This week is creeping by. Today I had to work all day in a resource room. The thing about the resource rooms is that they have very few kids, but the kids are all at such different places that there might as well be 100 of them. Luckily, in this class, one of the kids has a para (personal aide) so there was an extra person in the room. The other thing about the resource rooms is that they group the kids by relative grade level, so you never have just one grade at a time.
The push for next year is "inclusion". The latest trend in education thinking is that special ed and resource kids will do better if you mainstream them, but give them in-class support in the form of a resource teacher. I have heard that there will be no resource rooms next year, and the resource room teachers will "co-teach" in selected regular ed rooms. I have also heard that the elementary schools will only hire new teachers with dual certifications in special ed. There are so many kids who can't keep up in school today. I don't know if it's No Child Left Behind, vaccines, or just our society, that teaches 'to the test'. These are all reasons that I don't think I would ever go back to school for my degree. I've seen too many do it, and they're all still out there, searching.
At the end of the day, one of the special ed kindergarteners had some sort of medical incident and was sent to the hospital in an ambulance! They said he had a seizure, and he had a low grade fever, but his poor teacher was waiting by the door in tears. She is two days from her last day before maternity leave for her second child, with the first being not even two years old. She has one of the roughest classes in the school, with only ten kids (!), and then this had to happen. So hopefully he will be OK. I like this kid, despite himself. He's quite a character, and very smart, so I'm not sure what his classification is. Maybe he's mildly autistic. When I was in the class last week, he said to me, " I don't want to do math. It's boring." And he's six! (I have to admit, it probably his - he is capable of much more than calculating how many apples go to each child when there are six apples and two children)
So otherwise the day was OK, just a little long and I had one kid that couldn't understand me no matter what. It went like this:
Me: there are 36 inches in a yard. How many inches are there in a yard?
Kid: (looks intently at book): Um. One?
This happened in reading, too:
Me: The main idea of this story is getting energy from the wind and the sun. What is the main idea of the story?
Kid: Um. Windmills?
And that was that. Luckily you have pull-out only for an hour in the morning for reading and for forty minutes for math in the afternoon. And I haven't been in this class a whole lot, so I don't know the kids as well as I do the 4th and 5th grade resource kids - who are - by the way - much farther along.
After that, I spent an hour and a half on the phone with the AT&T customer service people. It seems that the place where I bought my cell phones and have changed the plans over the past, oh - I don't know - 12 years? - has been going into the system and making changes to my plan. I have caught the changes, but no rep has bothered to help figure out how until today. This one looked it up and saw that thay had even entered a false drivers' license expiration date, and changed my plan. They actually screwed everything up, because they changed Megan's line to the main line, and they did away with my texting ability completely, which it took me a few days to realize. I just thought everyone was ignoring me all weekend.
So she corrected everything, gave me a credit for the month's fees for my troubles, and said she would register a complaint against the franchise, which is privately owned. She also made a change so only corporate stores can change my account, or I can do it online. That's just insane. I guess they're compensated for new services sold, like the time they put roadside assistance and voice activated dialing without my permission. Jerks.
And there was my day. Brian is searching for Ralph S. Mouse so I can find out how Ralph does in The Great Mouse Caper, as I have read three chapters to this resource group and am dying to know how it turns out. He doesn't seem to have it. Now he is talking about Mr. Popper's Penguins.
And finally, in other news, Megan has come down with the sniffles. I gave her the last of her prescription decongestant, but this seems to need more than that. She is in good spirits, but she's trying to get out of going to school. She also informed me that her math grade has dropped to a plain A. So she won't be #1 in her class after all. Oh, there go my hopes and dreams. It's because of the week missed for Nationals, she got two 86's on tests. Sigh. Brian's baseball team lost tonight, again, 6-3. He had an error on first, a few strike-outs, and four runs scored in the innings he pitched. Other than that, he did great. Oh, and they had a bad ump. That's always fun. I am hoping for no work tomorrow so I can catch up on laundry and chores, and spend some time with Rusty in my lap. But if they call, I will take it, because someone told me today there are nine weeks of school left!
But .. it is only Tuesday.
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