The Lions Look Easy...

I often tease that I am not teaching but rather that I am the ring master of a three ring circus. I will also joke on stressful days that I am going to run away and join the next circus that passes by doing any odd job from tightrope walking to lion taming. Tuesday was one of those days when not only did the circus appear tempting, but the lions looked pretty darn easy. It started with me having been absent on Monday which means my kids had run wild over my new assistant and two substitutes. They smell weaknesses and take full advantage of them - Lord do they smell any weaknesses in the system and take advantage of them! So then that morning my little Houdini who has a trach and the fastest hands to pull it out was late getting to school. She removed it before we ever left the office so her mother put it back in right there with little difficulty once I restrained her hands. So then I am juggling three bags and a child in a stroller who likes to try to topple forward out of it or stick her hands under the wheels. Fun! We make it to speech therapy to discover that one of my other little ones has just vomited all over the floor. I make a note to call his mother when I get to the classroom and decide that wrestling with Houdini in her stroller is not worth it for the 5 remaining minutes of speech. At that point her trach is still in. We walk four doors down the hallway to my classroom and her trach is out. Oh Great!! I have no idea how that beautiful but stubborn and fast child does that so darn quickly and when I am right there. After callng for supplies and assistance from my assistant (we also had a substitute but I spared her the trauma) I began attempting to replace it. Um, no. It was not going back in and she was getting quite mad. I then decided that we had a school nurse for a reason and she could come do this for me. We called her "emergency" and she came strolling in about 2-3 minutes later. Would it kill this woman to run? She could not get the larger trach back in either (ha!) and we had to go down to a smaller one. Even that was hard to get in and she almost surrendered to calling for back up (either mom or 911) before it slid in. Apparently Houdini was so mad that we were messing with her that she tensed every muscle in her body including those in her trachea. Thanks little one. :) We then did the most ungraceful ballet trying to add the trach collar to it while holding it in place and keeping her arms down. It was a 3 man job and then some. Ugh! In the end her mom came up to the school to replace the trach with a larger one anyway and show us again how easy it is - well yes, it is easy when it is your child, when she is not angry, and when you have been doing this daily for 5 years. Cut us some slack here. So then I finally called the mother of my child who had returned breakfast and she agreed to cme get him as soon as she could. We then had what could only be described as chaos. Children trying everything they could to test limits because they sensed weaknesses. Climbing up and over shelves, throwing toys, dumping art materials, and the list goes on. My beautiful little heartbreaker went into attack mode because she was so stressed and frightened. I wish she had another way to communicate but I understand why she scratches and pinches. Oh, and at lunch one child choked and almost allowd me an opportunity I did not want to practice the Heimlich maneuver. I swear that there is never a dull moment. I also think I could hear circus music in the background all day over the chaotic din. Those lions, they look nice and cuddly and easy to control compared to my little mob. I wonder.......

Just Breathe

Ever have those days where you accidentally ask "what else can go wrong?" and then not five minutes later you reply "oh, that"? That is a good description of how yesterday felt. For the past few weeks our school has been using a "school wide" reinforcement system to reward positive behavior. However, when I attempted to participate I was informed that it was not appropriate for my children because they would not understand it but that they would be more than willing to assist me in developing a positive reinforcement system that I could use in my classroom. Um, I can reinforce my children it was the inclusion I wanted. So yesterday at the special education team meeting this reinforcement program was discussed and I mentioned that I had not been allowed to participate. Let's just say that no one else appreciated that either. The team leader volunteered to discuss it with the principal and less than an hour later preschool is included. However, I have the distinct feeling that while the administration has no issue with our inclusion those running the program below them do and so it is a begrudging inclusion. Oh well. Then we had a minor situation with a feeding pump that had me ready to throw the beeping "error - error- error" thing out the window. Finally after 15 minutes of trying this and that we emptied the feeding bag, washed it, flushed the tubing, and reset everything. Apparently that made the machine feel better because then it worked. It is of interest that there was no blockage in any of the tubing, no clumps in the feeding bag, and nothing wrong with it other than a bad attitude. Finally while outside on the playground Houdini managed to pull out her trach while being supervised. She is darn fast. The same movement used to cover her trach and talk slips into a pull-out-the-trach movement before you can stop it. So we made a trip to the school nurse to have it reinserted because I felt that the playground was not the best location for such an undertaking. I then received a lecture from the school nurse for allowing her to remove her trach and not providing proper supervision. UGH! Why doesn't she try my job for a day? She seemed to threaten that if it happened again any time soon (which is like saying if she sneezes any time soon) there would be serious reprocussions. I felt like crying because I am doing the best that I can and you can not always hold my children to the same expectations as children who are typically developing. For this child, removing her trach once in 5 days was great. It is all perspective and relative. So I ended up talking to the principal after my class left and was reassured that I would not be in any trouble if she removed her trach again because the only person to discipline me would be her (principal) and she would not do so. She also reminded me that I am a teacher, not a babysitter, and that I need to make my decisions based on what is educationally best for my children. Of course I need to make best effort to keep them safe but I am not child care and I am not a nurse. That was so reassuring. Because I had seriously considered the circus, or McDonalds. Some days it seems like a cage full of lions would be a relaxing vacation compared to teaching. Yet in the end I wouldn't trade my job. There are eight precious reasons waiting for me each day. Eight sticky, wet, slimy, warm, soft hands and eight sets of beautiful, piercing, seeking eyes and eight amazing little souls.

Lost Lunch

On Friday I discovered three guaranteed ways to lose any chance you may have had at eating your lunch, or any other lunch. I should explain that on days when I have a home visit almost immediately after school I tend to take my chances and buy a school lunch. This requires me eating with my very adorable children as they eat lunch which is always an adventure because while cute they have yet to develop anything resembling table manners or hygeine. Part of each meal involves retrieving children from under the table because for some reason lost to me food eaten off of the nasty preschool floor tastes infinitely better than the same food presented on a nice clean plate or a relatively clean table. Entertainment devised by the children on some days consists of dropping food and then laughing when someone else scrambles to the floor to eat it. Yes, three and four year olds have wicked senses of humor. Anyway, the three guaranteed ways to lose your desire to eat.
1) Open the container that your lunch is in and take a bite. Then position the container so that when the child seated behind you who has a trach coughs they spray your entire lunch with the bits of slime that emerge. As a bonus you may also be slimed.
2) Feed the children green cookies before lunch and then allow them to eat their lunchs. Then have one child take a few steps from the table and vomit. Vomiting green cookies is something that I could have gone all of my life without seeing and been perfectly content. Although he gets points for not getting any on himself...if only I could say the same for the floor.
3) Return from taking the comiting child to the nurse's office (where you have to sit with him holding the bucket until his mother shows up and informs you that his little sister has been sick for the past few days with the same thing - resist the urge to hit her) and suction the trach of the coughing child from #1. Discover more green treasures and dodge slime with minimal success. Try to remove green treasures and slime while convincing an unhappy protesting child that this really is for her own good and without contaminating anything.
If that does not slow down your appetite you have a more robust appetite than I possess. I did not feel queasy, I just no longer was interested in the lunch that i had once planned on eating nor anything else for a while. I also did not eat anything green that day...or the next day. Yuck!!!

Perspective

Teaching is not a job that guarantees immediate results. At the end of the day you do not have a set of sales figures, a graph of stock values, a pile of completed reports, or much tangible proof that you were successful. Depending on what grade level you teach there may be the assorted student papers but those are not what teaching is about and they are only a means to the end. The product of teaching in knowledge and growth, it is personal change of a child and that is often difficult to capture and quantify. How much is enough? To whom to you attribute it? What is mastery and understanding?
This past week I have been frustrated with myself and my abilities as a teacher. I expect things from myself that may or may not be reasonable and I demand that I live up to the highest expectations. In other words I am a perfectionist when it comes to the things that I do and prefer to do my best or do nothing. I began to feel that I must be among the worst teachers and that certainly my children were not going to benfit from their time in my class. Self doubt is a best friend of perfectionism. Then yesterday I spent some time with one of my kids that changed my perspective and made me really look at how far we have all come.
One of the newest children in my class is a little boy with autism. When I first met him about a month ago I was amazed by his energy and his continuous motion. I was also puzzled as to just what strategies I would use to bring him into the group and make a connection. The first few days he was a whirly-gig and he did not much care for the idea of a routine, or rules, or anything other than stimming (providing sensory input or stimualtion) with objects like crayons and string. I collected any object he liked to use as a reinforcer, as a reward for things like eye contact and talking and following a direction. Slowly he began to settle into our routine and slowly he began to make connections here and there. Yesterday he sat down at circle time and announced very cheerfully "Is Everybody Happy?" which is the introduction to our slightly bizarre version of "If You're Happy and You Know It" on CD. It was his way of requsting the song. We played it immediately. He is now joining in on some of the actions of most songs. He understands how to request things during circle time - both verbally and with our song choice cards. He knows the days of the week and gets them correct. He announces what day it is correctly when I ask (I prompt the other children in sign language). He correctly identifies the weather and includes things like windy. When his mother came to class she told me that he is doing this at home - telling her what day it is and what the weather is outside and that he never used to do this. Progress and perspective. Later that day we were playing with a toy that had some letters velcrod to it. I pulled one off and asked him, only half-seriously, what it was. To me it looked like the letter "u" but he responded "n" and turned it right side up. He was correct. I then began to present him with some other letters in a variety of positions - upside down, backwards, correctly positioned and he got them all. This little boy at the age of 3 1/2 can identify all of the letters of the alphabet presented in any order and in any position. I then put magnetic alphabet letters on the chalk board in correct order and he walked along them pointing to each one as he sang the alphabet song without any prompting. If he got ahead of his pointing he would correct and catch up to the right letter. Amazing!!!! Perspective. I had thought that the most I could hope for with him would be to establish things like eye contact, a simple turn taking game, a few requests in either sign or verbally, and following a strict routine with prompts. He has reminded me that there is often so much more if you take the time to look. Would I have ever known he was capable of this if I had not asked him to identify that one letter? Does this change how I view him? Does it change how I teach him? Perspective.
I then began to look at all of my children to see what I had not seen before. We may be a jumble and a one-of-a-kind group but we are one group and we have come a long way. I can see where each child has made progress and I can see where as one group we have made progress. No one is where they were at the beginning of the school year - slowly but surely we have taken steps one by one and together to reach new places. Goals are being met, skills are being learned, children are growing and developing, and we are working together to do it. Maybe, just maybe, I am not the worst teacher. Maybe, just maybe, I can do this after all. Maybe, just maybe, it is all in the perspective.