I'm not a babysitter

So, I'm listening to the New Moon soundtrack, which I have to say I'm pretty obsessed with because it is pretty fabulous.

On a completely unrelated note, whenever Taylor tells anyone that he is going to be a doctor, everyone immediately makes some comment about how he must be so smart and such a hard worker, which is totally true; Taylor is all those things. But when I tell people I am a special ed teacher, I get a completely different reaction. Mostly it's people telling me that they could never, ever do my job. Not because it's so difficult, but because it would be super boring to push kids in wheelchairs around all day (Seriously, someone actually thought that was what I did. Needless to say, she was shocked to find out that people could actually get a masters degree in that.)

But I realize that when we were kids "special ed" was a VERY different thing for most of us than it is today. And it is very different even today between schools and states. So let me clear up some possible misconceptions:

I work with kids who need extra help in school. These kids are in their classrooms most of the day, and they come to my room for a hour or so a day and I teach them in small groups.

But my job is awesome because it's not like just teaching the same lesson every day to every student. These are kids who really need extra help. So I do a lot of testing to find out exactly what skills are missing and then I decide what to teach. Everything that I do is based on data that I collect. Of course, I can't just go to the teacher store and grab one of those cutesy books and give them a worksheet. Everything that I do has to be research based and created for individual students. And so I'm reading a lot of books and research articles and talking to specialists all the time. I lead our teachers in meetings where we talk about students who are not making progress and we dig through research and we debate about which intervention we should try next. And then we collect data every day that tells us if our students are improving or not and keep making changes and trying new things until we find something that works.

And these are the kids who have a hard time with learning, so we have to be pretty creative with finding solutions that will actually work. There's a lot of disappointment, but that makes it even more exciting when we finally see some sixth grader who is reading on a first grade level move from reading 6 words per minute to 30. The kids that I work with are really amazing. I can't imagine going to school day after day and not being able to do most of the work that my friends can all do without any problems. But they keep working (sometimes it takes some interesting motivation strategies to get them to work) and they are really great kids.

I really love my job. I never know what to expect when I come to work and my kids are always surprising me. Some days I am running from class to class rescuing teachers from my students who decided to bite, kick, or scream the f word over and over instead of doing their assignments. And some days I'm making phone calls at 6pm to help kids with their math homework. And some days I'm hitting my head against the wall because seriously, the word is "take" not "tacky" and I know I've only told you this a hundred times, but you should know it by now. But most days I'm just looking at data and researching new ideas and trying to come up with solutions and teaching and teaching and teaching and remembering to celebrate the times when a student looks up at me with a big smile and says, "Hey, look, Mrs. Turner! I did it!" Because that's what my job is all about.