Answer Page 15

If someone said "I believe fervently that to teach all children the same way is to treat them unequally. Different kids have different learning needs; they have the right to have their needs met." Would you agree or disagree?

Wouldn't you look great if you knew the author of the statement was Dr. Mel Levine, author of the book A Mind at a Time and the director of the Clinical Center for the Study of Development and Learning at the University of North Carolina!

You should probably stress the importance of dealing with all students as individuals. That does not mean you need 30 different lesson plans to meet the 30 different sets of needs of your students. It does mean you should make every effort to be flexible both in the way you present material and in the way you evaluate your students.

If you can, give a couple of examples of how you dealt differently with two or three students in one of your classes:

Johnny was a "C" student who seemed "bored" with history but loved his iPod so I had him do a report on the music of the Roaring Twenties.
Billy would rather study his car magazines than read about "the Jazz Age" so I had him do a report on the cars that GM and Ford produced in the late twenties.
Meanwhile, I had Fred, the kid who wanted to be a politician, work on a report of the Presidents of the Twenties.