Hearing the Broken Heartedness

Everyone has days of frustration, days where you just want to throw in the proverbial towel, but when you’re in elementary school, you don’t have that luxury. When the teacher tells you that you have work to do, by gum, you’ve got work to do! The teacher doesn’t care if you’re having an off day or if your frustrated or not understanding everything completely, he or she has a lesson plan that needs to be followed pretty strictly and that’s the way that it’s got to be. When my 1:1 is having an off day it can get pretty bad and it can get pretty sad, we’re talking snot and tears kind of sad—and we’re talking not only him having the snot and tears, but me too—so there are trips outside that have to be taken.

The times that are the worst are when Mr. X refers to himself as “a dumb boy”. I don’t like using the word “hate”, but in this instance, I HATE it when he refers to himself as “a dumb boy”, because he is not a dumb boy. When times like these occur I pull him aside and we have one our little chats where I tell him that he is smart for Mr. X, it’s just that sometimes it takes him a little longer to understand things than everyone else. That’s when I start asking him about dinosaurs and he starts rattling off all these statistics about dinosaurs that I have NO knowledge about, but he knows EVERYTHING about, so I am about to tell him, “See, Ms. Christine didn’t know that! See how much smarter than Ms. Christine you are?!” At the end of those conversations he ends up feeling better about himself and we are able to move on with the curriculum and end up having a good rest of the day.

So, my suggestion is: if you find yourself in a similar situation with a Special Needs citizen and you know that there is a subject that they specialize in, get them talking about it and remind them that they DO know a lot about something and it will help them get back on track…at least most of the time