When the chips are down
Mainstreaming disabled children in schools has become the norm. No longer, as in years past, do they reside in the basement near the furnace, in ‘a room,’ just for ‘those kids.’ By choosing the poker chips metaphor, Richard Lavoie, shares his anguish about mainstreaming. Each student comes to school with poker chips, the more confident and successful he is the more chips he has to spend.
In his telling, Larry the Learning Disabled kid’s father tells his son he has to confront the cafeteria person who gave him the wrong change a day earlier. In class the next morning, Larry’s anguish about getting the right change has him dare not answer a question, one he’s pretty sure he knows. He’s afraid to lose all his chips.
Mainstreaming appears to be the moral choice in most schools. Lavoie’s poker-chip metaphor invites us to stop and think to recognize that people, especially those with learning disabilities of all ages, have varying levels of confidence.
When asking a learning disabled person at any age to engage, we need to be sensitive to how they see themselves. For instance, if we see a disabled person hesitant to engage, we should not push but offer a soft response. And we should never put them into an embarrassing situation. That’s true for all our students.
Lavoie wants us to know that in schools the “Larrys” should leave class with at least as many or more poker chips than those they came in with. And we need to recognize that learning-disabled adults we come into contact with, deserve to keep the chips they have.
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How do you feel about mainstreaming? About Lavoie’s poker-chip metaphor? You may not have good answers. Yet, the challenges students with learning disabilities have to live among the able––and for all people with disabilities in society––are real. They make up fifteen percent of the population.
One of Lavoie’s premises, “In regular education, the system dictates the curriculum. In special education, the child dictates the curriculum.” I spent seven years in the 70s in open classrooms offering children to be agents in their learning, to choose what to work on and when, and to develop their skills under the guidance of my colleagues and me. Chapters 7-15 in my classroom memoir, Teacher in the Rye: Doing It My Way articulates this practice.
Lavoie opens the door for all of us to be responsive to everyone we meet––especially for the disabled meeting them on their terms. His wisdom applies to all of us. We need to recognize each person as one of us, not as an “other.”
“Life can only be understood backwards;
but it must be lived forward.” (Kierkegaard)
I write to bring ideas and methods from my life as a teacher
in the latter half of the 20th century
to help teachers and the public to “live forward” in this century.
My latest book, Teacher in the Rye: Doing It My Way is available on Amazon.
I welcome comments here on my Substack or by email at frankthoms3@gmail.com.
