Chapter 8 Section VIII

"Edison, Einstein, and Hei Liuchezi are all LDs." This sentence was cut out of a magazine more than ten years ago and sent to me from New York.It was a paper published by a Japanese scholar in a journal, and a friend of my mother, a Japanese doctor living in New York, sent it to me. "Anyway, it's a pleasure to be able to compare you to those characters, so I sent it to you." - Such a letter is included in the printed matter.I couldn't help being surprised when I saw it, why on earth should I be compared with these geniuses? ?Of course, I can't think of anything we have in common.However, in any case, this is a very honorable thing, very gratifying, and I am also very happy.At that time, I didn't know what the so-called "LD" meant.

Later, it was said that my friend's child was LD, and the friend said to me: "If you want to know more about LD, please contact me!" My friend also said that he had attended a parent meeting for LD children.I suddenly remembered the article about Edison in the above article, but I was too busy with Pepsi at the time, and I didn't want to know the details.Soon, an actress who participated in the program "Tetsuko's Cabin" had a child with LD, so I finally knew what LD is. LD is the abbreviation of "Learning Disabilities". It is translated as "Learning Disabilities" in Japanese, but this is not very appropriate, so it is generally called LD directly.When I went to the bookstore, I was surprised to find all kinds of books about LD.But what surprised me even more was that the female director of "Tetsuko's Cabin" came back to me after rehearsing with the actress and said:

"Among the mothers, it is said that Ms. Hei Liu is an LD!" Soon, the education channel of NHK TV station sent me an invitation, saying: "Nowadays, some Japanese children suffer from ADHD. I was expelled from school, and I feel that Ms. Heiliu had this kind of problem when she was a child. In this book, it is also written about what kind of education Ms. Heiliu received to become the Tetsuko Heiliu I am today. We would like to invite you Tell me about the principal of the elementary school." I went to this show. ADHD means "inability to concentrate, hyperactivity". It is said that many children with this disorder also suffer from LD. "What the hell is going on? Unknowingly, I have this kind of problem?" In this way, my understanding of LD gradually increased, but what really played a decisive role was the four consecutive nights of NHK broadcasting this year. The show "Please Don't Say I'm a Weird Child".This is a program about LD children. I watched this program seriously, and I burst into tears when I finished watching it.It's not that I want to cry, it's just that the tears can't stop, anyway, I'm crying.

The reason why I want to write is because I like Principal Kobayashi very much, and I hope to record those stories when I have not forgotten him.This book is not the manuscript that the publishing house asked me to write.One night, after I had already gone to bed, I suddenly jumped up again, bent over my desk, and filled three sheets of 400-character manuscript paper in one breath. station".I once made an agreement with the principal: "When I grow up, I will be the teacher of this school." But my husband passed away before I fulfilled this agreement, and I chose a different path.Even for this promise, I should tell people that there used to be such a Mr. Principal who truly loved children and believed from the bottom of his heart that every child has their own talents and outstanding personalities, and he treated them with enthusiasm children.Therefore, the book also wrote in detail why I was expelled shortly after entering an ordinary elementary school. My mother tried her best to find a suitable school, and then I finally entered the Ba Academy founded by the principal.

I always believed that I was expelled because I was a high-energy kid who was full of curiosity, so I candidly wrote all the truth about the situation at that time.However, after I watched the program "Please Don't Say I'm a Weird Child", I felt that, in the eyes of experts and researchers who have diagnosed many LD children, no matter which one of the situations written in it is consistent with Symptoms consistent with LD.I really didn't think of that.One of the reasons why I was expelled from school was that when I was in school, I refused to sit at the desk, but stood at the classroom window and looked out.And a boy who appeared in the program as a case of LD was always unwilling to sit on the seat. Whenever something interesting happened, he would immediately stand up and run over to have a look.

I'm exactly like that too, I'm standing by the window, waiting for the promotional artists.I especially like to promote entertainers, I think if they pass by, I will stop the entertainers, and then tell the students in the class: "Come on!" Our classroom window directly faces the road, which is very lucky for me , but unfortunately for the school.When the publicity artists passed by the school, they stopped blowing and whistling and walked quietly, but as soon as I saw the artists, I told everyone: "They are coming!" So everyone ran to the window and shouted in unison. Said: "Propaganda artists!" He also begged the artists: "Give us a show!" It was rare for the children to be so eager to beg, and the publicity artists played the sanxian and the clarinet,

The gongs and drums were struck, and their unique and lively grand performance began.At this time, the young female teacher could only stand on the podium and wait, she must be very unhappy.When the publicity artists finished their performances, the other kids went back to their seats, but I still stood by the window.The teacher asked me: "Why are you still standing there?" I replied: "Maybe these artists will come back, maybe there will be other artists coming." Still looking out. Regarding the reason for being expelled from school, I don’t remember it myself. It was my mother who heard it from the teacher. When I grew up, my mother told me again.However, I also vaguely remember a fragment.It is also said in the TV program that if there are LD children in the class, it will be difficult to continue the class, and it is true.

Actually, before I ran to the window, I discovered an interesting thing.That is the classroom desk.The desk at home has a drawer, and the drawer will come out when you pull it out, but the desk at school has a cover, and you have to lift it up.At that time in Tokyo, the trash cans near my house looked like this.I found that the lid of the school desk was the same as the lid of the trash can. I couldn't help being very happy. During class, I opened and closed the desk, closed it and opened it again, and tossed and tossed it hundreds of times. The teacher said to me: "Student Heiliu, the lid of the desk is not for opening and closing to play, but for putting things in it." When I heard this, I quickly put all the notebooks, textbooks and pencil cases on the desk into it. inside the table.When the teacher said, "Everyone come to write the word 'a'", I first opened the desk cover and took out the notebook, closed the cover, then opened the cover again, drilled my head in, took out a pencil from the pencil case, and closed the cover again.Then start writing the word "a". If you make a mistake, open the table cover and take out the eraser, and then close the cover.After wiping off with an eraser, immediately open the lid and put the eraser in, then close the lid.After writing a word, I opened the lid again and put the pencil in, then closed the lid, then opened the lid again, put the notebook in, and closed it again.Then it was time to write "b", I opened the lid again and took out the notebook, and then took out the pencil... Just like this, I kept opening and closing the desk cover, making people dazzled.Because the teacher just said "it's for putting things", so it's not easy to say "don't do that", so I can only watch silently as I open and close the table cover a hundred times more than before.

The teacher is really poor.But I was really interested in the lid at the time, so I came up with such a method. I didn't intend to fight against the teacher at all.But thinking about it now, there must have been other children in the classroom who wanted to open the lid to play like me, but thought "that's not possible", so they didn't do it even though they wanted to; Not interested, so there are no children who come and go.Then there are kids like me who do it the moment it feels funny.I have an idea, that is, if the teacher said during the break time: "We don't do that in class, as long as we want to do it now, everyone can open and close the lid together, how about having fun?" Everyone turn on the switch together I will be very satisfied if I turn it off, I won't turn it on and off again during class.

If the adults say "don't do that", the children will do it secretly, so it would be great if the teacher can let the children have a good time as mentioned above!This may be my own wayward idea, but if I were a teacher, I would definitely do it.I kept opening and closing the cover of the table. After three days of doing it, I had enough fun, and then I went to the window.What I thought was that I could hear the teacher's words and see the outside scene by the window. After the "propaganda artist" incident, I discovered swallows nesting above the window again!I asked aloud:

"What are u doing?" The teacher asked: "who are you talking to?" He hurried to the window and looked up.When I found out that I was talking to Swallow, the teacher looked extremely annoyed and stared at me fiercely.Then returned to the podium.Afterwards the teacher said to my mother: "It's not that I don't understand the minds of children, but it's better not to ask the swallow so loudly 'what are you doing' during class." In the TV, there is a boy from LD talking to the pigeon, and he is going to climb up the wall while talking, but he is caught by the teacher. There are also children who are always unable to learn to write, and the words written by that child appear on the camera. He can only write a few words sparsely on a large piece of paper.Although I can learn to write, but in the painting class, the teacher said, "Please draw a national flag." I thought that drawing the sun flag was too simple and boring, so I thought of drawing a navy flag or a warship flag. The kind of flag that looks a bit like the Asahi Shimbun logo.I used a crayon to draw a flag on the drawing paper, and then I remembered: "Oh, I forgot to draw the tassel and the flagpole!" But I had to draw it outside the drawing paper, that is, in three directions on the table. The tassels and flagpoles are also painted on the table.So when I wanted to hand over the painting to the teacher, there were traces of tassels in three directions on the table, and traces of flagpoles on one side.Being able to do such a thing, it seems that I am still very different from other children.The marks of the crayons can't be wiped off. The teacher once said to my mother: "Now the marks are still on the table." When watching this program, what shocked me the most is that one of the characteristics of LD children is that they don't understand why they are being blamed by the teacher.This is absolutely true.It seemed like I was always made to stand in the hallway.This is something I didn't know for sure until I started working in television.In TV Asahi's "Morning in Nara" program, in the column "Meeting", the person who came to the studio was a teacher from that elementary school. At that time, she was teaching the first grade class next door to us!The teacher said she still clearly remembers my first grade.According to the teacher, she sometimes had something to go to the office during class, and at that time she let the students study by themselves, and when she walked to the corridor, she would always find me standing there.When this teacher passed me, I asked her: "Teacher, I was punished to stand, why?" Or: "Teacher, don't you like promoting artists?" Or: "Did I do something wrong?" etc.As a result, when the teacher opened the door of the classroom, if he found me standing in the corridor, he would not go out.Although many years have passed, the teacher said it as if it happened yesterday, and the people in the studio laughed out loud, but because I don’t remember being punished to stand at all, I couldn’t help feeling very sad after hearing these words. surprise. Because of these things, my mother was finally invited to the school by the teacher, and was told: "It will disturb other students here, please send her to another school." Dropped out.Thinking about it now, I am sincerely grateful to the teacher who made me drop out, because if I didn’t drop out and I didn’t get understanding, then I would definitely be shrouded in a very strong sense of inferiority, and I didn’t know what to do, so I was just so confused I grew up in a daze.But after I was expelled from school, I was able to spend a happy elementary school life in the later school, and I was able to study freely and carefree. After watching the TV show, I wrote down what I learned about LD.There must have been children with LD in the past, but they were not understood. Instead, they were said to be poor tutors, children who didn’t work hard, and behaved willfully. They were regarded as “weird children”.And what is hard to judge is that children who are also LD may behave completely differently.They have no problem in intelligence, but they can't do things that other children can do. They either can't calm down, or can't participate in group activities. Find.Some children may experience difficulties when they enter school to learn to write and count.It's not that they can't learn it completely. For example, when writing the character "森", they clearly wanted to write it well, but for some reason they always put it in the wrong position, and finally wrote the three characters "木" in a row.This is said to be due to impairments in visuospatial cognition.It's really poor to think about that kid, he tried so hard to write well. I remembered that about 20 years ago, a well-known American female painter attended the program "Tetsuko's Cabin".The painter was illiterate when she was over thirty, but she could draw.When she was 30 years old, she felt that she couldn't go on like this anymore, so she went to a school in the United States specially set up for children with "dyslexia" to study, and finally learned to read when she was in her 30s.Dyslexia is also an unimaginable disorder in which a person with this disorder cannot understand the meaning of words anyway.People with literacy disabilities who can recognize the individual letters b, o, o, and k cannot comprehend the word "book" when these letters form a word.The female artist told me that she can only pronounce the word "book" aloud at the moment when she is jumping up on the trampoline.Many children with dyslexia go to juvenile clinics and homes in the United States, but they are called lazy people.It is pitiful to be misunderstood like this.So the female painter said: "I want people to know that there is such a disease in the world, so I gave a lecture tour throughout the United States." It is said that the United States has started research on LD a long time ago. LD is not an intellectual problem.Many children have strong personalities, and some children can learn in their areas of expertise.They can do well what they like.It is difficult to use the scale of mental retardation to measure them.In addition, according to the TV program, there seems to be some relationship between brain function and learning, which has not yet been clearly concluded.This research has only just begun, and many questions are still unclear.Because of this, LD's children are often discriminated against.Therefore, if you can know that it is LD earlier, and you can get the understanding of people around you, you can have self-confidence. In that way, even if the situation of LD can not be improved in an all-round way, these children can still live in the LD because of their basic abilities. Grow with the help of those around you.Although there are some things that I am not good at, but I can find things that I like and are good at, and I can move forward with a clear purpose.According to the book, boys with LD disorders are more common, and the ratio of male to female is roughly 4:1. The reason I cry watching TV is that the kids called LDs on the screen look just like myself when I was a kid.Some children can't calm down and run around. No matter how the teacher reminds them, they still like to go to the office. They go straight in and sit at the teacher's desk to study alone.I am also like this.A school was featured on TV where the teacher taught the students one-on-one in the office if such a situation arose.That way, children can calm down and concentrate on their studies. Another reason that made me cry is that I feel more clearly that although Principal Kobayashi has no idea what an LD is, he has given me, who may be an LD, an extremely appropriate and perfect education.First of all, there are only 9 people in our class, and the seats are not fixed, you can sit as you like.Moreover, after arriving at school in the morning, the teacher will write all the contents of each subject to be studied in the day on the blackboard, and everyone can start learning from the subjects they like.Therefore, everyone is actually doing self-study, and if there is something they don’t understand, they will ask the teacher for advice. The result is to learn one-on-one with the teacher.Teachers must also be able to understand what each child is interested in, what they are not very good at, and be able to understand each child's personality in detail.There are several children in the school who suffer from polio or other disabilities. The principal never said something like "Everyone should help them", but only said: "We must be together, we must work together." So we are together no matter what we do, and of course there will be no bullying of disabled children.And later I found out that Mr. Principal said something to each child to encourage him to increase his self-confidence.My husband would tell me "you are such a good boy" several times a day.I always thought that I was a good boy. When I grew up and recalled it, I noticed that there was a word "true" in my husband's words.This sentence from my husband almost determined my life. For me, this is really a rare golden word.Because of this sentence, I always thought that I was a good boy. I trusted my husband and grew up slowly with this confidence. Ba Xueyuan is such a school, where you will feel that you are always under the care of the principal, and it is a school that is reassuring; for interesting things, the principal thinks more than us, and is able to let us A school that is happy and happy; a school where no matter how the children run around without a moment of silence, they still encourage us to "run more is okay"; a school where everyone can climb "your own tree"; Time to talk is a school where children who are not good at speaking can gradually become good at expressing; it is a school where the floor of the auditorium is used as a big blackboard, and they can draw as big pictures as they want with white chalk on the ground.Mr. Principal hopes to discover the children's individuality as early as possible, so that the buds of the children's individuality will not be destroyed by the surrounding environment and adults, and to cherish and solemnly educate the children.Isn't this educational method of your husband just right for the children of LD?Watching the TV show, I felt a strong shock. The mothers of children with LD who are studying now, and those who asked me to talk about the stories in elementary school, they have already discovered the problem that I may be LD.It is said that in the United States, there will be one child in about 35 children in a class with LD disorder. Let me talk about what Edison, Einstein and I have in common. If there is anything, it is that Edison, like me, was dropped out of elementary school after a few months.His teachers and friends said he was "incompetent", only his mother who had been a teacher protected him and said: "No, this child definitely has his strengths." Edison turned out to be such a child. Einstein was not good at communicating with others, and he was not good at studying except mathematics. When he was in college, he had to look for a school that did not require exams. He finally entered a university, but he was still said to have "eccentricities" . These great geniuses in the future were actually LDs when they were young. This was only discovered through recent research.Because I wrote it, I was also found to be LD.These are the contents of the articles of the scholars.Indeed, in any case, it is undoubtedly gratifying to have this kind of commonality with the great genius. After reading some books related to LD, I found that Hollywood superstar Tom Cruise clearly declared himself to be LD.And he also encouraged LD's children: "Even so, as long as you find a job that suits you, you can do well." The more I read about it, the more I feel like LD myself.And I also found that many books listed people who used to be LDs and became active in a certain field when they grew up, and I was also included in this category of characters. In addition, I think the following article will definitely give courage to many people.At the beginning of the book "Ask Your Child With ADHD" there is this sentence: "For example, there was a baseball coach who was believed to have ADHD from a young age. The coach was cheerful and honest, and was loved by many people." Someone must understand, right?There must be a miracle.Let us all understand the children of LD and help them develop their talents!As they get older, they grow too, let them develop their personalities and let them achieve something! When I went to Ba Xueyuan on the first day, the principal said to me: "Tell me everything you like, you can say anything." So I put what a 6-year-old child can say, to that My whole life so far has been told. Later, I heard from my mother that I talked for 4 hours.Therefore, since the second day I entered Ba Xueyuan, I never stood by the window, and sat in the front seat.Moreover, now I can sit upright and listen to the conversations of the guests in the program "Tetsuko's Cabin". It took me so long to write, this is what I want to say about LD.