Tag: ‘jared’ · TangleBones

More Jared School Stuff

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.

Thanks for ignoring his diagnosis

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.

Lots of Good Ideas

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?