Why You Should be Teaching Special Needs Students

My special needs students are the sweetest souls to teach. Unlike most JHS Japanese learners of English, they’re not shy to learn or speak English, they cheer me on loudly with their eagerness to please and participate.

When I was first assigned to teach them I was very apprehensive because I had little or no experience teaching SEN students but the teachers did well to introduce me to the students first during lunch time right before the English lesson. Oooh, that has been my best lunchtime engagement to date. One student was at the door to receive me, another pulled out a chair for me in a very gentlemanly way that put me totally at ease. At first glance, it was difficult to tell just how special they are, except for the very obvious ones of course, but interacting and spending time with them has shown me just how lucky I am to have these ones as my students. They have my heart and I'm letting them keep it. 

So far I’ve had three lessons with them. The first one was when I had my self-introduction lesson where only three students actively listened to me talk about Nigeria. However, the enthusiasm of those three totally made up for their classmates who were not in the mood that day. During the second lesson, I learned not to introduce a “competitive game” as one of the students had a bad meltdown when she lost.

The third lesson today got me feeling all kinds of happy. I reviewed colours and we played the “Find something (insert colour)” game where they all had to go round to find something in the class, that colour. Their eyes found the colours in all the places I could never have imagined!

Find something brown...

Some of the kids ran to grab and hug me tightly. It was such a sweet emotional moment for me.

Find something red...

Rinku held his breath till he turned red   

Find something white...

Rinku pointed at his teeth.

Find something yellow...

Rinku touched his teeth again 

And my darling Takeru was the smartest of them all. While every other kid ran around frantically looking for an object in the right colour, he simply found a pack of coloured pencils and put them in front of him, bringing out the right colours one after the other like a boss.

We ended the class with the “Heads, shoulders, knees and toes” song and I made a beautiful discovery that Yuta loves songs, he never speaks and it was exciting to see him try the action as he did his best to move to the song.

For beautiful experiences like this, I would choose to be a teacher over and over again. 

Thanks for stopping by, see you next post!

Image Credit: https://theinclusivechurch.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/4-color-puzzle-piece- special-needs.png  accessed via google images

Read More »

What Dimples and Teaching Have In Common

One of my students has dimples. Deep ones that sink into his cheeks when he smiles. I didn’t even know that he knew how to smile until today. He gave me a sweet smile that lit up his cute face. Made me really happy 

Dimpled-cheek Reo sits at the end of the first row, sulking and never willing to participate in any activity no matter how hard I or the JTE tried.

But today, at lunchtime I sat with his lunch group and we got talking. I hadn’t yet learned the names of the students in this group so I asked. I heard Reo clearly but the name of the boy next to him got lost in the lunchtime music blaring through the speaker. The poor kid repeated his name but I still didn’t get it, because Japanese names... so Reo helped out by saying “Captain Tsubaya” in a louder voice. I got the joke, widened my eyes in surprise, said “oh wow a Captain” and saluted the Captain. That made Reo smile. The rest of the lunch time conversation went really well with Reo participating actively.

Thinking about this episode, I’m still not clear about why Reo is so uncooperative in English class, I’m usually as silly, cracking “dry jokes” that make the students go “aaah Nigerian joke “  I have a hunch that he doesn’t like being at the back, sitting at the end of the row. For lunchtime, their tables were arranged vertically so that if I looked from my right he was first, still at the edge of the row but definitely not the last. But I’m not making conclusions yet, next week I’ll see if this “new relationship” transcends into the English lesson otherwise, I’ll have to dig deeper.

I’ve seen those dimples today and I intend to keep seeing them! If you have any tips on how to make this magic happen again and again please share. Also, this post will be filed under the “Heart-warming stories from the classroom” label and I’d like to start collecting sweet memories from classrooms all over the world under this tag. If you’d like to contribute please send an email to 1teacher2anoda@gmail.com. Your story will be published and you’ll be duly credited.

Thanks for stopping by, I hope that your day is made cheerful by sweet, dimpled smiles. See you next post!

Picture credit: found on google photos, traced to @mr.alani on Instagram. 

Read More »