We are back from S. Korea and I’d like to share one stand-out from our trip. It is about one of our students. He is an eight-year-old boy who had been unofficially diagnosed with a learning disability, the inability to pay attention. Any official diagnosis or therapy has been difficult because the Mayflower Church has moved numerous times in trying to find a residence that will keep their community together. Even apart from that, their situation is tenuous at best – the S. Koreans don’t want them there because of the tension it creates with their looming neighbor, China. Most Korean services available to Koreans are not available to them as Chinese refugees. Any diagnosis in this situation comes only from observation of all his teachers who have universally had great difficulty keeping him attentive and focused on their lessons.
Gail and I are by no means teachers of children, and to be truthful, the 2.5-hour daily morning class with the children was, while a great opportunity to develop relationships with the children, our consistently most difficult class to plan for and carry off each day. They have all the typical children’s issues of competition, emotional ups and downs, multiple levels of English among the children, making it difficult to know what material will benefit all of them equally, etc. We often left at the end of class feeling like failures and having the sense that the only guiding principle was chaos. Our respect level for teachers of children who spend their lives nurturing this age level has risen exponentially. All that being said, though, perhaps we did some good and increased their English skills an iota or two.
The learning disability reared its head early, of course. The boy in question, let’s call him Jimmy, had no focus or attention on what we were doing up front longer than a minute or less in the early classes. He would stare at us while we led them in English vocabulary, holding up pictures and asking them to repeat the names of the objects, then leading them in sentences and questions about them. But before too long, he would drift away and would be examining the items on his desk intensely, picking each one up and looking closely at it, or playing with it – no eye contact after that point. Gail and I would try all the tricks we knew to keep him involved in the lessons.
We are hardly professional children’s teachers, so our personal resources for this process were limited. However, about mid-second week, we began to notice that about 80% of the time we called on him, even though he was intensely involved in examining his nametag or pencil case, he would chime in with the correct answer.
As we watched him while teaching the class each day, we became aware that he is highly intelligent. His drawings were extremely detailed and creative. One of his homework assignments where he was tasked with drawing the furniture in the lesson and labeling it properly with English words was a creative masterpiece with military “army-man” subplots going on in the background and with every carefully scribed label neat and correct. Gail and I were amazed. He certainly didn’t have an attention problem while drawing that picture.
Coincidentally, we were scheduled to eat dinner with Jimmy’s family about that time, and, using our translator, we brought up the subject of his “learning disability” with the parents. We made it a point to tell them that we had observed that he was a bright child, and as evidence we showed them the picture he had drawn. The parents didn’t know what to make of the high level of detail. It challenged all their preconceptions about his “inability” to focus on a task. They talked about his obsession with bugs, where he collected all manner of six- and eight-legged creatures, always, of course, picking them up and running to show them off to his parents, specifically to his screeching mother.
As Gail and I continued to watch Jimmy in class, we noticed a lot of squinting and rubbing of his eyes toward the middle and latter part of each period. Was he having vision problems? Each day we corroborated this idea further by moving him closer to the board for copy work, holding the pictures within 3 feet of him when doing drills, etc. His classroom performance noticeably improved. In fact, when we put him 5 feet from the whiteboard, he would begin to write on his paper, but then he would get up and squat directly in front of the board, studying it as if seeing it for the first time, then go back to his paper and write. There was now nothing wrong with his attention span.
We mentioned this possibility to the adult assistant who was with us in class each day, and they said no, it was an attention problem. We talked to the parents about the possibility that Jimmy simply couldn’t see the board clearly and probably never had. We described what his world must be like being able to see clearly only the things up close and sitting in class wondering why he couldn’t do the things the other students were able to do. He would have no idea, of course, that his sight was any different from anyone else’s. We suggested that his withdrawn and inattentive classroom behavior could be explained by his poor eyesight and by the fact that he tended to pay attention to what he could actually see rather than what he couldn’t.
The parents were skeptical but agreed to take him to an ophthalmologist, which they did the next day. We were down to the end of our time in Jeju by now, and when Jimmy came back to class the next day, we were told that he has fairly severe astigmatism and, indeed, needs glasses.
We were scheduled to leave Jeju and return home just two days later. We would not get to see the great improvement in Jimmy’s performance that would probably result from his new glasses the following Monday. But we sat down with the family again and encouraged them to be patient as Jimmy adjusted to seeing the world everyone else could see for probably the first time in his life. We are praying that the glasses give him opportunities he has never had simply because he couldn’t see what the other children can see.
On our first Monday back home, we received an email from the mother, who had agreed to communicate with us about his progress through the online translator: “Thank you for letting me know about my child’s problems, for letting me see Jesus in your life…and that we are not walking this path on our own, but God is leading us.” She included a beautiful picture of Jimmy wearing his new glasses with a huge smile. (Picture excluded because of security issues, but it is a really sweet and grinning picture. I’m sorry I can’t show it.).