"Hey, Miss, do you play sports?"
"No. Focus on your work, please."
"Because I was just gonna say, you have big calves for such a small person."
Student A: Miss, I have a question. Is it true that people evolved from monkeys?
Me: Yes, but I need you to focus-
Student B: NO THEY DIDN'T. God created people.
Student: Miss Chen, I'm going to get a tattoo.
Me: G, please go sit down and work on your paragraph.
Student: Miss Chen, how about I'll get your name right here on my arm?
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Adding fuel to the fire
It’s more than just tiredness in her eyes. It’s weariness – weariness of the system that has so far seemed to fail her son.
Yet there is a glimmer of hope in Ms. B.’s face as I sit across from her and Eric as we discuss his dyslexia.
First of all, I would have had no idea Evan was dyslexic if he hadn’t come up to me after class at the beginning of the year to tell me. I had no access to his case file. Ms. B. tells me that all the teachers she has attempted to get in touch with have not responded to her calls, including the one who is designated to help those with learning disabilities and is supposed to be working with Evan.
I tell her I’m willing to do whatever it takes on my part to help Evan. Seeing the teacher whose room we’re borrowing leave, Ms. B. throws me a surreptitious thumbs-up.
“I hope you stay,” she tells me. “You’re the first teacher I’ve been able to talk to. And I even knew about you before you called because Evan has been talking about you at home. He enjoys your class.”
In the next twenty minutes or so, Ms. B. and Eric tell me about his difficulty in being back at Roosevelt – no specialized help for his learning disabilities, sleepless nights of worry, and the difficulties of arranging his therapy sessions with his class schedule.
“But I’m gonna try to schedule them around your class, Ms. Chen. Because I know you will help him.”
She tells me about how teachers threatened to fail him, despite hearing an explanation of Evan’s learning disabilities and the lack of help given to him by the school. So they transferred to a school 20 miles away in order for him to get adequate accommodations.
But they decided to make the move back to Roosevelt so that he could attend the same school as his sister, be with his friends, and play football. But he has been struggling.
As Ms. B. describes to me the difficulties in trying to get specialized tutoring given the single-parent income their family relies on, the anger starts to build. Anger and frustration that has already been sparked by the eye-opening situations at Roosevelt. Hearing about these struggles only fans an ever growing fire.
The question is, where can I find that water to extinguish it?
Yet there is a glimmer of hope in Ms. B.’s face as I sit across from her and Eric as we discuss his dyslexia.
First of all, I would have had no idea Evan was dyslexic if he hadn’t come up to me after class at the beginning of the year to tell me. I had no access to his case file. Ms. B. tells me that all the teachers she has attempted to get in touch with have not responded to her calls, including the one who is designated to help those with learning disabilities and is supposed to be working with Evan.
I tell her I’m willing to do whatever it takes on my part to help Evan. Seeing the teacher whose room we’re borrowing leave, Ms. B. throws me a surreptitious thumbs-up.
“I hope you stay,” she tells me. “You’re the first teacher I’ve been able to talk to. And I even knew about you before you called because Evan has been talking about you at home. He enjoys your class.”
In the next twenty minutes or so, Ms. B. and Eric tell me about his difficulty in being back at Roosevelt – no specialized help for his learning disabilities, sleepless nights of worry, and the difficulties of arranging his therapy sessions with his class schedule.
“But I’m gonna try to schedule them around your class, Ms. Chen. Because I know you will help him.”
She tells me about how teachers threatened to fail him, despite hearing an explanation of Evan’s learning disabilities and the lack of help given to him by the school. So they transferred to a school 20 miles away in order for him to get adequate accommodations.
But they decided to make the move back to Roosevelt so that he could attend the same school as his sister, be with his friends, and play football. But he has been struggling.
As Ms. B. describes to me the difficulties in trying to get specialized tutoring given the single-parent income their family relies on, the anger starts to build. Anger and frustration that has already been sparked by the eye-opening situations at Roosevelt. Hearing about these struggles only fans an ever growing fire.
The question is, where can I find that water to extinguish it?
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