I found this film, while dated, to be extremely eye opening for me as an educator of students with special needs. While I have been taught about different disabilities, best practices for working with students with special needs, assistive technologies, and common theories behind successfully educating students, I have never been forced to examine what it is that my students are facing on a day to day basis. I believe this is probably true for most educators, that we learn about LDs, but that we don't learn what it is like to have a LD.
The film is divided into different sections, and each section of the film revolves around a different topic related to LDs. One of the most interesting portions of the film to me were about perception and how students with a LD may not share the same perceptions as others and may then find themselves being punished and not knowing why. One example of this was when the "teacher" showed the image above of the woman looking into the mirror and doing her makeup. The teacher asked for each "student" to write a title or caption for the image and he chose one student's work to share with the class. The woman had written the title, "Death Stalker" for the image because the image she perceived was of the skull and not the woman doing her makeup in a vanity. The teacher than proceeded to chastise her and rip up her work in front of the class. The point of this exercise was to show how sometimes a student's may misinterpret what is in front of them or what is being asked of them and may find themselves being punished for reasons that are beyond them.
As a special education teacher in an 8:1:1 preschool classroom I find that often times my students perception does impact there work and I am faced daily with having to determine if their behavior was an act of defiance or purposeful misbehavior, or if it was an act of an inaccurate perception of what was asked of them. Thursday of this week I had my students coloring in pictures of apples for a page in a class book that we were making. I asked each child to color their apple either red, yellow, or green to show what their favorite type of apple was. One of my students proceeded to pick up all three crayons, and colored their apple with all three colors. My immediate reaction was that they did not understand what was being asked of them. But after talking to the child I realized that they used all three colors because they enjoyed all three of the types of apples that we tasted. Another child asked me why the pictures of apples had dots all over them, and I explained that the dots were just a mistake made by the copy machine. I then told them to just color the dots anyways. This child than proceeded to take his crayon and make fierce stabbings to his paper causing his paper to rip. I realized that this behavior was not because he was angry, but because he heard me say to "color his dots" and he perceived this instruction to be "color dots on your paper" so he was merely trying to make dots on his apple using his crayon.
I am faced with behaviors like this everyday and I often can realize that it is a simple misunderstanding or perception of the directions that has caused my students to behave in the way that they did. But I feel that it is easier for me to make this connection because I teach preschool and not just my students, but most preschoolers are still developing language and understanding. Because of this I actively search out answers to why they may have behaved in a particular fashion. Teachers of older grades that are not in self-contained settings might not automatically search for these answers because the majority of their students are behaving in a way that is developmentally appropriate so anything out of the norm may be perceived as defiance or being a class clown. This is why I feel it is so important to truly get to know your students, and to have conversations privately with students to determine their train of thought and not jump to conclusions.