Greater Tainan’s Tekao Elementary School has, in taking in a stray dog, unwittingly provided itself with a valuable teaching aid for children attending the school that are physically or mentally challenged.
Staff said the school first saw Lala (拉拉), a Labrador, on school grounds at Christmas last year near the building where the school’s third-year students were studying.
Though Lala had been quiet and was quite friendly to the braver students, who had ventured forth to pet her, the school was nonetheless stumped over what to do with the dog, the school said, adding that security guards had led her off campus that day, only to have her return to the same spot the very next day.
Photo: Huang Wen-huang, Taipei Times
Noticing that Lala was unusually friendly with children, the head of the school’s consultation department took her to the school’s learning center to interact with students, most of whom were physically or mentally challenged.
To his surprise, an autistic child with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, who had close to no interaction with teachers or fellow students, kept petting the dog and talking to her, to which the Labrador reciprocated with friendly reactions.
After dean Chen Mao-sheng (陳茂盛) learned of the news, he and other faculty members made the decision to keep the dog at the school to help teachers manage their students.
As a precaution, the faculty took Lala to a veterinarian to have her checked out and found out through an implanted chip that she had an owner.
After contacting the owner, who admitted to being unable to care for the dog and abandoning her on the street, the school adopted Lala and gave her a new home in the student affairs division.
After learning that interaction with Lala helped calm down schoolchildren, other teachers asked to borrow her for their classes. She lived up to her reputation, doing her best to interact with students after arriving in each classroom.
Other teachers also used time with Lala as an incentive for children to focus more on their studies, which has put many of the faculty on the ever-growing waiting list to borrow Lala for their classes.
As a sign of thanks for her contributions, the school made a special teacher’s license for Lala and earlier this month held a special ceremony conferring the license upon the dog, hoping that she would stay and deepen her ties with the school.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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