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hello, i can actually speak on this subject; my dad was a special ed teaching assistant for about a decade, and i was helped out by special ed teachers as a high-functioning kid with some neurological issues in school. there are a few things that immediately jump out to me as things that most people looking at careers in special education don't consider, and these are: - depending on the type of special educational needs a student has, they may be physically aggressive. my dad worked with severely disabled individuals, many of whom were fully grown adults who were bigger than him, but with the mental capacity of toddlers. when they would get stressed out or agitated, some of them would attack members of staff, in some cases breaking bones and even on one occasion knocking a teacher out and leaving her with a concussion. my dad struggled a lot with understanding that his students weren't lashing out like this because they were deliberately violent; it was hard for him to look at another adult and comprehend the disconnect between that physical appearance and the inner, neurologically impaired individual who needs help with finding emotional coping mechanisms that don't involve hurting those around them. he found it difficult to not resent certain students for being particularly violent, in the same way you might resent a neurotypical person for explaining similar emotional management issues. are you able to understand and manage such emotional outbursts? and do you think you can physically handle students who may be bigger and stronger than you, should they have such an outburst? - the parents of a lot of special needs children are shitbags. my dad is congenitally deaf, and is fluent in multiple forms of sign language; there are multiple special educational needs that make a student more likely to be deaf, with about ~40-50% of deaf children having some other disability, and some intellectual disabilities also cause some children to go nonverbal. the amount of children who my dad worked with whose parents just did not teach them to speak, or whose parents did not bother to learn to speak to them, makes my blood boil. my dad learned to sign pretty late in life, so he always seemed to look at language deprivation as just another fact of life for people unlucky enough to be born deaf, but he'd teach some children who'd basically only be able to talk and be spoken to for maybe an hour or two a day. i know for a fact that i don't have it in me to emotionally handle that sort of thing - do you? do you think you could keep yourself together in the face of abuse and neglect to advocate for your students, even if it alienates others who are (in theory) working alongside you to care for them? - if you work in a regular school in the special ed department, there needs to be a LOT of communication with the mainstream teachers and staff. i wore a badge in school stating that eye contact made me nervous, because i have some gnarly intellectual impairments, and i remember once a teacher read it and laughed, saying that she needed to get one of those badges, so nobody would bother her. nobody had communicated to her that i needed the badge so i wouldn't end up having a panic attack in class. how are you with admin work?
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Oct 22, 2023 15:53
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 23:33 |
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