Tag: special ed

A horrible story you don’t want to read

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

I got an email yesterday that I had some paperwork to do for one of my students. The paperwork was some sort of screening or intake form for an … I’m gonna say organization that I wasn’t familiar with, and so I looked them up, because typically when I get paperwork to do for a kid it’s from one of a very small number of sources.

It was for a residential facility, out of state, that more or less takes kids whose parents can’t take care of them. So not quite an orphanage, but … not not an orphanage, because it certainly didn’t scan hospital or any sort of inpatient facility. It was “you suck at raising your kids, so give us a shot.”

Uh-oh.

I emailed the counselor back asking for more details, to which she responded that she really didn’t know any more than I did, and the kid hasn’t been to school yet this week. And the kid, charitably, is a mess. He’s not a behavioral problem, but he’s got a host of intellectual disabilities and really doesn’t belong in a mainstream classroom setting. He’s not going to screw around or cause trouble in class, but he’s not going to do any work, it’s not clear at all that he can read, he absolutely can’t do any grade-level math, and most of the time his reaction when asked to do anything at all is to stare at you silently until you go away. He will not turn anything in. He will not take notes or do anything remotely academic. He doesn’t even really screw around on his iPad, which he won’t carry with him and will just leave behind if someone gives it to him. If left alone, he will sit and stare at the wall until the bell rings, then wander off vaguely in the direction of his next class, which he will arrive at … eventually.

This is where I admit I wasn’t previously 100% familiar with his IEP. He’s always been in a co-taught classroom, and given his complete refusal/inability to engage with the academic process … man, I don’t have a single class with under 30 kids. He is well beyond the point where I can remediate him and I cannot provide him with the help he needs. I’m fully aware of what a problem that is, believe me, but at some point the kid needs to be his parent’s problem, and … well. He gets his various and sundry accommodations but there’s not much I can do with will not do any work whatsoever. I don’t think he’s passed a class since fourth or fifth grade.

But I needed some information from the IEP, so I read through the whole thing rather than just looking at the goals (yeah, right) and the accommodations. Filled in his test scores (1% percentile in language arts and math, something like three years running) and then started reading through the more detailed parts.

So, uh, they suspect that the reason that he has his intellectual disabilities is that when he was born his lungs were full of meconium, and his heart stopped for a while while they were trying to deal with that, and they’re sure he incurred brain damage of some sort in the meantime.

Do you know what meconium is? It’s baby’s first poop. Don’t click on that link. The kid has brain damage because he inhaled a couple of lungfuls of his own fetal shit while in the womb and was born unable to breathe. And now he’s in my math class, where I teach linear equations and Pythagoras and shit, and somehow he’s expected to be on grade level, and I’m judged by whether I can get him there.

Go ahead, try and count the number of ways that’s fucked up. I’m not going anywhere.

Teacherly updatery

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

First things first, unrelated to teaching: I’d like you all to go back to my piece about the Iowa caucuses from a couple of days ago, read it, and marvel at my prescience. I am too disgusted with politics in general at the moment to discuss any of the various issues of the day (ITMFA now stands for Impeach the Motherfucker Again, not Already, and I did not watch the State of the Union, because I am not a fucking masochist) so you get to read teachertalk instead.

I got a fair amount of feedback and advice (not all of it on the blog) after my post about my student with selective mutism a couple of weeks ago. I thought I’d report back: it turns out that she’s entirely willing to communicate in writing, so a day or two after writing that post I handed her a piece of paper with a short note asking some questions and she answered everything and gave it back to me. She’s generally not willing to call attention to herself but there have been a couple of times where I checked in with her and she’d written some questions in the margins of her assignments; she doesn’t seem to have any difficulty (and there’s no reason to think she would) with listening or processing what she’s being told, so I can answer her verbally just fine, although I’ll occasionally respond in writing just for the hell of it. I just have to make sure to check in with her once or twice during class because she usually won’t put her hand up. She’ll respond to direct questions with gestures, though, and there have been times where I got a thumbs-up or a “sort of” gesture after asking her how she’s doing. My kids also will ask for bathroom breaks with a sign language “B” a lot of the time, and she’s picked that up as well.

So in general things are going just fine. She’s a bright kid and she gets good grades and she pays attention, so I basically just treat her with the slightly higher level of attention that some of my ESL and shyer students get and so far everything has gone just fine.

(Also, I called her an elective mute in that first post, and that term is apparently outdated; they call it selective mutism now. I’m not entirely certain what the difference might be, but I like to use the right words for things.)

Well, whatever works, I guess…

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching8 Comments

imagesI have a handful of severely autistic students.  One of them in particular has been a major behavior issue as of late– he’s been running out of the classroom, throwing things, saying crude sexual insults to the girls, and trampling people in the hallway.  We are trying, for a variety of reasons, some good, some not so good, to keep him in our building and not have to move him into a residential placement of some kind somewhere else.  His issues generally begin when he gets into the building, amplify during Success period, and by the time he gets into my room for Math he’s completely uncontrollable and acting out.

I met with the corporation’s autism consultant on Thursday, and she was in my classroom observing me/him/us today.  (Sidenote:  all three of my classes killed their math tests this week; I’m super happy about how they did.)  We’ve been working on solving two-step equations and linear equations for the last few weeks, and so they’ve been hearing me say the phrase “work backwards” or “do the opposite” over and over and over and over again.  (In other words, 4x = 12 is a multiplication problem; you need to do the opposite, division, in order to solve it.)  Well, everybody but this kid has; he’s spent most of his time either sitting in the hallway or in the main office or the counselor’s office.

He had to take the same test as everyone else, so the autism consultant and his usual paraprofessional worked with him in the back of the classroom.  I heard them repeating my instructions and going over procedures to solve problems, mimicking the language I’d been using.  The kid actually did pretty well.

For the last ten minutes of class, the autism consultant and the paraprofessional disappeared for some reason and left the kid in the room with me.  I noticed after a minute that every time I gave the class an instruction he was doing something else.  Oh, great, I thought; last thing I need is a meltdown when the two people who are here to observe him have left for two minutes.

“What are you doing, Jim?” I asked.  (Jim, obviously, isn’t his name.)

“The opposite,” he said.  “They said I’m supposed to do the opposite of everything you say.”  Big, shit-eating grin on his face.

Parts of my head screamed at other parts of my head.

“Stand up,” I told him.

He sat in his seat.

“Make as much noise as you can until the bell,” I told him.

Complete silence.

“Don’t do any of your missing work, at all,” I told him.

Out comes his math workbook.

Ah, autism.  Every day can be Opposite Day from now on.

The broken tree is gone.  All hail the broken tree!  The guys did such a good job they even took away the broken branches from the last big storm we had, over the summer, which I had hauled off into a corner of my yard and not bothered to finish bagging up and curbing.  The company is called, believe it or not, Skeeter’s.  If you’re in northern Indiana, you should use them the next time something falls down around your house.

(Sidenote: there’s a good lesson in why internet reviews can be a shitty idea here, where someone who perhaps should not be allowed to have an opinion appears to believe that tree doctors are a cabinet company.  Uh, no.)

In which I memorize

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

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We’ve just finished the third week of school, and I’ve probably spent most of the past three weeks breaking the law in some form or another. That folder there is full of special ed documentation about my many, many special education students. There are, right now, 22 dossiers in that folder, ranging from three to thirty-some-odd pages long. Some are for students I don’t actually have in my classes and have never met. I’m legally responsible to have read and understood (and “understood” in this case should be taken to mean “memorized”) the documentation on each of those kids. And I am absolutely certain that I don’t have all of my IEPs yet, and am even more certain that I don’t have all my BIPs yet, as I don’t have any at all from seventh or eighth grade.

Here’s the thing: special ed paperwork, and the idea of an “individualized education profile,” or IEP, is a very good idea in theory that has gone terribly wrong in practice. It’s much like Communism in that regard. The idea that a student with disabilities shouldn’t be educated in the same manner as a student without those disadvantages is a good one. The idea that special education students deserve the same access to a quality education as other students is a good one.

The idea that I’m supposed to memorize, on average, fifteen pages of accommodations for each of my twenty-some odd students, and that one person is supposed to write these IEPs for what could be dozens of kids with special ed needs in a low-income building, is insane. It can’t be done, and great special ed teachers are getting driven out of the field because half of what they do now is push around stacks of paper, and then endlessly revise those stacks of paper based on federal and state and local guidelines that can’t ever seem to stay consistent for more than a week or two at a time. It’s freaking madness.

And then there are the BIPs, or Behavior Intervention (I think) Plans. I support the concept behind the IEP, if not the way they’re implemented. Half the time I think BIPs are bullshit. I’ll be honest: I still haven’t sussed out what the distinction is between a kid who ends up with a BIP and a kid who is an asshole. It probably has something to do with whether they think the kid’s assholism is an actual disorder or not. What they basically are is a list of steps that you’re supposed to follow with Little Johnny Special Snowflake when he’s fucking up so that you can get him back on track– steps that don’t have to be followed for any other student. While it’s not supposed to mean this, frequently in practice a BIP means that LJSS can get away with shit that would get other students literally crucified– because LJSS is just too much of an asshole to be expected to conform to regular behavioral norms.

But whatever, right? I adapt my disciplinary methods to the individual student I’m dealing with all the time. In other contexts– hell, right here on this blog– I’ve defended not nailing a kid to a wall for something that might have me reaching for a hammer with another student. I get it, even though it annoys the piss out of me.

Here’s the problem: BIPs have to be seen and signed by every adult who works in a school who could conceivably come in contact with a kid. Not just the teachers. Every adult. So, like, bus drivers and cafeteria staff and custodians and the lady who does photocopying on Wednesdays are in theory supposed to have read and memorized the BIPs for every student who has one that they could possibly come into contact with. Some of us (me, for example) could theoretically come into contact with every single student in the building.

I have BIPs in this folder for students who I have literally never met, who are not in my grade or my wing of the building, who I may never have in my class. I may not be able to pick Jenny Fucknut or Johnny Fingerbang out of a lineup, but I’d sure as shit better know their BIPs so if I happen to encounter them freaking the fuck out in the hallway I can calmly redirect them or go through their deep breathing exercises or whatever the fuck; it’s not like I’ve read the damn things yet. All of that without knowing their names, because frequently when these kinds of kids do lose their shit they’re likely to tell me that their name is Go Fuck Yourself, and I don’t have a BIP for him.

Seriously; the people in the cafeteria line are expected to know these things. Gimme a fucking break.

(The good news? I have very little grading to do this weekend, and my lesson plans are done for next week, so at least there’s a chance in hell that I’ll end up getting to them at some point.)