I often hear from colleagues and teachers that working with children is as difficult as it is exciting, that the responsibility that everyone feels for them, although motivating and valuable, sometimes does not end with the end of the working day, and how they are able to surprise us with their questions and their (caustic!) answers, and personally I would say that I agree on all points.
It’s about a letter that I just can’t tune into.
A few weeks ago during an interview a guy took me back on a slightly colorful expression, of which he did not understand the sense but that to me seemed very clear, and that italianized sounds like this: “. you end up with patches on your butt!”
After trying to explain to him what I meant (very bad, it’s like with jokes and proverbs) he thought to label me with a cruel “I understand Doc but you speaks like a Boomer!” so later and a bit out of curiosity I started to look for the acronyms of the various generations, discovering that the Boomers were born in the postwar period (until ’64.), the Alphas after 2013, and that between these at intervals of 15 years there are the generations X – Y and Z.
Come on, that was close.
A few days later, however, I participated in a GLO, a working group composed of teachers, parents and health workers, organized by the school for the inclusion of “H Students” (namely Disabled, ADHD or with Specific Learning Disorders) for which it is mandatory to draw up a specific study plan aimed at combating early school leaving, and then I came to make a reflection..
Who leaves who?
But is it not that those guys who for different reasons (and not at all overlapping!) from a physical disability are labeled with the letter H are part of a “generation”?
And what can we say to those who have somehow “invented” putting on the same level restlessness, inattention, difficulty in learning reading, writing or calculation, that may have the most varied and complex roots but that belong to the psychic sphere, and organic pathologies that instead involve the development of the nervous system?
Can you define someone just for the historical-cultural period in which he had the chance to be born?
I am not referring so much to the obvious but banal consideration that no person can be defined on the basis of a pathology or a simple difficulty, it is not a question of linguistic finesse or political correctness, but of a cultural crater in which you end up throwing the future of thousands of children fully able to study and learn, that if not seen recognized and treated for their actual difficulties end up convincing themselves of the opposite.
Maybe at first glance it might even seem that there rot a little (less bad, less tasks…) but the deep experience can reach discouragement, and be thought without solution.
Perhaps I will attract some criticism, but I think that a change is absolutely necessary and not at all procrastinatable.
I understand the Guidelines, the Diagnostic Manuals, the timing and the Ministerial Directives, but I am convinced that anything can be improved if it is a personal and political choice, because stamps and marks, once affixed on the basis of the so fan all, They risk being lived as sentences without appeal, a sort of “scarlet letter” embroidered on aprons, certified on the registers and engraved in the heads.
A weight, a ballast (the term Handicap is used in racetracks, in which ironically the strongest horses have to carry a weight to be able to gallop “on equal terms” with others..) that can direct the boys to live well under their possibilities or expectations, leading health and education institutions to create gaps rather than fill them.
Certainly the School of Merit (which then is the Competition, able to create unsustainable pressures!) does not seem to help, as well as diagnosis support and distributed subsidies without differentiating what is needed from what is harmful ends up creating more problems than solutions.
A boy convinced of being “defective” can rebel, very badly, to a false destiny, act risky or self-injurious behavior, and I think it is necessary to continue to oppose what is likely to become a factory of explosive devices.
Of bombs.. H!
In geology time and pressure create precious gems is true, but with humans certainly does not work like that.
Marco Randisi
Leave a Reply