Special Ed…..Dr. Rosenthal’s Unusual Dual Certification
You get the fat envelope in the mail. A fat envelope usually means you’ve been accepted into the program, and sure enough, there it is:
Dear So and So,
You’ve been accepted to study at Dr. Rosenthal’s School, and when you finish the program you will be certified as a Special Ed Teacher and a Special Ed Student.
Sincerely,
Phiilip B. Rosenthal, PhD.
Dean of Special Ed
At first you don’t jump for joy It’s a little confusing. A school to be certified as aa Special Ed Teacher, that you get, but to get certified as a Special Ed Student??? That doesn’t seem like such an honor, or much to get enthused about.
It may be a stretch to wrap your mind around the notion of becoming both a special ed teacher and a special ed student. This article offers details of why such a notion is useful and how to learn both roles.
We’ll start from our actual experiences of special ed, whether those experiences come from having observed our children, relatives or friends receive special educational programming, or whether those experiences come from other perspectives (reading, seeing special ed students at a school).
Let’s be clear that I am using special ed metaphorically. We will begin with our received impressions of actual special education procedures and then “hijack” the concept to apply it more widely to our lives, particularly to our emotional blockages and growth.
What are our associations to the phrase “special ed”? Although I may be understating the diversity of people’s reactions, I’ll offer some of the more common ones. Special ed kids are different. Special ed kids are slower. Special ed kids are not the popular or successful ones. They look different and they act different, and here different is perceived more on the negative side. They come to school in the little bus or the van instead of the big yellow bus. Special ed can carry a “stigma” for the students in it, or the parents whose children are placed in the system.
What about the flip side? What might be the positives in what we perceive of special education? Kids in special ed have special ed teachers, teachers who have self-selected or been trained to create an atmosphere of acceptance and collaboration in the learning process. Special ed classes are smaller, making it less likely that an individual student will get “lost in the sauce.”
When a child is placed in special ed, there is often a closer attention by the people at school to this child as an individual, and comparisons are turned from how does this child compare to all of his peers, to how is this child doing compared to himself at a different point in time. The review process tends to include more professionals and is supposed to be more fine-grained than the educational system can offer all its students.
Learning is broken down into smaller pieces, and close attention is paid to finding the right size piece of learning so it can be assimilated by the student. What works for this particular student, different modes of presentations by the teacher, different modes of expression by the student, are all included In regular education, if the student doesn’t keep up with the pace or mode of teaching, that’s the student’s problem. Is that a little bit like the Biblical Procrustean bed—in that town, if the person was too small for the bed, they’d be stretched to fit it, if the person was too big for the bed, they would cut his feet off to get the fit right. In special ed, that Procrustean bed is not supposed to happen. If a student does not learn well, then the mode of presentation will be re-considered.
When special ed works well, the teachers bring curiosity to the blockages in their students’ learning. If something doesn’t work well, there is an atmosphere of openness. It wouldn’t make sense for a hospital nurse to say “Oog, all these sick people in the hospital—why can’t they just be well!” Or for a plumber to recoil when he gets to a bathroom overflow “Ooh, what a mess, I don’t want to get anywhere near it!” Special ed teachers are supposed to understand that there will be bumps in the road of learning, just as nurses expect their patients to have symptoms, and plumbers expect smelly messes.
Hijacking the Metaphor
Who needs special ed?
Everyone.
We’re expanding the reach of the concept beyond the walls of schools and population of kids in schools.
As a fifty-something year old who has practiced psychotherapy for more than thirty years I have become more and more aware of people’s unneveness. If we were graphing people’s abilities, capacities to learn over a variety of arenas in their lives, we’d seldom see a flat plain. What we see more often is a series of hills and valleys. These hills and valleys are not always apparent upon first meeting a person. The longer you know someone, and the more arenas of that person’s life you observe, the more likely you are to encounter that person’s unevenness.
We sometimes say someone is “book-smart” while another person is “street-smart.” We see someone who is great at coming up with unusual creative ideas and someone else who is consistent predictable and steady. Don’t these qualities exist at amazing unneven levels within a given person? Often someone who is a genius at one thing is a knucklehead at another.
I use another metaphor for unevenness: you’ve been working out at the gym. Your right side is rippling with muscle and your left side is atrophied. Not a pretty sight. The sides need to be in better balance.
I will tell the story of how in my own personal life I discovered and embraced the need to be both a special ed student and a special ed teacher. I will inter-weave how this discovery led to a particular way of working with my clients, which begins with helping them to accept their need for some slow track learning. I serve initially as their special ed teacher, and over time, they themselves learn how to be their own special ed teacher to themselves.
How I Became a Special Ed Student
I was raised in a high achieving Jewish family, the third of four children. I followed two sisters who were in the top top levels of their classes in high school, and who went on to be a physicist and a gastroenterologist. I felt the need to keep up with them, and in terms of level of achievement I did. I graduated in the top ten per cent of my class at Yale, went on to get a PhD in psychology at Yale.
I can remember one experience in about the third grade when I was told I might be taken out of class for speech therapy, and I was very upset. It felt like a failure and something I wanted to just go away. It never got followed through, I was relieved, and yet it’s something I do remember when I think of my own experiences in school.
Though I managed to get through Yale, both undergraduate and graduate school, it was not without a lot of wear and tear. Every paper I ever wrote was a nightmare, often handed in late. It was a huge struggle, but I felt I had to soldier on, and it never occurred to me that I might need a different track of learning in some areas, or that it could be an acceptable and honorable choice to get some “special education.”
Although I love music, always have, and am known for my wide-ranging knowledge and appreciation of music, I didn’t play an instrument nor did I sing, and it would take a lot of intoxication for me to get up and dance.
It was only in my late thirties and forties that I re-approached these activities, which I had closed off, to see if I could find an entrée. I was already partway there in terms of embracing a need for some special education in music so I signed up for a seminar of “Singing for Non-Singers”. We had about a dozen students meeting with a very competent teacher. At the end of the series of sessions here was my conclusion: There were eleven students who found out they only thought they couldn’t sing. And then there was me. It was not false modesty. It turned out that my trouble with singing was different from theirs. And it discouraged me for several years, until, further into my learning to embrace the concept of special ed, that I sought to find a teacher that could provide the special educational inputs that I needed.
I remembered the person who conducted the choir at a setting for developmentally delayed young adults, who seemed knowledgeable and friendly. I figured that she’d worked with people who were worse off in terms of musical disabilities than me, and that seemed comforting. I approached her, arranged one to one sessions, recorded those sessions well on audiotape, and found the experience to be tremendously enriching, offering a Rosetta Stone into the world of music. The sessions were entirely guided and shaped to my strengths and gaps. She turned out to be a gifted special ed teacher, but then I turned out to be a gifted special ed student.
Special Ed in the Therapy Office
I talk a lot with my patients about “special ed.” When I hear their stories I’m always struck by some unevenness in their lives.
They are great at some things. They are lousy at other things. They are geniuses, Olympic champions at some things. They are anything but geniuses or Olympic champions at other things.
Some are geniuses at holding onto relationships, and knuckleheads at breaking out of relationships. Some are geniuses at breaking out of relationships and knuckleheads at holding on. Some are geniuses at being rational and clear, and lousy at being spontaneous or emotional.
For others it’s exactly the opposite. They are great at being spontaneous and emotional, but are very poorly developed in their skills being rational and clear. I point this out to my patients, making sure that I do identify some areas which they have developed themselves well, and where they can count on skills because they’ve been practicing them for so long and these skills have become second nature to them.
Then with humor and acceptance I do point out those areas they are unlikely to be considered Olympic contenders,…areas where they are so so far from having a “black belt”….the result of long training, skill and practice. And I tell them the bad news / good news that just trying harder is unlikely to result in great progress. If they have trouble letting go of relationships, they are unlikely to be able to “just let go.” They don’t know how. It’s too hard for them. It’s too big a leap.
Having it pointed out to them that they are lousy at something is NOT news to them. THEY are the ones who have come to my office saying "I can't get out of relationships," or "It's just not me to hurt someone's feelings."
What is new is framing it as an undeveloped skill, a valley amongst peaks, and an area needing SPECIAL EDUCATION.