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Class Notes
	How we define intelligence... (Published April 4, 2005) By MATT WENNERSTEN

Do mentally retarded kids belong in the regular classroom?

Just before spring break I lost my patience with a gentle, good-natured kid, mildly mentally retarded, who just couldn’t figure out what should have been a simple subtraction problem. "A cell phone plan costs $25 to sign up, and after one minute of talking, the total cost is $25.13. How much was 1 minute? What’s the difference?" I asked. My student told me, "One is bigger than the other." Me: "Okay, by how much?" The reply: "It’s more!" Me: "That’s right. How much more?" The student: "One is $25 and the other is $25 and 13 cents." "OK, so exactly how much is the difference?" "The second one costs more!" – at which point I suggested that we stop working on this and come back to it tomorrow, since I couldn’t think of another way to explain it and I was about ready to get tremendously angry.

The next day, I came in before school and found that before I arrived at 8 a.m., another kid had showed my student how to find the difference by making a table: 0 minutes / $25.00, 1 minute / $25.13, 2 minutes / $25.26, 3 minutes, etc. Immediately my student saw the pattern of $0.13 per minute.

It is a tragedy of modern education how we define intelligence. What we call "smart" has nothing to do with how much we know, how much we can learn or how deeply we can think. Instead, when we observe other people, we decide if someone is smart or not by how quickly they work, how good their memory is, and how much they can keep in their head at one time.

For example, consider this problem: A farmer has chickens and rabbits. On the farm there are 20 heads and 48 legs. How many chickens and how many rabbits does the farmer have? If 100 people tried to work this problem out, the "smartest" person would be the person who found the right combination of chickens and rabbits the fastest, and/or the one who figured it out without writing anything down. Why do we care, if all 100 people found the right answer, and it took some five minutes and some 25? If there was some premium for working fast, we should care, but frankly, for most jobs, there really isn’t. Life is both un-timed and open-book. The manager who can make the right decision in 30 seconds versus the manager who needs five minutes to make up her mind are for all intents and purposes equivalent, since in almost every scenario, it’s not life or death, and waiting five minutes doesn’t matter. (Answer: 16 chickens, 4 rabbits)

Sometimes, even as a teacher, I forget that everyone processes information in different ways and at different rates; we all have our strengths and weaknesses. One explanation will not be clear to everybody. Whether I have mentally retarded kids in my class or not, I need to present several different approaches to problem solving, and repeat a skill until the class as a whole has mastered it, not just the one or two bright sparks who pick it up on the first go ’round. This is just good teaching. In fact, I’ve had several smart students from years past who compliment me on the fact that once they’ve learned something, I didn’t immediately move on to the next thing. Instead, I tried to repeat and reinforce until it was burned into their skulls.

Cognitive research, the study of the brain and how we think, has shown that to develop expertise, to really be an expert, requires practice beyond mastery. In other words, if you stop practicing once you get an idea, you never get really good at it and, in fact, you risk losing it completely. If you practice beyond the point where you have the main idea, you truly own the skill. This is why basketball players try to make 100 lay-ups in a row instead of stopping once they’ve made 10.

You might think that a student who can’t figure out the difference between $25 and $25.13 shouldn’t be in algebra, but instead should be taking a basic arithmetic class. As it turns out, this kid has an "A" in my algebra class, and not because the class is easy. On the last test, the student scored 46 out of 50 compared to a class average of 35. The nature of the kid’s brain is that new stuff goes in slowly, and only in very specific ways, but once it’s in, it’s burned in solidly and not forgotten. For example, once this kid learned how to solve an equation, the skill was mastered and I could count on 90 percent or more of equations to be correct on the first attempt.

What the 13 cents shows is that the kid is clearly capable of learning, even if I’m not always capable of teaching. If we were instead to let IQ determine what class a kid should be in, this student would never have a chance to do algebra, or any other subject thought to be too difficult for the mentally retarded.

While it depends to a certain extent on the nature of the retardation, and how severe, ultimately we have to take the approach of preparing all of our kids as best we can. As this example has shown, kids who learn slowly can be very successful in the classroom and develop the same degree of mastery as any other. Our responsibility to them is the same as to any other student.

Mentally retarded kids and kids with learning disabilities, or kids who are just "slow," belong in the regular classroom – and they belong there because they can learn, they can do well, they are part of our society and will be part of our regular workforce. How can we expect them to contribute if we keep them in the dark?

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Wennersten is a mathematics teacher at Bell Multicultural Senior High School and a graduate of the D.C. Teaching Fellows program. Contact him at mwenners@yahoo.com.

Copyright 2005 The Common Denominator