On the Plus Side

Fred Gailey: Look Doris, someday you're going to find that your way of facing this realistic world just doesn't work. And when you do, don't overlook those lovely intangibles. You'll discover those are the only things that are worthwhile.

—Miracle on 34th Street (1947)

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This is an extension of a comment I made on Epiphany's blog.

When I was working in New York schools, which happened between 1985 up until a few weeks before 9/11 (and with that two-year break at Record World), I worked in a few different places:

• Most of that time, I worked in a nonpublic school with severely- and profoundly-impaired youngsters, aged 5-21. We're talking one step away from an institution. I had kids who were fifteen years old, who were functionally nonverbal. They were two-year-olds in grown bodies.
• I was a substitute teacher in New York City for almost a year. Most of the classes I worked in were special education classes, and most of the schools were in the Queens neighborhood of South Ozone Park. PS 63Q was my "cash cow"; I got a lot of work there. The other one was the nearby middle school, IS 210. Lemme tell you, they fed the teachers well in 210's cafeteria. 
• I worked in a very small private high school in Manhattan for a year. My biggest class was five students. Most of these kids had serious money. A girl in my homeroom is now worth around $200 million.
• After that I spent about two years in the preschool program at Helen Keller Services for the Blind in Brooklyn.

So you see, I was either forgettable, or my students were so impaired that they wouldn't remember me today.

After my second marriage fell apart, a friend of mine suggested that I come down to Baltimore. They're looking for people here, she told me. My concern was that I didn't want to leave New York to have the same job I could have up there. She told me that I could work as an Instructional Associate, and she told me what the job entailed: basically, I would coordinate the crafting of the educational programs for the special ed students in a school. It sounded like exactly what I wanted to do, and here's why:

When I attended the IEP meetings for the Helen Keller students, I was given two tasks: write the progress report and develop the academic goals for the students. When I was asked to attend the meeting (which wasn't the case every time for my students; many times someone else from the school attended in my place), my participation was practically nil unless I made a point of injecting myself into the conversation. More often than not, we'd go to the meeting and someone would stick a document under the parents' noses and say, "Sign here." There was very little discussion of the student's program, the school they'd attend, the educational setting, anything. And this is what the parent is being asked to sign to. It made me pretty crazy, and coming to Baltimore seemed like an antidote. It was a way of "putting right what once went wrong" (bonus points if you can ID that quotation) and ensuring that bad IEPs weren't getting shoved down parents' throats.

So now that I'm in Baltimore, my contact with the students is a little more limited. Although many of them know my name, it's not as though they're forming fond student/teacher memories of me that they'll carry through their lives. However, there are plenty of times when I'll be at a meeting that seems to go on for EVER (and some of them do take several hours), and we go through what seems like a million details, and we walk out of the building trying to remember what sunshine looks like, and we know that we've put together a great document that truly has the student's best interests at heart; an educational plan that really seems to get this kid, and if all goes well then we've laid down the foundation for another great plan next year. And the parent who came into the meeting with the "Don't think you're going to blow smoke up my butt" attitude and the one with the "What lies are you going to tell me this year?" snarl leaves the school thanking us for our work, because we're the first team that truly heard what they have to say.

So when we get all of the other stress and grief and tsouris and the just-plain-bullshit from North Avenue and other Bigger Paychecks Than Ours, we think back on moments like those and remember that it's the things like that that make it worthwhile.

Comments

[AnITA]

Claude -

I wish I could hold on to the good days when the days, more often that not, descend into utter chaos. When i'm walking to my car and its as dark out as it was when I went in the building in the morning and the only person left in the building is the night custodian who came on when the kids left for the day, I wonder why I continue in this job. It's certainly not the money! But you're right. When a parent looks at you and says you're the first person to 'get' my kid or explain things to them in a way that makes sense, it really does make it worth it. But its getting harder and harder to remember that when you're getting data cleansing emails & deadlines & dealing with people who haven't been inside a classroom in 20 years.

What I don't understand is that when I describe the job I do, most lay people recognize with little effort what a thankless and impossible job it is, but those people in the Ivory Tower at North Avenue don't think we're worth the common courtesy of knowing in advance when our work duties end this year and begin next year.

Thanks for blogging and giving a voice to the frustrations we all are feeling (and giving us an inside scoop at times).