Broad Brushes are Like Bad Apples - It Only Takes One To Spoil The Rest

Frequent readers of my blogs would recognize that I have been accused in the past by the then top administrators of making "broad brush attacks" against the HCPS.

I thought I was simply speaking the truth. And I still think so.

One of the issues that I have faced as the parent of a disabled student within the HCPS system was teachers of the disabled that were less than professional. Couple that situation with the fact that my wife is an excellent educator, and it doesn't take long for issues to arise.

I was perusing another blog today and found this one at "From The Trenches of Public Education".

This paragraph got my attention: "One thing that I think very few non-teachers understand is that there is great incentive in teaching to perform well because of the very nature of the job. There are few things more humiliating than to stand up in front of twenty-five to thirty adolescents and know you are bombing. That audience is not very forgiving. There are very few occupations I can think of that would be worse to be bad at than teaching. Maybe professional boxing."

Bingo.

Standing in front of a group of kids who have limited communication skills to go home and tell Mommy and Daddy what the teacher did, or more importantly didn't do, is not conducive to being humiliated. Along with that, trying to prove anything a limited communicating "child" tries to say is essentially impossible.

Add to that a system that has arrogant and cavalier authority that looks at all teachers as professionals and students and parents as liars and troublemakers and what you have left is an insulated system that is unchecked.

Limited communicators can't go home and tell Mommy and Daddy that the O.T. didn't come to school today.

Limited communicators can't go home and tell Mommy and Daddy that the teacher showed a full length movie to the deaf class today. BTW, it makes it even more egregious when the kid is deaf and legally blind. Therefore the seat in the back of the room for a deaf kid with colobomas and 20/400 "distorted" vision is not really the appropriate educational setting for that kid. But who the hell am I. I am not a professional teacher. I am just the parent.

What real professional educators should know about kids who have "limited communication skills" is that their parents (most of them) have learned what the kid is "communicating" by "reading" their behavior. It is a real phenomenon. I have plenty of these types of scenarios that I could share where my son was "telling everyone" things were not well. Self mutilation and clothing destruction were two of the signs.

Over a period of time, the signs get louder. Even if the kid can't talk.

Fall of 1996.