Communicating Peter Documentary Summary

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ducating Peter is a documentary about Peter, a special needs student with Down's syndrome, and his journey of inclusion in a standard third grade classroom in public school. In my opinion one of Peter's strengths included being able to match pictures to what he was hearing. For example, the scene in the documentary which showed the teacher asking for him to point at the picture of the different things being listed. This would imply to me that Peter could have been picture smart. Also, I observed throughout the video that Peter seem to have found it extremely difficult to stay still for a long period of time, especially when he was not directly engaged. As far as weaknesses are concerned, it was abviously difficult for Peter to talk and communicate …show more content…

It brought light to how challenging an inclusion class could be. Although it was very much inspiring and intriguing to see the role that both the teacher and the other students played in Peter’s life in the classroom, this documentary left a lot of room for some uncomfortable feelings as well. Unfortunately, children were physically harmed by Peter on a day to day basis. Despite the fact that I knew Peter had down syndrome, and he was probably thinking irrationally, it was very difficult to watch Peter kick a child in the face for no apparent reason and then later tackle another child. Therefore, there were a few issues that I had in regards to Peter's educational …show more content…

It appeared that throughout the video Peter had too many opportunities in which his aggressive in behavior resulted in other children getting hurt. This leads me to my second issue which was the delay and unpreparedness in response to these aggressive behaviors. Majority of the scenes where children where physically mistreated by Peter seem to have been unsupervised, those with obvious supervision seemed to have had a delayed response to what was taking place, or the response did not seem to be highly effective. The third issue I have makes me think about the old saying "An idle mind is the devil's playground”, which in other words means that a person who doesn't have something particular to occupy himself with doing will be tempted to occupy himself with sin. Although having outburst are somewhat a norm with this kind of condition, in my opinion Peter was not provided with enough opportunity to be constantly engaged, if that was so, I do believe that his number of outburst would have lessen. If I was faced with a similar situation as a teacher, I would firstly try to gain more knowledge about the condition so as to better educate myself. Secondly if allowed, I would partner up with a specialist who could offer me their expertise on the best way to deal with different situation that may occur as a result of the condition. I would also do constant observations and note taking which could help me determine

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