1st Sick Day of the Year!

So I'm home sick with migraine.  The nice thing is that most of the time my migraines, which begin in the middle of the night, are gone by around 11:00am or so.  This allows me the rest of the day to relax and enjoy myself.  Yes I feel guilty that I'm not with my student right now (I'm missing mealworm centers!) but there's a game all new teachers have to play when they move from district to district each year.  Last year I used each and every one of my sick days because I knew that I didn't want to stay for the next year.  I wouldn't have used them so quickly if they went towards retirement, but one of the sucky things about being a teacher working as a paraprofessional is that your sick days don't roll over into anything.  Anyway, I don't know where I'll be next year right now but I figured one sick day can't hurt.  You have to spread them out over the course of the year so it doesn't look suspicious, a skill I am mastering as the years go by.

So you might like to know a little bit about what I do.  My school district is located in the northeast suburbs of Chicago right on Lake Michigan.  It's the nicest school district I've worked in so far with a very dedicated administration (from what I can tell so far), good teachers, parents who actually show up to curriculum night and conferences, and very sweet kids.  Definitely a change from the highly diverse, low income school district that I student taught in, as well as the Title 1 school I worked in last year.  Not that I didn't love those experiences; they were awesome and I learned a lot.  Now we are on the other side of the coin working with parents who care A LOT more than before, even a little too much?  I figure it's always something; you either have parents who don't care or parents who do care.  Kids who are motivated or kids who aren't.  All schools have challenges and it's how you approach those challenges that makes you a good or bad teacher.

The student I work with is in the special education program.  This is the second year I have worked with a student who is autistic.  I never thought in a million years that I would be so experienced with autism.  I swear that I couldn't even come up with a clear definition of autism two years ago.  I was so focused on what I wanted (to teach middle school reading/language arts) that I thought I was above everything else.  After I was let go, I had to decide very quickly if I wanted to stay in education and whether or not I was willing to become a paraprofessional to do that.  I never wanted to teach special ed., even though my college advisor was very optimistic about the profession.  He told his class that if you are general education, you will end up with more special education students in your class than the special ed. teachers.  He also told me that I was unemployable and that I didn't seem to care.  I spent a long time after that wanting so badly to prove him wrong, but it looks like he was right.  Dr. Bass, I still wouldn't choose special education.  After two years of reporting to special ed. teachers and working in the sped. program, I still don't want to do it.  Forget all that paperwork!  I just want my own classroom and to teach the subjects I am passionate about: English, literature, and social studies.

Anyway, I work with my student on a one-on-one basis each day.  I'm telling you, if he weren't so darn cute....I don't know what I'd do.  His smile and long curly eyelashes definitely break my heart, as do the multiple hugs.  Autism is the strangest thing.  I've worked with two different students with autism and I still can't figure it out.  It affects each person so differently, yet they have characteristics that are so similar.  Another thing that gets me is the way it must impact families, especially mothers.  How do you buy Christmas presents for a child that has no specific interests?  Who can't communicate his feelings about what he likes and dislikes?  My student last year had no concept of what the cabin of an airplane looked like because he had never been on one because his mother was afraid to take him on a vacation.  He was so sheltered he vowed to never leave his family and often stayed home from school.  I'm already worrying about my current student next year, and the year after that in new schools.  How do people with autism get through their adult lives?  Each case is so different, so how can we help them all?