Ketchup is My Favorite Vegetable by Liane Kupferberg Carter

Author:Liane Kupferberg Carter [Kupferberg Carter, Liane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784502096
Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
Published: 2015-09-17T00:00:00+00:00

Winter wore on. A spot of brightness: Marie gave Mickey a global history quiz that contained a word bank, as I’d suggested. He got an “A.” He had answered 23 out of 26 questions correctly. Across the top of his paper, she wrote: “Wonderful!” I was proud of him, and grateful to Marie for modifying the test for him.

Yet over and over we heard from his other teachers, “He’s not learning.”

How were they measuring that? His language deficits made it hard to assess what he was actually taking in. It was like saying that a student with a physical disability wasn’t learning because he couldn’t tie his shoelaces—he “knew” how to do it, but his body couldn’t execute it because of the nature of his disability. Couldn’t you make a similar argument for Mickey? As his tutor Nikki had once said, “His output does not correspond to his input.”

“What do you want for Mickey?” the dean kept throwing back at us.

We wanted the same things you want for any child. We wanted him to be happy. Mickey had been successful in elementary school. He’d thrived in middle school. How could we make high school work for him too?

Shortly after that January meeting, Karyn sent home a questionnaire to everyone in the program, asking us to evaluate Mickey’s program.

“Do we let them have it with both barrels?” I said to Marc.

“You know we can’t.”

He wrote, “We have always approached his situation as a glass half full and not half empty. It is very frustrating to be told by his dean that Mickey should consider a future of folding pizza boxes. We have no illusion about college, but we don’t want to put a ceiling on Mickey’s potential. He is continually surprising us.”

“Oh, c’mon! ‘Frustrating?’ How about saying, ‘infuriating?’”

“Because you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.”

Q: Would you like to continue with an emphasis on academic skills or would you prefer that the major focus of the program change to address life skills, e.g. skills needed to enter the workforce after high school, independent living skills, etc.?

“How about writing, ‘What use is it to be able to identify the mitochondria in a cell when you can’t even address an envelope correctly?’” I said.

“Because it sounds too snarky.”

Marc wrote, “While we want to engender a love of learning and provide the means to fulfill that love, in reality it is more important that Mickey learn how to carry on a conversation, work cooperatively, advocate for himself, write and address a letter, send an email, go to the bank and post office, learn to cook, make change in a store, or balance a check book… Recently he has been give the task of sorting the mail in the high school office. We think this is terrific as it teaches him discipline and responsibility for completing a task correctly, and how to interact appropriately with other people. We would like to encourage more activities such as filing books in the library, acting as messenger and so on.

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