Special Education

If you want to be a special educator, you should be pretty special yourself. For teaching special children requires you to have all the qualities that make a great kindergarten or primary schoolteacher – patience, creativity, and so on – but in far larger quantities. Plus a whole bunch of other attributes – sensitivity, understanding, empathy…

Teaching Special Children

If teaching is a noble profession, if imparting knowledge is a blessed vocation, if molding young and impressionable minds is a responsibility bigger than any other, then special educators are the noblest, most blessed, and most responsibility-ridden teachers of them all.

Cheerfully taking under their wings those children of a lesser God who need special care, affection and education, these courageous, dedicated men and women make it their business to see that their wards learn to be self-reliant, making full use of opportunity and with hope, and as normal as their various disabilities permit them.

Special educators teach the visually-impaired, the hearing- impaired, the mentally-challenged in all their forms, and the physically-disabled. They also teach children with learning disabilities like dyslexia. Their job is as much about teaching these children their ABC as it is about teaching them to dress themselves, to board buses and cross the street themselves independently, to speak even if they cannot hear, to pick up a phone and call for help, and, in some cases, simply to hold a pencil tight. Not only do special educators have to build their wards’ knowledge bases, but they also have to build their self-confidence and self-esteem.

A special educator’s entire efforts are geared more towards the all-round development of their wards and less towards making them toppers at the school or university level. And since there are no special colleges for their students, these teachers work hard to ensure that their special children will fit into normal colleges and normal society by the time they leave their hands, so that they will have all the opportunities that other children have in life.

Are you a ‘special educator’ material?

Special educators learn to live with unhappiness and occasional depression and gloom at the injustice of it all, but also learn to overcome it so that they pass on only cheerfulness and hope to their students. But they all swear that even the occasional triumph – the first time a visually-impaired student walked into a bank and deposited a cheque, the first time a hearing-impaired student turned his lips perfectly and said the words back to them, the first time a spastic child buttoned her shirt on her own, the time one of their students quit the special school to join a normal school after passing an entrance exam – is enough to make all their years of effort worthwhile.

If you want to become a special educator, you should:

#First of all realize that the job is far from easy – The biggest joy of teaching is the response from your students, but in a special educator’s job, such responses may not be as quick, as extensive or as dramatic as those in a regular teacher’s job.

#Be very patient and calm, especially as each day will be quite different from any other and quite unpredictable altogether.

#Be very tough mentally – Children in your care may frequently exhibit extreme and unexpected reactions to situations, and you simply cannot afford to get rattled by such an occasion.

#Not be judgmental. It is not your students’ faults that they are the way they are.

#Be very sensitive to your students’ feelings.

#At the same time, harden your heart against feeling sorry for them, realizing that what they want is not your pity but your affection, your respect, and your support in turning them into worthy citizens of the society with a minimum of problems.

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