Thursday, January 04, 2007

Into the Fire

Yesterday was my first day back to work! Yea! In an inservice yesterday, we discussed a new method our school district will be using to evaluate preschoolers. Today the kids are back, and it's a full schedule. I have, count them, 4 meetings today. I'm also in the middle of evaluating a 2nd grader for learning disabilities, so hopefully I can finish that today and tomorrow. Poor little guy, he's pretty good in math, but is so disfluent in reading. He's so extremely frustrated that now he has become a behavior problem. Mom is living many, many states away and is battling her own demons, trying to get her life together so that she can once again take care of her kids. That's gotta be tough for this young man.

I've completed my first evaluation of a student who I will recommend placement in special education under the "Mental Retardation" category. These are the tough ones. It's hard to tell parents this news, and in this case, English is not these parents' first language, so it will be more difficult. We have hired a translator for the meeting, just to make sure there is no misunderstanding. Their kid is a cutie, repeating kindergarten for the 2nd time, and still not understanding a lot of things those kindergarteners need to know. He's behind, very behind, in all academic areas, and socially and emotionally. But he liked coming with me for testing!

It's going to be a nice day here, in the 50's and sunny. Would be a good day to walk outside-maybe around the playground. Yeah, around the playground. Maybe I'll try that.

1 comment:

The Black Briefcase said...

Hey, I probably should have just emailed you but i didn't want to assume your email address. Mine is theblackbriefcase@gmail.com in case you were wondering.

I'm in New England, and my district has about 7000 kids, the town pop. is 55K.

When I have a free moment I'm going to read through your blog. I saw some interesting headers in there.

BBC