It Only Takes Half a Brain To Love With Your Whole Heart

So many people say that it takes a special person with special patience with a special heart to work with special kids; but I think that they have it all wrong. I think that it takes special kids to work with the adults that are thrust into their lives to work with them. Some of us adults come in with such low expectations of these children that we barely expect them to be able to tie their shoes let alone write their own names down on paper. Granted, there are children who aren’t capable of doing these things, but the children I am referring to are the children that are labeled as “high functioning” special education children. High functioning special education children are students who are considered teachable, children who, within the right setting, given the proper tools, time, and instruction, will be able to learn the same curriculum as that of a regular education student. The type of classroom that I work in is called an LH (Learning Handicapped) classroom with students whose abilities range from very poor to very high. In fact, two of the students are mainstreamed, which means they go into a regular education classroom, for a subject. One child is mainstreamed for English, while the other is mainstreamed for math.

I am what is called an IA-1:1-SDC which is a lot of letters and numbers that means Instructional Aid-One-on-One-Special Day Class. What that means is that I work specifically with one student all day long, helping him with his work, keep him on task, reinstruct him if he does not understand the instructions the teacher gives, read directions to him as many times as he may need them read to him, follow him from one work station to the next to help him out; basically, I am his mother away from home. However, I am a very strict mother. I refuse to coddle my one-on-one because it is my opinion that he will never learn to be independent if I am constantly doing things for him and following behind him like a little puppy, so I require him to attempt everything himself, before I step in and assist him. Naturally, there are things that I know that he is not really capable of doing on his own, so I am right there immediately to help him; but, by and large, he knows that he has to give it the ol’ college try before Ms. Christine is going to come and help him.

My one-on-one (from now on it will be abbreviated 1:1) is a sneaky little feller. He knows that he’s a cutie pie with big doe eyes, so he does his best to use those suckers to his advantage; but he’s under estimated Ms. Christine’s smarts, she’s no dumb blond (which, by the way, I am no longer a blond), I’ve caught onto his games, so he’s no longer able to get past me any more with his little tricks. My little guy, we’ll just call him Mr. X, LOVES to draw and one day I told him that if he finishes his work that he could draw, but that he could only get one piece of drawing paper from my desk. So I’m working with a little girl with her math and he comes and tells me that he finished his work and shows it to me, so I know that it’s true and he turns it in to the teacher. He comes back and gets into my desk to get drawing paper and he’s roosting around in there a little longer than I think is necessary to get one piece of paper, so when he stands up, I ask to see the paper. “See, I only got one, Ms. Cwistine”. (He talks like a waskily wabbit). I look a little closer at it and it just doesn’t seem right so I make him hand it to me. That little stinker had 5 pieces of paper! I tore up all 5 pieces of paper and made him throw them in the trash and told him that he was banned from drawing for the rest of the week! He thought that I was just the meanest person on the face of the planet for doing that to him!

That is just one story of MANY that I have stored up about life working with high functioning special education kids. It really is a lot of fun and, at the end of the day, not matter how frustrating it is, you really do end up feeling rewarded in some way, shape, or form for helping those kids out.