An educational story

It starts up stairs in a church building durring the last thirty minutes of an Awana meeting. A boy is upset about his lack of progress in his awana book. I normally do not work ini this room but they needed help so I go in there. I help out two boys then I move to the one who is not trying to learn his verses. He is way behind in his book and I start to work with him and there they come. The excuses start coming and I start to encourage him that he can in fact say verses. He tells me its hard and I agree with him that it is indeed hard but he is able to learn them. So after about a 5 min coversation of trying to get him to learn a verse we go up to a white board and I have him start to write the verse out adding 3-5 words at a time. Each time he repeats the whole verse after he adds new words. Then he has the entire verse up and I make him repeat it a few times. Then I start to remove a word at a time and have him repeat it with the missing words. Then its time to go. I finally find his mom and talk to her about this. My attempt to get her to study with her son is responded to with legitimate excuses. He is having a hard time in life, and he has had problems learning in many areas of study. The boy admited to me up stairs that he just does not want to work very hard. The mom then start to use The Excuse that is sure to silence all motivation and reasons for working harder. You guessed it "learning disability". Learning disability for a boy who learned John 1;1 and almost learned 1 John 5:5 in about 15 minutes. The learning disability which I will not discard as being a real problem does not excuse one from overcoming? Or does it?

I would of course say no it does not. I am not good at a lot of things naturally. What that means is that I must put forth extra effort into working on these areas. If we reconize in a child the real dificulty in mastering a particular skill that is going to be needed for every day life what should be done? Should one Pitty this child and allow him to be babied? Perhaps taking some emotions away from this will be helpful.

Lets look at an adult who has $50,000 dollars in consumer debt on Credit cards, $100,000 mortage on his house, and a $10,000 car payment, with a salary of $80,000 in his mid 30's. Do we say that this guy has a money management problem? Yes, of course he does. He is making a good salary as a single man and because, he has wanted things before he could pay for them allong with some miss fortune ran up $50,000 on credit cards. The Car payment is on a car that is more than he can afford considering his debt. The house is exceptable but perhaps not wise considering the other two. So what would we tell this man to do? We would tell him to start spending less, cut up his credit cards, pay the money he has promised to pay, and start being a steward of his resources that God has given him. These are habbits that can be changed and attitudes and ways of life that are able to be painfully corrected.

The same goes with the learning disability. It is harder for this young man to learn but hard work will pay off. It will pay off in all areas of his life not just awana.

The saddest part of this story is what the mother said at the end of the conversation where I was trying to show her house her son could finish his book this year by passing three sections a week. This involves four verses a week on average. She said, "hopefully you will get what you want". She took my challenge for her to help her son develope as something I wanted for myself. Not as something she could do to build character into her child. Thats why I wrote this. Some victums wish to continue to be victums.