special education – Page 2 – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

One of the things that’s really hitting me with my Algebra kids this year is just how unused they are to having to work in class. These kids are smart, right? And they’re used to being the smart kids, and with only a couple of exceptions they’re used to thinking of themselves as smart kids; it’s part of their self-identity; something they’re proud of.

Smart kids are supposed to get stuff. School’s not supposed to be hard for smart kids.

Literally the first thing I said to these kids when they walked into my room on the first day of school was “Welcome to high school.” I’m walking a fine line here; I’m trying to push them as far and as fast as I can without breaking any of them, and it’s an interesting and delicate dance to be involved in. I’m thinking about this because I graded a mid-chapter quiz today, and I’m trying to figure out what to do with the kids who didn’t do well– some of them are clearly smart kids (remember, I’ve had everyone in this group before except for about three of them) who are so unused to having to ask questions in class that I think they’re actually ashamed to have to do so. I gotta work on that. By and large, considering the volume of stuff I threw at them in the last three weeks, they did well. It’s just the handful that didn’t that I need to figure out how to handle.

Getting a new student on Monday. I can pronounce neither of her names, and I only know she’s a she because I looked her up. My wild-ass guess is that she’s Kenyan. This should be interesting. (Kenyans speak, what, English and Swahili? With maybe French as a distant third? Hopefully there’s not a language issue.)

So, yeah. Smart kids. Then there’s whatever is going on in that picture there, which I took in my classroom on Friday after a student volunteered to do that problem on the board. Now, this is my special ed group– don’t get me wrong, I’m not in any way trying to make fun of this kid, just to give you an idea of the range of abilities I see throughout the day, because after this kid leaves my room I get the Algebra kids, a group that contains a kid who got a perfect score on his math ISTEP last year. I was trying to demonstrate the various algebraic principles; the problem on the other side of the one on the board is 4x(6×5) and the idea is that they’re supposed to notice that both equal 120 regardless of where the parentheses are. Note that this does not represent multiple attempts to solve the problem. He did the green part first, where rather than multiplying four by six (or adding it six times, which would have been fine) he raised four to the fourth power. Then he switched to a blue marker, getting into an argument over whether it was “his” marker in the process, added six to itself four times and got 24. What caused him to privilege the 24 over the 32, I’m not sure, although this kid is prone to giving me multiple choice answers on assignments– he’ll literally write “3 or 30 or 4 or 17” next to a problem. The blue squiggle next to the 2 under the actual problem is supposed to be a 4; there are also huge handwriting issues.

Then he switched to a red marker and tried to multiply 24 by 5. Note that he’s first tried to add it, but only four times, and that the presence of a tens digit has utterly confounded him– he’s added the two pairs of fours to get two eights, then added those and gotten six instead of sixteen. This isn’t forgetting to add a digit; I was standing behind him watching this performance and he actually said “four plus four is six” while he was writing. He then turned around and told me that the answer was six, at which point I took this picture, erased the whole mess, and walked through everything with him.

I do this often, by the way– letting a kid dig himself into a hole can frequently be useful because it gives me insight into how they handle mathematics. Unfortunately, for the second time this year, I’m looking at this and getting the “holy shit, I can’t fix this” vibe that I get from writing sometimes. The kid can’t handle basic multiplication on his own, and even with other adults in the room I can’t get around to them often enough to help him with everything he needs help with. Luckily, he has involved parents; I can’t imagine what he’d be like otherwise, as this is what he is like with help at home.

I’ll figure it out– I’ll figure him out, I always do– but Christ, do I have a headache right now.

I had been thinking that the challenge this year was going to be the Algebra class. Two weeks in, I’m pretty sure I got that one completely wrong. Granted, we’re still mostly in “review” territory, but the Algebra kids are moving along swimmingly; if anything I could probably be pushing them faster if I really wanted to.

No, the problem is going to be third and fourth hour. First and second hour are just a roomful of kids. Granted, they swing toward the knuckleheady, and there’s more of them (32 or 33, I think) than I want there to be, and I’m sure there are going to be days where I hate them– but functionally they’re no different from any number of other classes of kids I’ve had over the years. They’re going to do well on some things and not so well on others. They’re going to be challenging, because teaching anyone anything is challenging, but they’re not going to be challenging, if you know what I mean.

On Tuesday, the school counselor walked into my room, shoved a roster under my nose, and told me to eliminate six of my kids.

“Permanently?” I said, eyeing a certain set of the roster.

“To (other teacher’s) room,” she said, and I started looking at a different set of kids. She then showed me a different list, which contained the six kids that she was moving into my room– special-needs students, each and every one of them. Turns out that it had been decided that I was going to co-teach with one of our special ed teachers during those class periods, and they’d decided to consolidate all the available special education students into my room out of the two seventh grade math classes that were available.

(Weird, true fact: There are two different kids who would have been on my list if I was consigning them to the flames, but were not on my “willing to send to someone else” list. I’m not sure what that says about me. Certainly not that I’m sparing the other teacher. The impulse is more “no one is your math teacher but me” than anything else, and I certainly insisted on protecting the kids who I had last year. I dunno.)

Teachers who read this will all recognize this anecdote: you know how sometimes you’ll get a writing assignment turned in from a kid, and it’s so bad that you literally don’t have any idea how to correct it? That the only thing to do is start over completely, and by “start over completely” I mean “wipe the kid’s brain, send him back to kindergarden, and reeducate him entirely”? Where there’s simply no way to correct the thing without entirely redoing it?

I’ve had that impulse in writing classes many, many times, unfortunately. I have never had it in math before, in twelve years of teaching, until this week– and this week I had it with four different kids. I have two students with sub-60 IQs, and another pair of boys who I don’t even want to talk about on account of their plethora of learning disabilities and neurological disorders. Plus at least four kids who are severely autistic (two of whom, just for the record, aren’t actually in this class) and two with massive behavioral disorders.

I’ve never co-taught before; I don’t know precisely how it works, and the special ed teacher, who has spent all week buried in beginning-of-year paperwork, has been content to sit back and let me drive the bus for now, although that will probably change as we get to know each other and find some time to actually collaborate. And I’ve never, ever had a class this low before. I’ve got two kids in there who were among my lowest students last year (although they both showed genuinely impressive gains over the course of the year) and this year they are the smart ones.

And now you know why there’s a Keanu pic at the top of this post.