Teaching tolerance

You might also add in some stories from your teaching experience about how you show compassion ( do you really want them to merely ‘tolerate’ LD students??) to your LD students without of course needing to mention names. You might cite times when you’ve chosen to reduce as assignment or raise a grade as you knew the student was struggling with the challenge of having learning differences.

I learned to have a tolerance for students with special needs at a early age. I had a cousin that was three years younger than me who had a learning disability. During my high school education, the basketball coach paired us up with children in his classroom that had learing disabilities and we were their mentors. We helped them with classwork and accompanied the severly disabled to the lunch or the library. It taught many of us to be thankful for those ablities that God had blessed us with and by being thankful we helped others that were less fortunate. To encourage more participation you may want to develope an incentive program that will reward the students for participating and at the same time they will develope a tolerance for the students with speacial needs.

Ridicule one of the bullies a bit until you star seeing some tears then ask him or her to explain to the class how it feels. You may wanna start with some kind of mind game, puzzle or concept they can’t comprehend. Then frustrate and ridicule as patr of the demo. Make it emotional, you’ll be a hero and you’ll get to lay the smack down on some mouthy punk. That will boost the selfesteem of the LD kids. Victimizers feeling like victims. How sweet it is!!!

Ask,” how can all of us help our fellow students?” Cooperation as opposed to competition. Learning should be a cooperative effort not a competeitve sport the way it is now.

Victimizers usually figure you’re either one or the other.

It’s the whole cooperative thing they have no concept of. Often pushing them to tears just means they’re hungrier for being on the victimizer side to make up for it. So, if you try that route, you’d better be able to supervise enough so the usual victims don’t just get more of the same later, thanks to you. (But if they *really* have no concept of anything but victim/victimizer, then that’s the language they will hear whether you’re speaking it or not, so you may as well convince them that they need to straighten up or be a victim to your power. And in the meantime figure out what message you’re sending to all the *other* people in the classroom.)

The message may be empowerment. A beaten bully is a beautiful thing. It shows good over evil and right over wrong. A beaten bully will humble other bullies. Some kids need a lesson in humility. I say scare the crap out of them. It may prevent another Columbine.