Persistence Pays

I had a rewarding teaching moment the other day. I have been working witht his girl in my class who has a pretty significant learning disability. As frustrating it is for me to try teaching her, I can't imagine what she has to go through trying to learn things in school. She is well behind her classmates despite the effort she puts into it. Over the last several years in school she has developed something called "learned helplessness". Either she has been told, or she has come to know through experience that no matter how hard she tries she isn't smart so she figures she just won't try since it yields the same result. Learned helpless is one of the most difficult things to deal with as a teacher. It's like pulling teeth. You push and push and push and the kid will not even give it an ounce of effort, they just won't budge.
Mr. Von was teaching a lesson on multiplying by 10. He was trying to teach students that if you break apart bigger numbers in multiplication that the equation becomes easier to solve. (For example, 3 x 40 you can just do 3 x4 then add the 0 after) He first wanted to show them though that any number multiplied by 10 is just the number with a 0 on the end of it. The class caught on pretty quickly; the student I was working with did not. No matter how many different ways I explained it she just did not get it. I would say things like "If 3 x 10 is 30, then 5 x 10 is?" and she would immediately respond with, "I don't know, I'm bad at math". After pushing and pushing and pushing (for about an hour) she finally got it. Although the other kids had caught on real fast, Mr. Von had her show the class how to solve 12 x 10. She couldn't stop smiling for the rest of the day. I have never, in the three weeks I have been there, seen her so happy. She came up to me later and said "Thank you for teaching me that today Miss Morris". It's moments like these that I remember why I want to be a teacher.