Comments on: Calvin Takes His Pills…

By: Michael

Michael — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 23:17:29 +0000

Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs…bathed in chocolate milk! I would have done better, I think, if I had been paddled.

By: bob pinto

bob pinto — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 23:05:18 +0000

I’m 50 years old, so I can say in my day you didn’t have ADD, you were just bad. And they’d paddle you. I wasn’t put on drugs but today I would have, simply because I talked during class. ( Horrors!)

I scooped too much sugar on cereal like Calvin.

(Cheerios were great. The hard surface and holes of the cereal allowed the sugar to fall to the bottom of the bowl, more so than corn flakes, so it produced a really intense slurry.)

Kids who wanted favor with the teacher did it less with academic achievement and more with snitching. (Tattling.)

With Calvin, whatever way possible to not deal with him is acceptable. And if the teacher has contempt for him so will his classmates.

The better teachers of my day challenged me to be creative and I did so!

By: Malana Johansen

Malana Johansen — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 04:38:12 +0000

As a junior high teacher, I mourn the loss of imagination in our children today. I would love having a Calvin in class just to keep things interesting. Instead I have had students who live to just “beat the game” on computers or when something goes wrong say, “Face it, Ms. J, that’s life.” I learned a long time ago to accept each student as God made him or her and love them and try to find ways to make them shine (without the silly fake self-esteem stuff). After all, God loves me, and I still like to believe that brownies came in my house as a child and made the beds and did the dishes on Sundays when we rushed to prepare for service. That’s what my mom told me and later on when my sister said it was our neighbor, I still preferred the brownies.

By: Cheryl

Cheryl — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 03:06:03 +0000

I had a similar situation, but the results were different. I was the children’s director for a church and one the kid’s (Ryan) parents came to talk to me. I had taught Ryan every Sunday for three years. They were concern because his first grade teacher wanted to have him tested for ADD. The reason the teacher gave: the only way she could get him to focus and do his work was to seperate Ryan from everyone. I asked the parents if Ryan was upset when she seperated him, they said no it helped him get his work done. I told them that Ryan was independant learner, just give him instructions and let him go off on his own and he will do it. I told them he had teacher that either did not understand learning styles or had class too big to care that children learn differently.

They refused to have him be tested and labeled. They transferred him to a Christian school and he did great.