"As a kid, I remember listening wide-eyed to my grandmother tell me about the “Dummy Room.” The Dummy Room was one of her first assignments as a young teacher in small-town Iowa in the 1930s. Like other Dummy Rooms across the country, it was the dumping ground for the school district’s hard cases.
The Dummy Room was supposed to be just for the “retards,” as they were widely called back then. But as Grandma quickly found out, many of the kids she’d been handed had no mental disabilities at all. Some just needed glasses. Others needed hearing aids. Many improved immediately after a few regular meals and proper grooming.
The road to the Dummy Room left scars on some of those kids. Frustrated (or sadistic) teachers had yelled at them or simply ignored them. Some of the kids had endured corporal punishment when they failed to respond to normal teaching methods. Thank goodness, I’ve often thought, that such treatment is a thing of the past. We now have special education and highly trained teachers. Ours is a more enlightened age."
The Dummy Room was supposed to be just for the “retards,” as they were widely called back then. But as Grandma quickly found out, many of the kids she’d been handed had no mental disabilities at all. Some just needed glasses. Others needed hearing aids. Many improved immediately after a few regular meals and proper grooming.
The road to the Dummy Room left scars on some of those kids. Frustrated (or sadistic) teachers had yelled at them or simply ignored them. Some of the kids had endured corporal punishment when they failed to respond to normal teaching methods. Thank goodness, I’ve often thought, that such treatment is a thing of the past. We now have special education and highly trained teachers. Ours is a more enlightened age."
