Every Child is Special: a Reaction Paper

A friend was too busy to compose a reaction paper her boyfriend asked her to write (his assignment in school, actually). Enter me the savior. Here it is.

          Just like any other Aahmir Khan movie I had watched, Every Child Is Special made me cry buckets. And yes, I’m a guy but I cried. Who wouldn’t cry? It’s one of the most inspiring and touching movies of all time. It’s one of those movies that just won’t be forgotten easily, a movie that will be etched in a viewer’s mind, and a movie that surely will impart lessons about life, parenting, and teaching.

          The movie introduced me to the condition called dyslexia. It made me wonder and think back in time if some people I knew and met were dyslexic. I had classmates before in grade school that I really didn’t understand why they took too long to read a simple sentence or a short paragraph, which to me, were very easy. The movie made me wonder if, perhaps, some of them were dyslexic after all. At that time, it was either you were smart because you read fluently, or you were dull because you simply took a longer time to read simple words and sentences. There was no in-between, no label for those who had a hard time reading simply because what they saw when they try to read were different from what normal people see.

          Another lesson that the movie made me realize was about parenting, about how parents should love their children equally, how they should accept them whatever conditions come with them when they were born and whoever they turn out to be. Parents should love their child all the more when they realize that he did not turn out to be the child they wanted to have. For a person still planning to have his own family and children in the future like I, that lesson in the movie will not be forgotten easily. With that alone, my mind was already awakened to the heavy responsibility of how a parent should love his child.

          Another deep lesson being carved in my mind was about how teachers greatly affect their students’ outlook in life, and how they influence them. A simple show of care and understanding goes a long way, especially if that child has undergone something, e.g., personal crisis in coping with personal incapability, family problem, among other things.

          Those are the three main lessons that I won’t easily forget about the movie Every Child Is Special. I’m sure that it won’t be easily forgotten. The movie introducing me to dyslexia was like a Baader-Meinhof phenomenon to me: after seeing/knowing about it, I start to see it everywhere. What I mean is, after watching the movie, I started to get to know people, be it in person or I only know of or read about, who were dyslexic.