EU PROGRES

Interview with Grade Teacher Slavica Jovanovic

“Although I have the title of professor of pedagogy, I prefer calling myself a grade teacher, because I have the most responsible, the most beautiful and, at the same time, most difficult job. We, grade teachers, bring up new generations, form people, form humans!”

Slavica Jovanovic, known to her colleagues as Dunja, has been working as a grade teacher in the Prokuplje primary school Ratko Pavlovic Cicko for twenty years now. Slavica has been devotedly helping a girl with impaired eyesight fit in the school system for three years now. 

PROGRES: What do you like best about your job?
Slavica: I love working with children. It’s difficult sometimes, but when you realise after a number of years that you were an important figure and a milestone in someone’s life, you realise that you were born into this world to leave a trace, a trace that will remain visible for a long, long time.

PROGRES: A girl with impaired eyesight enrolled in your class three years ago. How did that seem at the time?
Slavica: Before 1^st grade started, the school principal told me a blind girl had enrolled in our school. I agreed to teach her. I had rarely had the opportunity to even meet a blind person, and now I was to work with a blind child. How? My first step was to meet her mother, who told me that the girl, Danica, had a twin sister, Dragana, whose eyesight was not impaired. My impression of the mother, Sanja, was of a fighter, a courageous, devoted, persistent, enterprising, strict and demanding mother. I perceived her also as a good associate and a partner in our work. That is the key to success – when the cooperation between the parents and the teachers is strong. When the teacher and the parents think the same, you can’t miss, success is guaranteed. The mother shared with me important information about the girls and I was to meet them the next day. Millions of questions buzzed in my mind: what does she look like, how do I greet her, what present should I buy her, what should I ask her, what… When I met the girls, I realised that sister Dragana also provided a lot of support to Danica, in addition to their mother.

I spent that whole summer looking for information about the blind and how to work with them.

PROGRES: What problems did you face at the time?
Slavica: First grade is the time when you learn the letters of the alphabet, how to read and write. It was a great problem to fit Danica in. She would bring her Braille machine to school, that was the first time I ever saw one. And she and I together learned to write the dots, step by step, while the other children were learning the letters.

A cell of six dot positions is the main character in Braille. Various combinations of the dots make up the characters – letters, numbers, parentheses, commas, question and exclamation marks, apostrophes, music notes. I practiced by myself at home, too. We needed special paper but there wasn’t any so we typed on ordinary paper. I am keeping everything we did on paper, filed properly by date, and when the times improve, I am planning on binding it all and giving it to Danica, as a memento of the first things she learned.

I had to devote my attention to the other pupils at the same time. All of them individually were starved for knowledge, everyone in their own way. I had to find a way to fit all this within the teaching process. I spent a lot of time browsing the Internet, reading literature, sharing information with people who are versed in this issue. We’re still thinking up the best ways to work, often improvising along the way.

PROGRES: How did Danica fit in the group of children who can see?
Slavica: I realised at the very beginning of 1^st grade that she is a happy, outgoing, persistent, hard-working girl, who does not have complexes because she can’t see. She is extremely talkative, knows the capitals of nearly all countries, knows what a cell of an organism consists of, knows how many planets there are in the Solar System and their names. She’s won first place at the state competition of blind poem reciters for two years in a row. She writes very good poems and essays and she won prizes at every single competition I sent her works to. That makes her particularly happy. 

When you watch her play with her friends in the school yard – she skips rope, rides a bike, climbs trees… you would never know she was blind.

PROGRES: Did you get support?
Slavica: There was help, but mostly financial. Humanitarian rock concerts and performances were staged and all the money was paid into Danica’s account. Part of it was used to buy speech software, but we’re unfortunately not using it yet, because we haven’t undergone the training.

The PROGRES staff were the first to give us something specific that will help us make headway a lot – the board game “Sorry!”, playing cards, a writing pad, set of geometry tools, as well as books in Braille and maps donated to the Association of the Blind of the Toplica District.

PROGRES: What happens when Danica finishes 4^th grade?
Slavica: Everything will be all right for another year. What happens afterwards? I can’t say how she will adjust to 12-13 subject teachers as of 5^th grade, and how they will adjust to her. I think the Education Ministry should look into this more seriously. Yes, inclusion is necessary, but not in the way it is envisaged now. I think that children with intellectual difficulties cannot follow class but that children with sensory and motor difficulties (blind, deaf, dystrophic) can. In any case, greater will of the individuals and the society’s financial support will lead to success!

Coincidentally, our friend Pavle, whose psycho-motor development is slower and who suffers from some even graver health problems, also joined our class. His adjustment to the education system had been much more difficult. Our class has become a small family, where everyone looks after everyone else, but after Pavle and Danica as well.