Yearning to Educate

Not only am I a broad-brush-attack, isolated-incident, malcontent parent who can-never-be-appeased, I also have a desire to educate. Just ask the hundreds-close-to-low thousands of families that I have had contact with over the last 32 years.

I believe that the world of Special Education is the cornerstone of "public education". For those who have never been responsible for a disabled person, this concept may seem bass-ackwards.


I submit that professional teachers of the disabled can teach rings around professional teachers of the regular.

Concepts such as backward chaining, daily living skills, functional causation and understanding that pragmatic discourse is generally not beneficial in educating those who learn differently.


For those who care - pragmatics is regarded as one of the most challenging aspects for language learners to grasp, and can only truly be learned with experience.

"....Another perspective is that pragmatics deals with the ways we reach our goal in communication. Suppose, a person wanted to ask someone else to stop smoking. This can be achieved by using several utterances. The person could simply say, 'Stop smoking, please!' which is direct and with clear semantic meaning; alternatively, the person could say, 'Whew, this room could use an air purifier' which implies a similar meaning but is indirect and therefore requires pragmatic inference to derive the intended meaning."


Low expectations is the bane of all education. ALL education.


At Kingswood Elementary, in 1990-91, when my 3rd grade deaf/blind child was being quizzed on Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, I objected to the appropriateness of the content. How the hell does he know, or will ever care, who they were. Why not teach him who the Principal is, or people he can "relate" to?

Another classic example of arrogance with ignorance was when he was in a music class at Colson Elementary. He was given a "music class" test that consisted of 3 or 4 pages of questions in which he had to answer questions related to music cadences that were played by the teacher. It was a "simple test" - he had to circle "yes" or "no".

As my son had a lot of experience in recognizing "patterns", he had drawn circles around the "yes - yes" and "no - no".

The fact that he could not hear the chimes and bells played by the teacher that represented one count, two count or three count cadences was lost to the "professional educators". The teacher, in his heartfelt pity, wrote "good try" on my son's "F" paper.

That was around 1994-95- not sure which. My concerns fell on deaf ears.

JusT Like i UsEd TO comPlaiN aBout HOW my SoN waS tAugHt His SpelLING WOrds IN all CapitaL LetterS.


Yes, it is true, one of my son's teachers taught him his spelling words in all-capital-letters. She had been doing it for x amount of years, and I (you know, the ignorant, non-professional educator, simply-stupid-parent) was not going to change her practice. Despite my year-long, multi-faceted approach to trying to fix this problem, I did not prevail. I even tried to use the fact that no spelling word book in Hillsborough County presented spelling words in capital letters. Instead of dealing in best practices, I was dealing with power and control. In fact, it was when I learned the "secret" that "when the teacher's door is closed, it is "her/his" realm."

Convenient for the administration to allow ignorance to prevail.