I was teaching a student named Ben, a 14-year-old diagnosed ADD. He told his teacher that he forgot to take his medication. Ben's class is reputed to be a difficult class and I was asked to give a hand to the teacher. Ben was quite agitated, not wanting to sit and not on task. I took Ben aside and started to POC and POD; he settled down after 10 minutes.
We had to do some maths. Ben first reaction was, " It's boring Miss. Look at the questions they are asking me to answer. It's stupid ..." It was true. They were very simple math exercises. "Level-B," he told me. I asked him what level he wanted to be at. His answer was to try to do Level-J. I decided to grab a Level-J math book and see how he would manage. Overall Ben did really well. A few questions were new for him but he did it all from Level-B to Level-J. He struggled doing the decimals numbers exercises - he had never done any of these exercises before. Well, by the end of the day Ben was adding and subtracting big numbers with decimals ... and he was loving it.
Another amazing thing happened. I was next to Ben sitting against the desk, thinking it wasn't comfortable and I should take a chair. Two seconds later without me saying anything, here is Ben standing up and walking in the classroom to pick up a chair for me. He said, "Here Miss. It'll be more comfortable for you." I couldn't believe it! Actually, I could.
I used some techniques I learnt when Gary and Dan came to Perth. For two days focusing on ADD, ADHD and Autism, I used telepathy, faster speech and lots of POC and POD. It was amazing to see the difference. I felt a great sense of achievement that day and what a great reward it was too.
Sandie Della Rocca. Teacher
Perth. Australia |