In this video Rick Lavoie uses poker chips to describe self esteem. The popular kids in school have a ton of poker chips and get more chips every time something good happens to them. If they are picked to be the captain of the football team or homecoming king they get 10,000 poker chips. Because of inclusion, learning disabled kids are forced to attend school with these children who have thousands and thousands of poker chips. The learning disabled kids however, do not have many chips at all and they want to hold on tightly to the few they do have. This is why these children don’t ask questions in class, this is why they don’t try out for sports teams, or even ask peers to go to dances with them for fear of being rejected and losing their chips.
As teachers, our job is to make sure that every kid has more poker chips when he or she goes home than when they got up that morning. We need to give them as many poker chips as we can and take away just the minimum we have to. We need to build our children up, our job as teachers is to be sure they have confidence and let them know they can achieve their potential.
You MUST have working links. You should have been doing this by week 3! See #3 on p. 12 of the Activities Instruction Manual. There also is an extremely easy way to make a working button in a post. Find out how and send me an email telling me how to do it. This is a required assignment!
ReplyDeleteYour assignment raises some very fascinating and serious questions that deserve considerable discussion and debate. I hope that is happening in other classes. Maybe I should include some of that discussion/debate in EDM310. I'll consider it.
Do you think this video questions the inclusion approach to special ed? What is your position on that question?
ReplyDeleteDo you think this video is addressed as much to families as to school?
How do you raise the self-esteem of low self-esteem students without a) misrepresenting their skills and abilities and b) without devaluing the value of all the chips - those held by high self-esteem students as well as those with low self-esteem?
I really enjoyed reading your blog. You did a really nice job on creating your own assignment for blog post 12. Keep up the good work! :)
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