Diko can be difficult. He is one of the sweetest kids I've ever met, yet hardly ever fails to frustrate me. He insists on holding the door for the whole class to pass through out of pure chivalry, yet he has trouble completing the most simple tasks, such as sitting in his seat for more than a minute at a time. He is not simply a fidgety child. I've seen plenty of those, and Diko is different.
He is not stupid, and he means well. I truly believe this, but I sometimes have to keep repeating it in my mind as a mantra of sorts to keep from snapping at him. If my patience needs to be tested, Diko is doing a mighty fine, albeit unsolicited, job of doing so.
He had made some incredible progress by December break, to the point where I told myself that it was worth devoting a little extra time to his cause. I had a system in which I would break down his classwork into its most basic parts and time him for each part. He went from spending over three minutes to write his name and the date (amidst heavy coaxing on my behalf, mind you) to completing his name, the date, and copying down the question in well under that time. He was so proud of his progress that he began asking me to take out my timer before he began any work.
I knew from speaking to Diko that his extracurricular life revolved almost exclusively around Xbox. As Ms. Zeljak explained to me, his single mother is stuck in single-not-mother mode, and is not about to be held back socially by a fourth grader. Turns out Black Ops is a much cheaper alternative to a babysitter.
I've spoken to Diko extensively about his gaming habit, stressing the importance of reading if he wants to advance. But a six-hour-a-day habit can be a hard one to break.
I almost gave up on Diko after returning from December break. I guess all it took was a few weeks of nearly uninterrupted gameplay to take him back to where he was in September. I thought about all the time I had spent planted next to him, forgoing to attend to the momentary needs of his classmates because with with Diko it's your undivided attention or it's not even worth trying. But something had to give.
I decided to treat Diko as if he were any fourth grader. That meant no more painstaking half-hour sessions trying to get him to write a response to a single, straightforward question. No more verbally dragging him back into a lesson when he had wandered off, in body or mind (or most often, both). And hardest of all, no more feeling like he was my personal burden.
One thing I would not quit on, however, were the videogames. I continued to ask him, every Monday, how his weekend had been and what he had done. At first the answer was always the same: I played my games. That response eventually morphed into: you already know. Eventually, though, I noticed a note of shame and embarrassment in his responses. Somewhere in that mystery of a mind of his, he knew his habit was only setting him back academically.
Thursday, the day before the second longest vacation during the school year, I asked Diko what his plans were for vacation. To my surprise and delight, "play the game" was not among them. He told me he wanted to make me proud, and had stopped playing his video games over a week ago. He gave me the titles of all the books he was hoping to read over the vacation.
The day before, the class had been assigned to draw their future offices. Diko drew himself behind a librarian's desk.
