Teaching Special Education is the toughest job in the world.
When Matthew was about to enter kindergarten, we had our first Individual Education Plan meeting, or IEP, expecting that Matthew would only need Special Education services for a few years – until we got him straightened out. We learned that children in our district with special needs are either mainstreamed, and attend regular class with the help of an aide and modified curriculum, or are placed in a “special day class” with fewer students and more individualized instruction. We liked the idea of the special day class, and thought that since he would only be in “the system” for a little while, we might as well go for the heavy-duty program.
When we saw the kids in his class on the first day of school, we were happy. They all seemed pretty normal. We later learned that looks can be deceiving.
Matthew’s special day classes had an average of eight students with a broad range of disabilities taught by one teacher and one or two instructional aides.
Each child in the class has an IEP that incorporates recommendations and services from a variety of specialists, depending on the nature of the child’s disability and the parents’ demands. Some of the students require a one-on-one instructional aide, as did Matthew from third through fifth grades. We asked for an aide at first because Matthew had become obsessed with airplanes and looked out the window all day hoping to see one. “Where are they going?” he’d ask. “Where have they been?” No work was getting done. Matthew’s aide, Carolyn, was a student teacher in her mid-forties, and her job was challenging – Matthew’s obsessions usually took hold for about six months, and she struggled to get Matthew to focus on his work.
When we could see that his obsession with airplanes had gripped him beyond anything we had seen before, we saw a psychiatrist that specialized in autistic spectrum disorders. He recommended Luvox, a drug that helps tame obsessive-compulsive disorder. OCD is one of the characteristics that plague many who are diagnosed with autism, and Matthew’s seemed to be getting worse as he got older. Peter and I had always struggled with the idea of medicating Matthew, but were encouraged by the dramatic reduction of his obsessive-compulsive behavior just a few weeks after he started taking medication. Carolyn was finally able to engage Matthew, and while he was still fascinated with airplanes, she could keep him at work for ten minutes before rewarding him with a minute of airplane time, either looking out the window, or drawing airplanes in the margins of his workbook. When I picked Matthew up from school, there were days when Carolyn looked like she was one hundred years old. On other days she looked like she couldn’t wait to get in her car and burst into tears. My favorite days were when she looked radiant.
“Matthew had a great day!”
One year as Matthew’s aide proved to be enough for Carolyn, and the following year, a new aide, Sam, was broken in early by an unfortunate unannounced fire drill at the beginning of the school year, and Matthew spent three months after the drill with his hands over his ears at school.
The school district, from the superintendent down, was dedicated to solving this problem, and tried everything to convince Matthew that he was safe – the alarm would not go off again. I was given schedules of fire drills for the remainder of the year so that I could keep Matthew home during the next episode.
In the end, Matthew resolved his fixation with a simple question and answer.
“Does Grandpa take his hands off his ears when it’s time to?”
“Yes”
And that was the end of it.
A day in the life of a Special Ed teacher is fraught with unpredictability. I stopped by Matthew’s seventh grade class one day at 10 a.m. to bring him lunch, and already two of the students had recovered from seizures, and another was on the verge of one. Matthew wasn’t exactly being a prince that day, having sunk his teeth into a fellow student’s arm. She was quietly sobbing at her desk.
Every year for a Special Ed teacher brings a new mix of kids, complete with parents. Some parents are willing to do anything to make the teacher’s life easier. Others are invisible, and never accessible during a crisis. There are parents who do nothing but complain, and demand the impossible. Why isn’t she reading on grade level? When will he be doing long division? He never acts that way at home. You must have done something to set him off.
All this turmoil while making sure children are following the lesson plan outlined in their IEP.
I’ve hired college students to mentor Matthew in the afternoons. Some of them have told me, “I want to be a special education teacher!” Not too long ago, I followed up with one of them to see how she was doing. She had decided against the special education career and worked in an advertising agency.