One advantage to my terrible iPhone camera and my terrible photography skills is that student confidentiality is always protected! Even the photos I take of the students themselves are completely unrecognizable. ;)
The picture above is actually a photo of my interpreter / student / classroom schedule for this year. I can say in all sincerity that...well, that this is nuts. One or two of the mainstream kids in particular are giving me fits. Seriously, I have the twitchy eyelid, the random cold sweats - the whole business. With DIS pullout (speech, vision, etc.) there honestly doesn't seem to be enough hours in the day.
This post may seem, at first blush, to be a thinly-veiled attempt to guilt you all into adhering to a rock-solid, 100% unyielding and inflexible schedule for my own convenience as I attempt to schedule my own instructional program against yours.
Well, okay. It's sort of that.
I know, of course, that teachers - more than any other of God's creations - must be resilient and flexible to survive. You must bend to the assembly, to the minimum day, to the state standard requiring that all students be able to recite the Declaration of Independence, in the dark, hanging upside down by a trapeze. You've worked out an agreement with your grade-level teaching team that Social Studies will be taught during second period on Wednesdays and Thursdays, except when it's on Tuesdays, and never under a waxing gibbous moon. Also, second period should include part of third period, at least on every other Friday.
Complicating matters further is this frequent IEP gem: "Student will be mainstreamed for all subjects EXCEPT Reading / ELA."
As we begin to implement Common Core, isolating ELA in this fashion seems heretical.
I am unabashedly grateful for the contributions of you, our mainstream teachers - for your hard work, for your tolerance of additional adults and children in your already overcrowded classrooms, for your willingness to go the extra mile for kids that really need your help. You never ask for thanks (and receive thanks far less often than you deserve). In all past school years, when teachers have needed to flex their schedules a bit, we've generally been able to accommodate the change, even with no advance notice.
This year- it feels overwhelming. In mapping out precisely what students I hope to have at what time of day, I've sliced each period very thinly in an effort to squeeze as much instruction as possible into tiny slivers of time. For example, I have third period and part of fourth to teach 5 different levels of Reading / ELA to kids who need intensive instruction in these areas. A simple shift or extension on the part of a mainstream teacher might simply mean that a given student gets no Reading/ELA that day. If several mainstream teachers all decide to modify their schedules at the same time, things are suddenly the special kind of hairy that no mousse can tame.
This goes two ways, of course. Changes in our schedule - even small misfires, like sending students at the wrong time, misunderstanding an announced schedule change, or - epic fail - having kids show up that you never knew were coming - can be very disruptive to your classrooms as well. Pull-out for speech, vision, mobility, etc. can derail otherwise promising group projects, or put you in a position where a lesson must be re-taught and extra materials/notes provided when the students returns.
There is no clear solution to this, other than - in the words of a famously forgetful blue fish - "Just keep swimming..." The day to day survival of any teacher depends, in part, on his or her ability to flex. And boy do we flex! We should teach yoga or something...
I do think that understanding our respective situations helps. Keeping the lines of communication open helps even more. It's much easier for me to plan around a 48-hour notice that Math and ELA will be swapped on an upcoming day than it is for me to react in the moment to a harried interpreter, letting me know that the student's schedule has changed at the last minute and that not only will the student not receive my carefully planned ELA instruction that day, but the interpreter won't be getting her well-deserved break after all. :(
I'm happy - almost overjoyed, in fact - to sit down with any mainstream teacher individually and discuss a given student schedule. It sometimes really helps to see the schedules spread out on a table in order to understand how things like A/B schedules, subject area times and DIS services (speech, etc.) impact the complex flow of our school days.
It ain't rocket science, but it's within spitting distance.
Thank you for your
J.
