Any idea what Ayy LMAO means?

No?

Have heart teachers – you are not alone!

A few years ago, during an extended family get together of some sort, we somehow we got to talking one morning about music.  Everyone in my family likes music, especially my brother and I, but we tend to shy away from discussing our tastes aloud to anyone but ourselves.  I think my mother was asking about the kind of music my kids liked, which then flowed into a diatribe about rap music.  Now, I’m no hug fan of contemporary rap music, but I do appreciate its place within popular culture, and marvel at it’s hold over young people of all races and ethnicities.  I see how it connects young people to experiences and themes they can identify with, just as the music of my youth did for me.  In the late 80’s and early 90’s, rap music to me was almost an alien life form, and it took awhile for it to have any effect whatsoever on me.  I listened to Public Enemy and was immediately taken aback by the force and fury of the lyrics, and the minimalist sounds in the background that were almost non-musical.  I wondered if it was even music.  I mean, where was the guitar? Public Enemy described a world that was vastly different from my own, but something I wanted to more about.

I ended up listening to many different artists, until one day my brother had me check out N.W.A.  I was completely blown away.  Fury had turned to violence, and I struggled with feelings of attraction and revulsion all at the same time.  During a poetry unit as a student teacher I would play clean versions of rap songs with the lyrics printed out, so my students could get a sense not only of the density of the imagery, but also of the different ways at which a poem could be delivered to an audience.  I was young then, not many years removed from a high school classroom.

I thought of this as my mom went on and on about how terrible rap music is, and how she just didn’t understand how people liked it.  After a couple of minutes, I interrupted her and said, “It’s not for you, mom.  This music was not made for you.”

It probably came across as rude, but the flavor of what I was trying to say rings true.  As the edgy, controversial music of our youth becomes bland and slotted into no-brainer, ready-made Pandora playlists, new forms or new explorations of previous forms flash to life.  Our grip on what is hip and trendy begins to slide through our fingers, and we’re left with memory.

Which is how it supposed to be.  Some of us hold on to the old stuff like it’s something that defines us, but I think that’s not an accurate description.  It defines a time and a place, and an emotion.  We can appreciate the new (or what is taken for new) for what it is, but we needn’t worry that we don’t “get it”.

All of this is a very long-winded way of saying that, as teachers, we don’t need to concern ourselves with staying too terribly current.  Of course anyone with a passing interest in young people will have a sense of what’s cool and what’s not, but don’t beat yourself up if you happen to miss something.  Even as a young teacher, you will get snickered at for being “old”.  The separation is important, necessary, and natural.   The trick is to be relevant without being trendy, to identify without being referential, and to connect without being, well…connected.

We are good teachers because we care about the people our students are and can be – not about what trend they happen to be trying on at the moment. It’s all Ayy LMAO, anyway.

But what is Ayy LMAO you might ask?

Answer: It’s not for you.

The Jimmy’s of the world can teach you a lot, if you have the patience to deal with them over the course of a school year or four.  Mere days will not suffice, as one is incapable of understanding the true nature of a Jimmy after one, two, or twenty-five encounters.  If Ogre’s are like onions, then Jimmy’s are like rutabagas.  Difficult to peel, but you can boil them down to something pretty good over time.

Our relationship did not begin well.

On some days, Jimmy made it nearly impossible to teach.  One of his very first questions to me was, “Do you drink?” Not only was the question way, way out of context and inappropriate but also hugely interruptive.  Of course I had to stop what I was doing to take the time to explain to Jimmy that the question had no bearing on the lesson and if he wanted to discuss it further we could do it at brunch – which is exactly what he wanted to happen.  It was a battle of wits, and clearly I was the loser.

Jimmy was constantly in motion – fidgeting in his seat, walking around the classroom, asking to go to the bathroom or get a drink of water.  Taking notes? Barely.  Finishing classwork?  Hardly.  Doing homework?  Rarely.  Actually – never.  Discussions with Jimmy centered around partying, fighting, and getting laid.  As you can imagine these were not discussions so much as soliloquies, spoken while everyone else was working, or even worse: trying to listen.  On his best days he was just tired, and as the school year progressed he was most likely hung over as well.

One day after class Jimmy decided he wanted to take some time to talk to me about a fight he had gotten into recently.  We were standing in the middle of the classroom when he begins to dance around, Sugar Ray-style – acting out the fight, with me being the bewildered other party.  Soon enough we’re both throwing jabs slow-motion, with Jimmy narrating as I swing exaggeratedly at his jaw: “And then he hits me with an overhand right…BOOM!”  After a week or so these “matches” became more discussions of strategy than any re-creation of an actual event.  I was never the kind of kid that picked fights, or ever really got into a fight, but Jimmy taught me some valuable tips.  Things like: how to get into someone’s face in order to get a fight going, how to stomp on someone’s feet and shove hard backwards (also presumably before punches are thrown), and what to do when attacked from behind.

Jimmy was physical, and had some obvious athletic gifts.  I tried to get him out for football the following year, and he was doing fine up until the first 6-week grading period.  He got benched due to poor grades and then eventually quit.  I thought he would be good for the wrestling team, but he had an aversion to wearing “tights” as he mistakenly called the uniform.  About the only exercise he got was running from cops on Saturday nights, or so he claimed.  Since he was far from the only squirrely male in the class, at the end of the week I would organize a Feat-of-Strength Friday, which involved a series of physical tasks but mostly consisted of arm-wrestling.  All the boys jumped to it eagerly, arm-wrestling again and again in rematch after rematch until they could barely pick up their backpacks.   I was often asked to join in, but being the smart, older role model that I am I waited until the boys were nearly dead before coming in and beating everyone handily, left AND right-handed.  They never caught on to my strategy, yet the experience somehow bonded Jimmy and I in a weird way that I didn’t quite understand until later.

Every teacher has had a Jimmy.

Might actually be a kid named Jimmy, might be a kid who acts like a Jimmy.

The Jimmy’s of the world walk around your local high school campuses, waiting for you to piss them off.

I met my Jimmy the first day I started teaching high school, eleven years ago.  I’d been around the block of course.  I’d taught kids before.  I knew how to handle kids.  I thought I knew what made kids tick.

Without going into too much detail about all the craziness that accompanied my introductory week of orientation to the world of high school, suffice it to say by Day One I was ready to go.  I had my lessons planned, and my classroom organized.  I had my rosters ready and organized, and I was prepared to greet all my student personally as they walked in.  I was eager to meet the twelve special education students in my first period Environmental Science class, and I was excited to be teaching Science for the first time in my career.

Side note (which may or may not be incredibly relevant): I am NOT a Science guy.  I enjoyed Biology, but that’s about it.  I found Chemistry to be incomprehensible and subsequently boring.  I blame this squarely on my high school Chemistry teacher.

The first bell rang promptly at 7:30am, and students began to make haste to their respective classes.  In the human crossfire I fully expected a student or two to extricate themselves from the throng and walk towards my room.  I waited, and watched students make their way into room adjoining mine and across campus.  I waited, and the footsteps and sounds of the student body began to slowly fade.  The second bell rang indicating the start of class at 7:35, and within seconds doors were closing and teachers were beginning their lessons.  Still I waited, thinking that maybe because my room was all the way on the other side of the school that perhaps students were lost, or got caught in the heavy first day of school traffic.  I waited until the only one still standing outside, student or teacher, was me.

I checked my roster again.  Did I really have a first period class?  Was I missing something?  Maybe someone in the office messed up.  Maybe they thought I had a first period but it really was a second period class.  I mean, this was weird.

My classroom at that time really did occupy a unique spot on campus.  Before new construction obstructed the view, you could stand at my door and look all the way through to the front of the school and on into the hills beyond.  I used to enjoy looking out after students cleared out for the day, imagining that the view hadn’t changed much since the school came into being 50 years prior.  It felt intimate, almost like a middle school.  Considering where I’d taught previously, that was somehow comforting to me those first couple of years.

I went inside, shuffled some papers idly around and checked the clock.

7:40 and still no sign of anyone.  Not a single student.

At 7:45 I went to the door again and cracked it ever so slightly to see if perhaps a group of twelve confused students were being escorted to my room by an assistant principal.  It would all be a mild misunderstanding.  Their schedules would be wrong and we’d all have a laugh and say something about the first day of school being so crazy and confusing and whatnot.

Nothing.  Nobody.

I looked at my roster again.  First period – twelve students. I checked it again.

As I looked up I saw a figure emerge from the fuzziness at the front of the school.  As the figure approached I could tell it was a boy from the way he sauntered from side to side, walking slowly with a self-assured manner that said to anyone who might have noticed: “That’s right…I’m back.”

I chuckled inside as I watched him.  Who does this guy think he is?  He passed multiples of closed doors as he walked.  Surely he will pause, pull out his schedule from his pocket and go either left or right to his classroom, I thought.  How stupid to be late like that on your first day, I thought again.  What a way to start a year.

He passed more rooms.  As he got closer, I could make out his features.  He was wearing white shoes, high tops maybe.  Very baggy dark blue jeans and a red and white checked button down shirt, each of which were at least ten sizes too big. Right below where his shirt ended (almost at his knees) I could make out the slight edge of a red bandana, presumably tucked into his pocket but placed just so.  I hadn’t had much if any exposure to gang or pseudo-gang activity before, but I was pretty sure that he was a walking violation of our dress code.

Even with the baggy, ill-fitting clothes I could tell he was a well-built kid.  Football player perhaps?  Or a wrestler.  He had a shaved head, so short as to be bald on the sides with a little more up top.

Side note: This hairstyle has a name, apparently.  A “Fade”? Back in the day we called it a Buzz.

He looked as if he’d not seen an ounce of sun all summer. Lilly-white. And, more incredibly, STILL coming!

What are the odds this kid is coming to my class, I thought.  There’s no way.

I checked my watch – 7:50am.

Suddenly he is standing before me, arms at his sides, his blue eyes staring at me.  On his shoulder his thin black Jansport hung limply, not a thing in it.

Side note: There is a sub-set of the student population who believes that it is terribly uncool to appear to carry school materials from class to class.  They have backpacks, but they generally carry only a few pieces of paper and perhaps a writing utensil.  Binders, even one-inchers, are too thick and cumbersome.  Homework and important notes are nowhere to be found in the pristine nebulae of their interiors.  Nor will there be cell phone chargers, which cause much consternation when battery power begins to wane shortly before mid-morning.  I call these students the “Casual Day-Trekkers”.  Its as if they left their house for a six-hour, lazy, unplanned sightseeing tour of the city, carrying only a street map and a granola bar, drinking it all in but taking careful note of little.

He looked me up and down, and then up and down again.  With absolutely zero expression on his face, he spoke…

“Who the fuck are you?”

Jog?

Recently I’ve been thinking that I would like to try something different.  I’d like to venture into the realm of educational leadership a bit, and thought this blog would be a good way to start.  I have some ideas about where I’d like to go with this idea and what I’d like to do, so at some point I’ll just dive in and see what happens.

I was thinking about this a few nights ago and got really excited upon hearing that the High School Exit Exam is no longer being required by the state of California as a graduation requirement.  I thought about a blog post I had written a while back in regards to abolishing the Exit Exam (CAHSEE), how it was outdated, inauthentic, and inherently unfair to special education students, and how someone, somewhere, must have read it and said: “Yeah!”

Turns out I wrote it and never published it.  Check back for more on this topic.

When I started teaching public school 11 years ago, I was interviewed for the school newspaper.  It was just a little something they put together every year to introduce the students to the new teachers.  I was asked a few questions and my short (at the time I thought: insightful and humorous) replies were published.  One question was about where I had taught previously, and the follow-up had to do with what I expected would be different about teaching in a public vs. private school.  I don’t remember exactly what I said, but it was something to the effect of: “Oh, I don’t think there will be that much difference – after all, kids are kids.”

I have thought about the dual wisdom and non-wisdom of that quote ever since.  On the one hand, kids are kids.  Not much has changed about teenagers in the years I have taught them.  Instructional approaches and philosophies change, but kids remain as perplexing and frustrating and wonderful and memorable as ever.  On the other hand, there is a difference in how kids from different socio-economic backgrounds approach their educational experience.  I was not prepared for that.  I was not prepared to work with kids whose home-lives were sometimes so chaotic and unstructured that it was a miracle they were in their seat at all.  Nor was I prepared for the differences between middle-school teenagers and high school teenagers.  Just a few years can also fundamentally alter how kids act towards and think about school.  I was not prepared to be told to shut up or be flipped off or to be completely and totally ignored.  Keep in mind as well that these are very unscientific observations, and only the result of my own thinking on this topic.

I used to tell my students in private school that it shouldn’t matter to them if they liked their teachers, or if their teachers liked them, or even if they enjoyed or didn’t enjoy whatever subject they happened to be studying.  Their effort and attention should remain the same.  I told stories about teachers that I detested, but still managed to eke out a decent grade by sheer determination and force of will.  I failed to remember that special education students do not share this view.  In fact, I failed to understand it at all until a few years ago.  Special education students, perhaps even more profoundly than their general education peers, need to feel connected to adults on campus. They need to feel that their learning environment is safe, and they must like you.

If they like you they will learn from you.  They will take risks and try new things.  They will work harder than they ever have before.  They will listen to you when you talk to them.  They will not feel as if you are judging them, and they will feel as if you like them back.  They will feel they have a voice.

It is not surprising then that we become their favorite teachers.  They in turn become our favorite students.  In my years of teaching I have had many crazy, amazing, wonderful students.  I have had many horrible students and experiences where I thought I would give anything if the period would only end now rather than five minutes from now.  I have many favorite students, and will hopefully have many more.  I would like to devote some time on this website now and again to tell you about them.

If you don’t write it, it never was.

Well it is time to forge ahead.

I realize my last post was a bit sad, and I’m sorry about that.  It was a theme I kept running over and over in my head, and had to put words to what it was.  It would be interesting to hear what other teachers think and feel about the issue of loss, and what they do to cope with it. Anybody?

So now on to the impending school year: 2015-2016.  Rapidly approaching, I should think, for many of you.  There’s a lot to do – and for me, pondering what I need to do and how little time I have left to actually do it can be daunting.  Thinking about it though, and taking the time to ponder, needs to happen in order to create impetus.  Summer Me slowly needs to be shaken away, as if we’ve come in from the snow and need to shed all these layers just to get back to equilibrium. I’m a big advocate of being who you are as a teacher, but you do need to gear up, and there are some subtle differences in the School You and the Summer You.

For instance, let it be said that Summer Me is not always the cleanest.  Summer Me might be wearing shorts and the same t-shirt for days on end.  The dri-fit shirt that does a great job of making the pit stains negligible begins to smell like my Grandpa smelled back in the day.  Summer me has perhaps declined in general physical upkeep, most notably in the Facial Hair Department.  The Ear Hair Department has also increased business during the reign of Summer Me.  The dawn of Summer Me has created a list of tasks for Summer Me to complete in its zeal to do stuff, yet paradoxically be free from doing stuff – however the twilight of Summer Me realizes wistfully that most items will be placed on next summer’s list to be similarly ignored.  I could go on and on.  These habits must be put in order, sometimes rapidly, in order for School Me to function properly.

Thinking about how you are going to start thinking helps.  Don’t think about it, just think about how you might begin.  I tend to think that the rust starts to fall away a little at this point, and then perhaps some planning can occur.  I need to prepare for how I’m going to possibly wear pants again, stick to a consistent showering routine, and follow-through on my commitments. I need to start thinking about how I’m going to deal with my students, because they are coming.  They are coming and they will expect me to be ready

So get ready Summer Me, and all the Summer You’s.  Time for the School You’s to emerge.  In the meantime, cultivate that ear hair for a few more blissful weeks.  I know I will…

It’s taken me awhile to recover from this past year’s graduation.  You’d think after all these years that it wouldn’t be a problem – that perhaps these things were expected, endured, reflected upon, and subsequently moved on from.  Something about this year was different, and it’s taken me three weeks to figure it out.

In short, it’s loss.  Not just another year gone, students gone, teachers gone.  This year, more than any other, I feel like I’ve lost something significant.

Let me back up a bit.  A great deal happened at my school since my last blog post a few months ago.  After feeling like my department was dealt a huge setback  with the “reassignment” (read: firing, resignation) of four full-time teachers, I was prepared for the worst for the coming school year.  We hired new teachers, created some solid inter-departmental and District level teams, and got ready to forge ahead.  This what we do, right?  We forge ahead with new personnel, new policies, new students, and a “Don’t Look Back” attitude.  It’s how we survive, and how we make an environment of constant change work for us.  Things were looking good.

The drama began in the Spring, with the “reassignment” (see above interpretation) of a well-liked teacher in our department.  The situation was traumatic, to say the least, not only for the teacher in question but for me, my colleagues, and non-Special Education co-workers that liked and respected her.  Another teacher gone from our department – a total of five over a two-year period.  For a small, relatively close-knit group, that’s a lot.  At about the same time, we came to the stark realization that several of our seniors were most likely not going to graduate.  That may seem like no big deal to those of you outside SPEDLand – after all, lots of kids don’t graduate.  Those kids may or may not turn out ok, but the likelihood that you will be in some manner disadvantaged is quite high if you do not, at the very least, get your high school diploma as a child with a learning disability.  It becomes a badge of honor, a certificate of perseverance in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, and not just a stepping stone to college.  For many, it is the highest educational honor they will ever achieve.  For some, it is the highest educational honor anyone in their family has ever achieved.

This came as a blow.  Our senior class had been a tough group ever since they entered as freshmen four years ago.  Not tough behaviorally – more so in the realm of motivation and effort.  Getting them to class on time, or even to attend school in some cases, was hard.  Once in class, getting them to do work, of any kind, was hard.  Homework was out of the question from day one.  Families were supportive, but difficult to contact and  pin down for meetings.  They entered our school with very low test scores and skills, and had experienced years of feeling stupid and ostracized from their non-disabled, highly academic peers.  At first I thought, “Well, they did it to themselves.”  They cut classes and didn’t do the work, so why should they get any special treatment?  Why should I go out of my way, when I’ve been going out of my way for three years, to try and motivate these kids to leave here with a diploma?  Besides, it’s almost the end of the school year.  With two months to go, what can they possibly DO to make up for a lifetime of diminished expectations?

Then I remembered that this is what we do.  We do it every year, and as long as we are teachers with a voice that can advocate for our students, we will continue to do it.  Communication is always key, so we increased it.  We started to communicate more with all involved parties – teachers, parents, administrators, and potential non-grads.  We encouraged, cajoled, threatened, yelled, complained, and cried.  Our seniors started to come around.  They went to class, did make-up work, and kept their eyes on the prize.  Sure, we had many scary moments along the way, but in the end they all made it.  Graduation Day 2016 came around and I saw them all walk across the stage.  I heard their families yelling for them, and I saw their faces as they passed by me one last time, all of them aglow with accomplishment.  For the first time in their lives,  real accomplishment.  I tried to identify how I felt, and I felt nothing at all.

We went on a family vacation the very next week, and I was a wreck.  I was exhausted and grumpy, and I didn’t really know why.  The day after the ceremony, I received this text message from G, a senior on my caseload that was perhaps the most unmotivated of the unmotivated from the Class of 2016:

Mr. (spelled my last name wrong…)

Hey I’m sorry I didn’t get to see you after the graduation I was really hoping to so I could give you a big hug to thank you.  You had so much faith in me that I was going to graduate.  I’m going to miss the good times we had ha

Haha I appreciate the help so much you are the best teacher I ever had in my life.  I was thankful to have a teacher like you.  Thanks for everything Mr. (spelled my last name wrong) you made a difference in my life.  Have a great summer

I have read that message over and over again, and it nearly brings me to tears everytime.  I have received many thank-you’s in my years as a teacher, and I think I know now why this one in particular hits so hard.

Loss.  Our students don’t just go – we lose them.  In many ways, the relationship a Special Education teacher has with their students is like a marriage.  There are good times, rough times, laughter, hurt feelings, disappointment, and victory.  We get to know their families, and they ours.  We bicker and sneer at each other, and chuckle at each other’s foibles.  We delight in their progress, no matter how small.  We counsel them in relationships with their peers and help work through sensitive family issues.  We try and teach by example.  Yet in the end we lose them.

I feel like I am losing friends.  I think about all the wonderful teachers I have known throughout the years, and how many of them are lost to me now.  They’ve moved, gone on to other jobs, been “reassigned”, or have just dropped off the radar.  I think too of all the wonderful students I’ve had, and how many more of them are lost to me as well.  I have kept in touch with some, but most are lost.  The idea that they may have forgotten about me completely does not bother me the least.  Young people move on and live their lives.  I’m still here, however – thinking about them and not wanting my job to be about constant upheaval all the time.  Sometimes in a profession of continual, unrelenting change, we just need things to stay the same for awhile. Today I am not comforted by the constant of change, and feel the need to pause and look back.  That is, until it’s time to forge ahead.

---

---

Not everyone is cut out to be a teacher.  People go into the profession for all sorts of noble reasons, and end up leaving because it wasn’t what they expected.  You want to teach, to impart some knowledge or wisdom, to educate – but what you run into are bureaucratic headaches, bumbling administrators, crazed parents, and uninspired students.  The burn-out level is very high with all teachers, and nowhere more so than in Special Education.  My school has a Special Education department of around 20 or so individuals, which includes teachers, counselors, therapists, and paraeducators.  Between the end of last school year and the beginning of this one, we lost four full-time teachers.  Two were not asked back, one got a job at a different school, and one left the profession altogether.  That’s roughly a 20% dropout rate overall, and a 40% dropout rate if you count just teachers.   I’d think if you were trying to evaluate the benefits of staying in this field, based on a very small sample size, you wouldn’t be crazy by choosing something else.

Sometimes people ARE cut out to teach, but just need to do something else.  My friend R. works at a private school, and has been teaching English for many years.  In stark contrast to what I do, R. often works with the highest level students on his campus – which is to say, their reading, comprehension, critical thinking, and writing skills are generally high – demonstrated not only by standardized test scores but also by in-class performance.  His lessons are engaging and thought-provoking, and he is constantly trying to improve himself and the quality of his instruction by trying new things, attending and speaking at conferences, and utilizing new and emerging technology in order to impart the knowledge and wisdom that he knows he can bring to the classroom.  That is a long-winded and eduspeak-y way to say: I think R. is a good teacher.

The last few years, though, R. has been unhappy.  In short, the administration at his school has not been overly supportive or enthusiastic about some of the changes he feels need to be made.  He has felt like he is spinning his wheels.  As an seasoned educator that has endured the various trials and tribulations of his profession, has experienced firsthand the aforementioned bureaucratic headaches, bumbling administrators, crazed parents,  uninspired students and lived to tell about it – the question becomes: do you stick it out or leave?  Leaving becomes progressively more and more scary as we get older.  The regularity of teaching, however frustrating and initiative-numbing it may be, is oddly comforting.  The bell rings and I know that it’s time to eat my snack.  In fifteen minutes another group of kids will come in, and I will teach them the same thing,more or less, that I taught the kids in first period.  Another bell will ring later and I know that I have time to go to the bathroom and eat lunch.  Finally, at some point a bell will ring and I can go home.  Or, a the very least, the students will go home and I can finally get some work done.  R. took the bold step, the scary step, and he has decided to leave.

It remains to be seen if R. will stay away from teaching altogether.  He is giving himself a year, and has plans to write a novel.  When I first met him years ago, he told me that he had a degree in Creative Writing, and had always wanted to write a book.  The demands of work, family, and just having too much time go by had forced him to the sad realization that actually taking the time to write something was never going to happen.  That, in fact, he needed to place his dreams on a dusty shelf somewhere and forget about them.  Now he has the opportunity to live his dream, and possibly help out with the laundry a little more. He had the courage to leap – not peer into the unknown and recoil, but jump.  It makes me wonder if we should all  take that opportunity.

Have heart teachers.  Don’t beat your head against a wall if the 40-something  version of you looks radically different from the 20-something version.  Don’t feel stuck in your profession.  There is still something left to give, even if you’ve already given so much, and maybe what you have left should be reserved solely for yourself.

Student-centered IEP’s.  Nice idea – but I don’t see it happening.

IEP documents are becoming longer, more ponderous, and less focused on what a student actually needs to be successful in school.  In my particular school district in California, I see a lot of very dedicated teachers spending more time planning and writing their IEP’s than actually planning their lessons each day.  Perhaps this is the nature of the beast, but perhaps we’ve slowly allowed the legal aspects of Individualized Education Plans to take precedent over the educational aspects.

Case in point: when I began writing IEP’s 10 years ago, they were done by hand.  With a pen.  And whiteout – lots of whiteout.  Most information was quickly and illegibly jotted down during the meeting.  Participants signed and everything was finished in thirty minutes.  Documents were 10-12 pages maximum.  Forms A and B and a couple of other capital letters for good measure.  Somebody somewhere checked the documents to see that nothing outrageous was promised or said, and life was good.

A year or two later and somebody invented web-based IEP’s and the cascade of paper began to flow.  A new form here and there – nothing big at first.  Forms 1A and 1B, Form 2 part 1, Form 2 part 2.  More boxes to check.  Write a statement rather than simply typing “N/A”.

Considerations if the student is deaf or hard of hearing: N/A.  Doesn’t apply.  My student can hear just fine – I looked up his hearing screening information, put the date of the screening and whether or not he passed in a section on a previous document, so I don’t really need to say much else – right?  Wrong.  I need to write a statement indicating that my student is neither deaf nor hard of hearing and therefore no considerations need to be made in this area at this time.

It’s just an extra sentence, but if you consider that special education teachers are expected to write additional sentences on 10-15 more pages of information than what was required just a decade ago, then you get a small idea of what I’m griping about.

Forms 3A, 3B.  Form 4 – very important form.  Goals for the year!  Form 4 can be six pages long – with loads of wasted space, especially if your student is mild/moderately disabled. A section that should be completely in tune with what the IEP team is trying to do, but is often worded so awkwardly in the name of having something that can be tangibly measured that the actual educational value is muffled.

A page for direct services and a page for supplemental services and a notes page that was originally intended as an area to jot down other things the IEP team happened to discuss.  Now the notes page must summarize (with complete sentences) in detail everything that happened in the IEP meeting, as if the previous 20+ pages didn’t do exactly that.

Our teachers were told a few years ago that administrators needed to be considered first when scheduling our IEP meetings.  Not the case manager/teacher schedules, not the student schedules, not the parent schedules – the ADMIN schedules.  Administrators are part of the team and need to be included, but teachers and parents are the ones who make the most contact with these kids each day, and need to be considered before people they may only see once or twice a year.

I do actually have some suggestions on how to improve and streamline the process, but you’ll have to wait for that.  It’s getting late…

That same retirement ceremony, another teacher came up to give his little speech.  Funny that in the end, we’re given five or ten minutes to sum up a career – a career rich with human interaction and crazy stuff happening almost every single day!  I mean, what do you say?  This particular teacher, a Mr. H, was quite unlike the first guy.

I remember seeing him in the last semi-sad, waning days of summer the year before he retired.  He too taught at my old high school, and I marched right up to him and introduced myself.  We chatted for a bit about some of my classmates and teachers that were there a the time.  He said, “I remember you!” At first I thought, “Wow, I was never even in his class – but he remembers ME?” It was only later that I realized he was probably just humoring me.

We were standing in line waiting for some type of pre-school event – some luncheon or meeting or something.  HIs hair looked like the crazy, matted piles of synthetic straw found most commonly on the top of my daughter’s dolls.  His nose and ear hair were equally as prodigious, poking every which way like plants searching for sunlight.  His skin had the color and texture of an old baseball glove – well oiled at one time but since left too long in the elements.  He was wearing a bright Hawaiian shirt, shorts, and flip-flops, and I could swear I heard “Margaritaville” playing somewhere in the background.

Fast forward to the first day of classes, and Mr. H was polished and ready to go.  Hair trimmed and neatly combed, other body hairs appropriately contained, skin moisturized but mostly still rough and topographical.  The only other thing I recall about his last year was that someone had gone into his classroom looking for him one day, and found his gradebook sitting open on his desk.  Seeking only to write a quick note to Mr. H, the person couldn’t help but noticing the peculiar way in which Mr. H decided to grade his students.  Keep in mind that this was when we had actual (not virtual) gradebooks, where we kept record of student’s assignment scores in pencil, and were expected to do actual math to tabulate current grades.  Most teachers utilized some sort of recognizable numeric system, but not Mr. H.  In the place of numbers, he had archaic symbols, runes, and smiley faces, possibly the brilliant precursor to today’s emojis.  If this sort of thing were discovered today, he would be put on immediate administrative leave and most likely let go.

It was Mr. H’s turn to talk, and he stepped up to the podium with a plastic garbage bag.  Inside were various items he had collected and possibly used throughout his teaching career – props, really, for his last stage act.  And boy was he funny!  Not one word about himself, his philosophy, even about teaching.  He told stories about his students!  He had a motorcycle helmet that he wore for years when he used to ride.  He gave motorcycle rides after school to students and their friends. If this sort of thing were discovered today, he would be put on immediate administrative leave and most likely let go.

He had a handmade protest sign from long ago, created years ago when he was more active in the teacher’s union, back when teachers cared about issues and raised a stink when things didn’t go their way.  I laughed until I cried and still have no clue what any of his stories were about.  What a way to end a crazy, memorable career in service to people.  In service to kids.