A GREAT MOVIE CALLED STARS ON EARTH!

When I was in the undergraduated program one Teacher advise me to watch this movie called "Stars on Earth" in that time I did not see the things in the same I do right now, but them when a teacher from the master advise me to watch it again, I could do a deeper reflection and that is what I want to share with you, my experience with the movie and my personal experience with a child who had a neurolinguistic problem called Dislexya. 

“STARS ON EARTH” A STORY THAT CHANGED MY MIND AS TEACHER

INTRODUCTION

Stars on Earth is a great movie in which we can see how many teachers and parents most of the times are not aware of the language problems that their students or sons could have and for this reason they do not know how to react when these kind of difficulties appeared. On the next pages we will discuss closely how a language problem about difficulties in reading and writing  called Dyslexia and dysgraphia, affected the learning process of a little boy named Ishan.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Nowadays, through Neuroscience studies many physical problems of the brain related to the development of language have been discovered and studied; according to Brown, S and Attardo, S (2009) these are some of the most common Athypical Language Developments:

HEARING IMPAIRMENTS: Related to hearing loss and deaf children.

MENTAL REATARDATION: It is defined for basis of IQ, in this case it found 4 mentally retardation levels: IQ 70-52 Mild, IQ 51-36 Moderate, IQ 35-20 Severe, IQ < 20 Profound.

AUTISM: It is the lack of the ability to establish social relations including with their parents. Language development is very slow. Autistic children are unable to work in cooperative activities.

STUTTERING:  Repetition of sounds, syllables or phrases, it can a block because the speaker cannot release the words.

APHASIA: It is a damage of the brain, in which can exist a partial or total loss of language.

DYSLEXIA is a disorder in reading and Dysgraphia that is a disorder in writing, these disorders can be acquired or developmental. There are three types of dyslexia and dysgraphia: Phonological, deep and surface. Children with this disability have problems spelling, they have disruptive behavior, and they watch a lot of television.

REFLECTION

We as teachers have heard that all these language development problems exist but, unfortunately, most of the times we have not received instruction enough about the symptoms to identify the disabilities or about the possible activities that could be implemented in order to teach these kinds of children. For this reason we confuse these difficulties with behavior problems, and we called our students lazy and bad children; this was the story of a little boy called Ishan brother of a smart guy, and  son of a noble woman and a strict man, who was very hard with his two boys, so different, one of them was always the first in the class, and he got 10 in all this tests, instead of Ishan who failed all the subjects, and he was unable to write or read correctly.

Ishan parents did not know what to do with him, they thought Ishan was lazy, and naughty, due to this he did not like to do his homework and he failed all the tests, but he was not bad at all, because he was very good at painting, he loved to do it and he had the biggest imagination to make up beautiful pictures. Nevertheless teachers, and parents did not see the good things in Ishan and they just considered that he needed to be corrected in order to get better scores, as his brother did every day.

Their teachers did not do anything to find out what is going on with his mind and his learning problem, and nobody helped him, so he ended in a far and boarding school, where he felt completely alone and sad, he was depressed and he felt he was the worst person in the world because he was unable to read and write as it was a crime.  Many days and classes passed and Ishan without any help, was going bad again he mixed everything and even if he tried really hard to understand what the teachers said he could not get a word.

 This story remains me two years ago when I was working in Villa de Leyva, I got a student named Valeria, she really nice, and she was very good in English, she could pronounce everything in a right way, but when she was trying to write she could not do it, she wrote as if she were looking in a mirror, at the beginning I did not notice the problem, I thought it was normal and maybe because it was English, I thought it was hard for her to write, but then one day in a meeting with all the teachers of Valeria,  they asked me if Valeria was a good student, because she could not read or write well in the other subjects, so I was really surprised because she could pronounce well in English but not in the other subjects .

At that time, I was studying Learning needs at the UPTC, so I thought Valeria had  Dyslexia or dysgraphia but I was not sure so I asked for help to one of my teachers, I told my teacher the doubt a have about if Valeria had problem of Dyslexia and dysgraphia or not, I showed him the english and math notebook, he analyzed the things and he said it was very possible, for this reason, I told to the coordinator about the situation, she asked me to talk with their parents and finally they took Valeria to specialist and they started treating Valerias’s problem, after one year she got better and then could write and read much better.

When I was watching the movie I started thinking of Valeria because she had the same problem and nobody knew it, she almost passed for a lazy and misbehave girl, as Ishan in the movie, fortunately, as Ishan was helped by his arts teacher who discovered his big talent for painting and who helped him to improve his  writing and reading, and helped his parent to understand Ishan’s problem, I tried to help Valeria as well, I did not gave her extra classes to help her but I got a feeling about her difficulty, and I tried to make sure she was suffering of something before saying she was a bad student.

In conclusion, it is really important to be very careful with our students, because there some problems like HEARING IMPAIRMENTS, MENTAL REATARDATION, and STUTTERING which are easy to identify but there are some others like AUTISM, DYSLEXIA and DYSGRAPHIA, which are not so simple to discover that is why we as professional of the education must pay closely attention to all of our students and we notice something different  of unusual it is essential to ask for help and try to assist the student in order to allow him/her to improve and do things better,  we can be the people who help the world or the people who make it fall down, our words are powerful  and our actions much more, so we must be careful with the things we say and the thing we do.

Written by Mariana Ibañez G

­­­­