Parents’ meeting at the beginning of the year. She enters her son’s classroom. The awesome teacher gives an update on the new plans for the coming year and the need to keep the routine. She already planned ahead for an entire busy year! (This is how it is when the teacher is also a professional and capable manager). She realizes that her son’s integrating class has changed. It is not clear why. Both children and parents in last year’s class were great, connected beautifully to their kids, enjoyed many joint experiences and the bond seemed to be strong. However, the system had made a decision.
After an hour’s meeting, they were called to go to the room of the new integrating class. The parents of the integrating class were seated opposite the teacher. She entered the classroom with three other parents and felt great embarrassment as the parents of the other class were staring at her. This situation is familiar to her. She is a mother of a special child, which automatically makes her a ‘different’ mother, whose daily routine is different than theirs. This ‘royal’ entrance to the class was completely unnecessary for her. She would have liked to enter the class with everyone else, sit down like the others and introduce herself to everybody. She would decide if to tell everyone that she is the mother of ….. who is a special child. But first, let them get to know her without prejudice. The parents looked nice and some of them had kids who were already companions to children from younger classes. This is not new to them, and still, she thought, had that been a group of gifted kids, the meeting would have probably been arranged differently. It would have been more appropriate to begin the meeting together and have a round of introductions at the beginning of the meeting, because this is a group and this is what you do when you want to bond a group.
Parents of special children want to belong. Their children need reinforcements, but neither they nor their children should feel they are ‘special additions’. This is possible. When it starts from an early age, when the school works properly, the kids understand that the child from the smaller group is one of them. They learn to care about someone who is different from them and they learn that a judgmental approach is completely irrelevant. It is in fact a great opportunity to teach them about being judgmental. They understand why others behave the way they do, and then… they are not afraid. If the kids get it, so can their parents. She knows it is so. She has already seen this happening.
So what should be done? Begin to change. Assume that the parents and school staff cannot think or feel like we do. Explain where we come from, and initiate and suggest other ways of doing things. Come with realistic solutions, those that do not call for a radical change and that are not intimidating, at least in the first stages. Small steps for an important cause.
We must be the change we want to see
Gandhi
