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Show Perhaps it was a weak advocate, but it would be a chance for her younger counterparts to be heard. When I look back now, through three years of my own new learning and experience, being much more precise about behavioral programs, knowing a purpose to developmental curriculums, the short time I spent with her seems saddened somehow. I had no knowledge then of how to teach a child through her other senses in a precise step by step manner, from close physical co-movement to distancing, letting the child expand his own world and curiosity, guiding the teacher by his own way of learning, We are all such egomaniacs that listening in another sense or mode and touching there is impossible, unless the child leads us. So many times since, I have stood before these children as they stare from their dayrooms in great numbers, seeing that spark of knowledge in each of them, unable to reach it. I have given workshops, and child after child is shoved at me. Warehouses full of them, seeking a quick recipe for success as if trying to prove me wrong or seeking something they think not possible. I wander among them in the dayrooms, seeing so many ways of teaching them in the whole of their worlds, unable to teach their wardens, "seeing". Their teachers so often protecting them with a false sense of love. Defend, unseeing, their right to childhood, unable to believe in them, unable to be taught by them. In three years, since the first encounter with Patty, I can see in every face the human capacity to be curious. Visits to new programs are always unpleasant for me. I dislike the excessive exposure to people, the crowding, the airsickness, and the many changes of planes. Workshops are even less pleasant, usually fabricated to move staff members out of their bored state and often poorly organized on the whim of one particular supervisor, who either idealistically believes in change or hopes to promote a feather in his cap. Patty's workshop was even worse; no one even knew what it was they wanted to learn, nor did they care The whole thing had been organized as a solution for the difficulty with Patty, and the teacher who had requested the funds because of her own fear of Patty had quit some months before. Patty's original teacher, putting three years investment into -22- |