Every Child is Special

Movie Review

BY

Renz E. Olermo

(BSED1A – SCIENCE)

TO

Sir. Alvin Austria Manganti

 EVERY CHILD IS SPECIAL

I. Character and Character Description

Ishaan Nandkishore Awasthi (Darsheel Safary)- is an eight-year-old boy who

dislikes school and fails every test or exam. He finds all subjects difficult, and is

belittled by his teachers and classmates. But Ishaan's internal world is rich with

wonders that he is unable to convey to others, magical lands filled with colour

and animated animals. He is an artist whose talent is unrecognized.

Ishaan's father, Nandkishore Awasthi (Vipin Sharma) - is a successful executive

who expects his children to excel.

Ishaan’s Maya Awasthi (Tisca Chopra) – is a loving mother that is always caring

for her sons. But frustrated due to her inability to educate her son Ishaan.

Ishaan's elder brother, Yohaan (Sachet Engineer) - is an exemplary scholar and

athlete, which Ishaan is frequently reminded of.

Rajan (Tanay Chheda) – One of the classmate of Ishaan when he is transferred

that became his friend. Rajan is physically disabled and one of the top students

in his class.

Ram Shankar Nikumbh (Aamir Khan) - joins the school's faculty. An instructor at

the Tulips School for young children with developmental disabilities, Nikumbh's
teaching style is markedly different from that of his strict predecessor, and he

quickly observes that Ishaan is unhappy and contributes little to class activities.
II. Plot

Ishaan Awasthi (Darsheel Safary) is an eight-year-old whose world is filled

with wonders that no one else seems to appreciate; colors, fish, dogs and kites

are just not important in the world of adults, who are much more interested in

things like homework, marks and neatness. And Ishaan just cannot seem to get

anything right in class.

When he gets into far more trouble than his parents can handle, he is

packed off to a boarding school to be disciplined. Things are no different at his

new school, and Ishaan has to contend with the added trauma of separation

from his family.

One day a new art teacher bursts onto the scene, Ram Shankar Nikumbh

(Aamir Khan), who infects the students with joy and optimism. He breaks all the

rules of how things are done by asking them to think, dream and imagine, and

all the children respond with enthusiasm, all except Ishaan. Nikumbh soon

realizes that Ishaan is very unhappy, and he sets out to discover why. With time,

patience and care, he ultimately helps Ishaan find himself.

III. Related Literature and Studies

Ishaan is a boy who has a trouble in reading and writing and because of it

Ishaan can’t cope up to other normal kid who can read and write. This disability

of Ishaan is called dyslexia. According to the article of Luciana Cidrim and

Francisco Madeiro (2017), Dyslexia is a learning disorder that affects word

recognition during reading, spelling (sounding out letters) and writing. It is the

result of a phonological processing deficit. Phonological deficit hinders the

learning of the alphabetical principle of the language, more specifically, the

phoneme-grapheme correspondence. In languages such as French, this

correspondence is the basic aspect for the successful learning of the reading

and writing skills.

According to Katherine Martinelli (2019), Dyslexia is not a reflection of a

child’s intelligence in fact it’s defined as a gap between a student’s ability and

achievement. Some youngsters with dyslexia are able to keep up with their

peers with extra effort at least for the first few grades. But by the third grade or

so, when they need to be able to read quickly and fluently in order to keep up

with their work, they run into trouble. Dyslexia can result in frustration,

embarrassment, avoidance and low self-esteem as a result of difficulties

performing tasks that seem to come naturally to others. Demystifying the

learning disorder with your child can help him develop the tools and resilience

necessary to manage it, both in school and in social circumstances.

 Despite the many confusions and misunderstandings, the term dyslexia is

commonly used by medical personnel, researchers, and clinicians. One of the

most common misunderstandings about this condition is that dyslexia is a

problem of letter or word reversals (b/d, was/saw) or of letters, words, or

sentences "dancing around" on the page (Rayner, Foorman, Perfetti, Pesetsky, &

Seidenberg, 2001).

According to the book “Dyslexia: Learning Disorder or Creative Gift?” by

Cornelia Jantzen (2009), Dyslexia has long been known as a learning difficulty

that primarily affects literacy skills. Increasingly, however, researchers and

professionals working with dyslexia suggest that it is less a disorder than a sign of

specially gifted people. People with dyslexia often have a highly developed

imagination and a unique way of perceiving things. They frequently have above

average intelligence and are highly creative, provided they are supported and

nurtured by parents and teachers.

According to the study Responsiveness to Intervention in Children with

Dyslexia by Elisabeth A. T. Tilanus, Elian Segers, et al. (2016),”We examined the

responsiveness to a 12‐week phonics intervention in 54 s‐grade Dutch children

with dyslexia, and compared their reading and spelling gains to a control group

of 61 typical readers. The intervention aimed to train grapheme–phoneme

correspondences (GPCs), and word reading and spelling by using phonics

instruction. We examined the accuracy and efficiency of grapheme–phoneme

correspondences, decoding words and pseudo words, as well as the accuracy

of spelling words before and after the intervention. Moreover, responsiveness to

intervention was examined by studying to what extent scores at posttest could

directly or indirectly be predicted from precursor measures. Results showed that

the children with dyslexia were significantly behind in all reading and spelling

measures at pretest. During the intervention, the children with dyslexia made

more progress on GPC, (pseudo)word decoding accuracy and efficiency, and

spelling accuracy than the typical reading group. Furthermore, we found a

direct effect of the precursor measures rapid automatized naming, verbal

working memory and phoneme deletion on the dyslexic children's progress in

GPC speed, and indirect effects of rapid automatized naming and phoneme

deletion on word and pseudo word efficiency and word decoding accuracy

via the scores at pretest”.

According to the study Spelling Errors of Dyslexic Children in Bosnian

Language With Transparent Orthography by Mirela Duranović (2016), the study

was to explore the nature of spelling errors made by children with dyslexia in

Bosnian language with transparent orthography. Three main error categories

were distinguished: phonological, orthographic, and grammatical errors. An

analysis of error type showed 86% of phonological errors, 10% of orthographic

errors, and 4% of grammatical errors. Furthermore, the majority errors were the

omissions and substitutions, followed by the insertions, omission of rules of

assimilation by voicing, and errors with utilization of suffix. The researcher can
conclude that phonological errors were dominant in children with dyslexia at all

grade levels.

According to the study Spelling difficulties in Spanish-speaking children

with dyslexia by Paz Suárez-Coalla, Nerea Villanueva, et al. (2016), In addition to

reading difficulties, a significant proportion of developmental dyslexics have

spelling problems, which persist into adulthood. Studies carried out in languages

with opaque orthographies have found that dyslexics frequently make

phonological substitutions when spelling and have difficulties in developing

orthographic representations of irregular words. Those errors seem to derive from

an excessive use of phonological codes when writing. Minimal research in

Spanish (relatively transparent orthography) about the relationship between

dyslexia and spelling difficulties has been carried out to date. In this study, 19

Spanish-speaking developmental dyslexics (from 7 to 11 years old) and 28

controls (from 6 to 11 years old, distributed in two groups, one matched for age

and the other for reading level with the dyslexics) performed a dictation task of

80 stimuli with different levels of orthographic consistency, in order to discover

the codes they use in the writing process. Results showed that Spanish children

with dyslexia made significantly more spelling errors, especially among the ruled

and irregular words. These findings are consistent with the idea that these

children have difficulties in developing orthographic representations and use

phonological codes more frequently than non-dyslexics, resulting in

phonologically plausible errors when writing irregular words. These results have
important implications for the treatment of spelling difficulties in children with

dyslexia, highlighting the need to focus on the correct acquisition of grapheme-

phoneme conversion rules as well as the development of appropriate

orthographic representations.

I chose these citations because in the film Every Child Is Special, we can

see that Ishaan Nandkishore Awasthi is just a boy who suffered from having

reading difficulty or also a disability known as dyslexia. And because of dyslexia

many children’s are having a hard time to read and write. By knowing dyslexia

many teacher can provide special care for student’s like Ishaan. Also this can

give the parents a proper way to help their child to grow.

IV. Reflection

Every teacher plays an important role in the development of his/her students.

This one holds true in the movie “Every Child is Special” which is about the boy,

Ishaan Awasthi, who was suffering from dyslexia and the teacher who changed

his life. Ishaan had difficulty in recognizing letters and numbers and could hardly

read and write. The condition of Ishaan that his mother and father did not know

especially his teacher’s. This leads to giving him a feeling of isolation to other

children’s by not having the ability to read and write properly.

The kind of treatment we build to the young ones can greatly affects how they

view themselves and what they will become in the future. And because of that

they become rebellious and hard to learn in the school because of the lack of

knowledge to know their conditions

In the movie, Ishaan met Mr. Ram Shankar Nikumbh, a substitute art teacher.

With his persistence to help the young boy, he found out the boy’s condition

and so offered extra time to teach him in learning how to write and read by

using different methods. For me, the character of Mr. so Shankar Nikumbh shows

us some qualities of a great teacher. A teacher who does not only teach, but

inspires as well. The teacher’s persistence to truly understand the boy changes

everything. From a lazy, dumb boy as others view he was, turned to a very smart

and gifted boy in the end. A very promising artist to remember.

Oftentimes we are blinded by the strict rules and high standards in meeting

academic requirements, that, we fail to see the person’s worth. Sometimes we

look on a person base on their performance but not their potential as a learner.

As to why teacher’s view student’s who are not performing well in school not

worth their time. I believe that every teacher should not always focus on

teaching their subject but also have the care for the students to help in every

way they can.

References

http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1516-

18462017000600842

https://childmind.org/article/understanding-dyslexia/

http://www.ldonline.org/article/14907/

https://www.amazon.com/Dyslexia-Learning-Disorder-Creative-

Gift/dp/0863157092

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02103702.2015.1132979

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/dys.1533

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0022219416645814

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/186787.php
OLERMO, RENZ E.

BSED1A