bed light. A balancing physical growth accompanied Jack’s mental exhilaration. He grew taller, less stocky, and less stiff. He would run without being forcefully urged to. The tendency to ‘’ hysteria’’ became less evident. (A toy gun of any description would cause Jack to run for the open screaming “Don’t wanted to be shooted.” This Christmas he asked Santa to bring him a gun.) Hysterical outbursts at home ceased. Much of Jack’s physical improvement was due to the persistent exertions of a nurse. Walking and playing in the open air took the place of motoring. Thus Jack grew up to his short boyish hair cut and emphatically cut trousers. In September, 1924, Jack was enrolled in a public school. After an examination by the supervising principal he was placed in the “high” first grade for two weeks’ tutoring in arithmetic and writing and adjustment to group teaching. He was then placed in the second grade and was reported to be doing very good work though his mother said he was suffering from ennui. She also reported that he was the “pet” of the class and all the little girls fought as to which one should take him out to play at the recess period.
However, his public school career for the first term was of short duration. He promptly contracted both whooping cough and mumps and gave both to his two younger sisters. Quarantine restrictions necessarily stopped the experiment with group teaching.
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