I did several of these activities on the misunderstood minds
website and all of them got me pretty angry and frustrated. I completed the attention and reading
activities and I must say it helped me to partially realize the hell that some
of these kids go through. If I faced
those troubles every day I wouldn’t want to try at school either like I see
some many kids do in my PDS classroom.
The attention activity where it asked me to read the article and answer the
questions while the article faded in and out while switching to different
pictures then went blank kind of hit home for me because I do that a lot but I figure
it happens with most people. Either way
it still made me pretty frustrated as well as did the listening activity. I tried this activity five times and still
couldn’t get my picture to look correct.
The reading activity with the phonemes seemed like a puzzle to me which I
figure is how it feels to a student with a reading problem would feel.
Doing these activities after watching
the video made me get more of a feel for what the kids in the video as well as
other kids go through that have problems in these areas because it can be
pretty easy to just watch the video and think, “whenever I become a teacher I’m
not going to have kids like this in my classroom.” I’ll admit that’s kind of
what I thought when watching the video for the first time. I would think that all teachers and those
becoming teachers have some sort of fantasy about this perfect classroom where
they taught how they wanted to teach and all the students earned perfect grades
on the first go around and everything was cheerful and happy, but in reality that’s
not the case. It seems like from what I
have learned, both in college and from teachers in public schools that the
number of students with learning problems is something that is increasing. Students like Nathan and Sara are becoming
more common and I think that educators need to understand the problem in order
to deal with it which is something far
more easier said than done especially for teachers who have been teaching for a
long time. 