In what is called a "self-contained" classroom, an elementary school teacher is with the same students the whole school day. It becomes very clear that each student is unique. Over the course of school days from September to June, a student's appearance, habits, strengths, academic weaknesses emerge to create that person's "essence" in the teacher's mind. I taught the 5th grade for 4 years. For the first two years, four 5th grades ran in a self-contained way. For the last two years, the students moved from teacher to teacher for different subjects, the way our junior highs, senior highs and college classes do.
In those latter years, I taught arithmetic to four different groups each day. The classes were supposedly differentiated by ability. But it was always possible that a student in the "highest" class would have trouble with a concept or a calculation while a student in the "lowest" sailed through ideas and operations. A friend recently used the word "class" to mean a group that had some sort of similar record or label and the word "case" to mean an occasion when attention was focused on that student alone and that student's unique personality, history, family setting, abilities, and interests.
I have been reading Prof. Anil Seth's "Being You: A New Science of Consciousness". I also have Prof. David Linden's "Unique: The New Science of Human Individuality". I am reading aloud to Lynn the book by Carl Zimmer "She Has Her Mother's Life: The Powers, Perversions and Potential" of heredity. These books often focus on what there is about me or about you that is not true of anyone else, on the uniqueness of the individual. The picture of a therapist and a single patient sitting facing each other and talking about the patient's life, problems, difficulties and goals is the typical picture of a specialist concentrating on a client's description of dealing with some personal combination of mental, emotional or social difficulties. Sometimes, a classroom teacher has such a session with a student or a parent.
