"POKER CHIPS"

I became familiar with Rick Lavoie in my SPE400 class and I think he's great. He is a nationally known expert on learning dissabilities. His plan in educating these types of students is a lot of positive feedback. I think this should apply to all students. His plan is to constantly boost a childs self-esteem. We should think of self-esteem as poker chips. When good things happen to you, you get alot of poker chips. The charmed life of a popular kid has a lot of poker chips. The kid with LD has a small stack.

We as teachers should go to bat for our kids. There are going to be many people in a childs life to take away chips but I'm going to make sure I leave a student with more chips than he came in my class with. I think you can be an extremely intelligent teacher, a very educated teacher , but if you don't know how to motivate kids and make them feel good about themselves , you won't be successful. That's the one thing I will concentrate on as a teacher is making my kids feel good about themselves so they want to learn.