Three Things to Remind Your Students of Daily

Three Things I Remind My Students of Almost Daily

1.  There is no such thing as "NORMAL". For some reason, people are always comparing themselves to others.  I am not sure if this is innate or something that is learned over time.  However, when we compare ourselves to others, or we compare others to ourselves, we put ourselves in a very vulnerable position.  

It is no secret that the students I teach have learning disabilities.  I constantly remind my students that "if we were all "normal" we would all be the exact same". Thus, life would be boring. We would all look the same, we would all learn the same way, we would like the same things and we would all eat the same food!

Imagine all 7.4 billion people in the world loved pepperoni and cheese pizza and that's all we ate because we thought it was normal. We would all be extremely tired of eating pizza. We would never be exposed to french onion soup, lasagne, roti, cheeseburgers, pickles, sushi... The point here is that life would be EXTREMELY boring!

2. People who live with any sort of disability are intrinsically hardworking.  I know this is not a proven fact, however it is a strong theory.  I find that students with LD's have to work harder than students without. This is because they need to be cognizant of how their LD affects their learning and how they can work around their LD in order to learn. If you haven't seen Angela Lee Duckworth's TED talk on Grit, I suggest you take a peak. 

3. Every "need" a student faces can easily be seen as a "strength". I explain this to my students with many examples, my favourite is the student that has a memory deficit.  I say something like "If a student asks how to do something 7 times because they keep forgetting what to do, what is this student good at?".  At first I get a lot of baffled looks, then I say, "If a student is comfortable asking questions, they are likely strong self advocates!". If these students don't ask questions they will be left behind.

As a teacher in a school for students with LD's, I find a lot of kids with a lack of confidence in learning.  Many students I see, have been inadvertently conditioned to think they can't learn. When students are reminded that no one is the same, they are gritty and their needs highlight their strengths, their confidence begins to be restored.  This confidence in learning is a very important condition for learning. What will you say to your students tomorrow?