I received another note from Jared’s service coordinator:
I wanted to let you know that from today on, Jared will be in Mrs. XXX’s (1st grade) class every day for math. I am in this class with him. This decision was made so that he could be in a team-taught classroom. He will still be in Mrs. YYY’s class for all other subjects. If you have any questions or concerns, please let me know.
Here’s my response, mostly placed here so that I don’t lose it:
I’m afraid I don’t understand what you mean in your letter. I’m certainly not an educator, so I don’t know what the advantages of a “team-taught classroom” are for Jared. What I do know is that while Jared deals with change better than many autistics, changes like this are usually accompanies by a certain amount of anxiety and stress for him. Considering that his assistant has been changed, does changing his math teacher, his math classroom, his method of instruction and his access to the break-time de-stressors in Mrs. YYY’s class make sense? Also what advantage do we hope to gain by using a team, considering that Jared has such a hard time dealing with more than one person at a time? And the biggest piece of information missing from your letter is why this change needs to take place. Is Jared doing poorly in math? I he doing so well that he needs more advanced lessons? Why is this change worth making him anxious all day? Please understand, I want to support you and the other members of his team, but I feel like your short note was a little too short. If you’d like to expand, you can reach me at…
They’re trying to turn me into one of those crazy parents who fights with the school about everything, they really are. I don’t want to be that guy that turns the IEP meeting into a shouting match. I don’t want to be the father that makes the teachers afraid that he’s lawyering up. I want to be the friendly, jovial parent that the teachers like almost as much as they like his son. But as Jared gets older, that might not be in the cards.
I’ve never really understood the whole religious experience thing, but suddenly I feel as though I completely understand what the disciples felt when they witnessed Christ’s resurrection. Why?
Oh, sure, to some of you that means nothing. It’s just some guy whose nostril flares when he blinks rambling about the WGA strike and covering a little bit of news. But to those of us who love him, it’s the second coming. So get out your duckie, trade your walnuts for gold, and pray to whoever will listen that he’s coming back to stay.
Update: And look, Malcolm Gladwell is back too! Can Elvis be far behind?
Dear Senator Leahy,
There’s a simple answer to the problems you’re having with Michael Mukasey’s confirmation. If he won’t tell you whether or not he thinks waterboarding is torture, you’re going to have to waterboard him until he has an answer. I’m guessing he’ll say yes.
Sincerely,
Jemal Cole
p.s. Here’s how to do it.
I read a lot on the Internet and follow a lot of different news sources, so it’s nice to finally feel like I can believe something about a celebrity. Here’s what writer Neil Gaiman has to say about Angelina Jolie:
I like Angelina. She’s nice, very professional, and has a slightly goofy sense of humour. Last time I met her was November 2005, when she was doing the acting bit of Beowulf. Even then, it had already been reported in the papers that she had closed down production on Beowulf by walking off the set after a fight with Ray Winstone — two weeks before her first day on set. I realised that where she was concerned the press were happy to simply make up stuff that sounded credible. It didn’t need have to have any basis at all in reality.
Other than that, I’m assuming that everything else I read is crap. Neil Gaiman: America’s most trusted source of news.
You really should watch more tennis. I know, I know, you think it’s too hard to keep up with and you’re so busy. But what if I told you there was a kind of tennis that only had one event a week, and only two people played at a time? Best of all, you can watch it on the internet, and it doesn’t matter when you tune in because everybody always wins. Too good to be true? Nope!
Of course I’m talking about Layer Tennis from Coudal Partners. Each week two talented designers duke it out in a 10 round, no-images-barred match. Designers have 15 minutes to see what their competition has made, come up with an idea and then create a response.
Competitions so far have features some really amazing photographers and designers. My favorite is the first, between Shaun Inman and Kevin Cornell. A great illustrator, a great designer, and commentary by one of my favorite bloggers, John Gruber. Volley after volley of high intensity artwork.
If you have any interest in design, you’ll love it.
So it’s the first day of Standard Time here in America, and it couldn’t have come at a more opportune moment. Here you are with an extra hour in the day, GIVEN to you by the people you will be cursing in a few months when they steal it back, and you have something great to do with it: NaBloPoMo.
No, I didn’t have a seizure at the end of that last post. It’s National Blog Posting Month, fool! The month where you commit to posting something on your blog every day. That’s right, 30 days and nights of talking about your cat, complaining about the lady in front of you at the checkout line, or whining about having nothing to write about. And even if you’ve missed the last 3 days, it’s okay, because you aren’t doing it for any particular reason.
I’m doing it, which obviously means that you should too. So sign up, and get writing.
Oh, and since I’m pretty sure that posting about NaBloPoMo doesn’t count, I’m going to go poke my cat and see what falls out.
Jared’s school promoted the WONDERFUL woman who has been Jared’s assistant since the middle of last year, and he has a new person helping him stay focused. Or rather, he has a new person standing near him while he remains unfocused and anxious. Evidently that “resistance to change” part of the autism diagnosis slipped past them.
I’m hoping that Jared warms to this new person, or that his behavior last week (less than perfect) was because of his fall allergies. I don’t begrudge his old assistant getting promoted because she totally deserves it, but I wish that if they were going to switch things up on Jared, they would have done it in the beginning of the year. And I’m sure that the new assistant is doing her level best, but she’s been put in a crappy situation.
I guess I’m just disappointed because it’s been all good news for Jared this year, and now things are going downhill. Each day the kids get a little indication of their behavior in their take home folders: either a green, yellow or red dot. Last month, Jared had almost nothing but green smiley faces - not just dots, people, but smiley faces. A couple days of a new assistant, and behavior is lousy again.
Here’s his first month’s progress report towards his IEP goals from the school:
Jared did well in his first month of first grade. When asked questions during and after reading he is able to answer them correctly. Jared can respond to a text orally and pictorially but often needs verbal prompts to stay focused. We do modify tasks for Jared and he is usually able to finish a task. Jared will answer when called on and we are working on him quietly raising his hands. Fine motor skills such as cutting and handwriting are improving but are still sometimes difficult. Jared is communicating with his peers and interacts with them both inside the classroom and at recess.
Here’s the second:
Jared has been making progress in the area of language arts. He has been writing full sentences without even taking part in shared writing. Comprehension with text is getting better, although Jared still will restate verbatim from the text. Jared is improving his task completion but still needs many prompts.
Yes there are some criticisms in there, but when combined with how well Jared is doing academically, I’m ecstatic with his progress so far. But by switching out a member of his team, a wrench has been thrown into the works. Jared is already working at a disadvantage compared to his peers. He’s easily distracted, has a hard time communicating with other people, and learns in a completely different way. The metaphor I use is that it’s as though all the kids in his class are running a marathon. Jared’s autism means that he’s running with 30 pounds of weight on his back, and yet he’s still keeping up with the other kids. The last thing he needs are detours on the route… okay, that metaphor is getting tortured. You know what I mean.
So here’s to hoping that things work out with the new assistant. Jared’s been working so hard this year, and I’d hate to see him start falling behind.
I’m sort of paralyzed right now by the number of potential projects on my plate. I have a site that I promised I would build for Kellie, a site that I need to design and write for myself, and a new programming job I’d like to pitch to another site. Sadly, I’m not really motivated to do any of them.
The job for Kellie is a women’s health site that will be a nexus between social networking, health management and medical resources. It’s very ambitions, but there’s so much to do that I don’t know where to start. Kellie wrote me about 6 dozen pages of requirements, which is good, but it’s a bit overwhelming.
The site I want to write is another medical resource site based on my experience with Jared. I’m ready to do it, and I’m pretty sure I know what I want to say, but there are a lot of freaky people out there, and I’m not sure I’m in a place where I want to deal with what will happen if they find the site.
The last one is actually a miniature variation of a site I worked on last spring, but more focused and yet more generalized. I’d like a way for a certain breed of small websites to be able to add a social element to their sites without a lot of work, but the idea I have in mind will combine a database, some PHP and a return to Flash. And that’s especially overwhelming.
So I’m hoping to get myself motivated - do any of you have any recommendations on self-starting?
Jared was up at 3 last night, and I got up to get him back to sleep. After missing a couple hours sleep, I was really bleary-eyed when I finally crawled into the living room at 7. I sat down at the computer to check my email (and my swiftly descending page rank) and the cat jumped up on the desk in front of me. She stretched out for some grooming, and I tried to read around her while she sat splay-legged doing her best to block my view of the browser.
As I was trying to read my morning comics, I heard a tiny little thump and realized that there was something sitting on the keyboard tray: a small, vaguely Hershey’s kiss-shaped lump with red and green specks. I thought, “the cat didn’t just take a crap on my desk did she?” I sat there and stared at it for a few seconds before I noticed that there was a string attached to the pile.
And the cat.
It was a single yellow thread that snaked around and led to the cat’s butt. That seemed to prove that what I was looking at was definitely poop, but I was too tired to know what to do. I looked around and found a small plastic bag and scooped up the poop, realizing that I was going to have to pull the string out. Let’s just say that the string was significantly longer than one might hope.
The only thing I regret is that I didn’t take a picture. Not of the poop or the string, but of the look on the cat’s face. She was both surprised and bored, as though she didn’t expect to be in this situation, but it didn’t really bother her either. I’m a human - it’s my job to dislodge things from her butt.