Facilitating Chaos

My son is on the Autism Spectrum.  The diagnosis was not a surprise, since I was already aware of the signs and symptoms of Autism through my work as a classroom teacher.  Although the diagnosis was not a surprise and I had researched and implemented some strategies before, I dove head-first into ensuring that my son would reach his full potential no matter what it was.  Fast-forward to 10 years later, past a lot of tears, frustration, and lots of other stuff and I wanted to write a book chapter about the Special Education Inclusion model from the perspectives of a teacher, parent, and student.  At the writing of this post, the book is in the final stages of publication and will be available for purchase soon! I will let you all know when! The book can be purchased here:  https://www.igi-global. com/book/rethinking- perception-centering-voices- unique/293781 Below you will find the portion of the chapter that I wrote from the student's perspective.  This po...

Can you start the year over? We have all seen it.  A teacher who starts the year with big dreams and good intentions.  Whether it is a first-year teacher or a veteran teacher, a traditionally trained teacher or a teacher who enters the profession through an alternative certification program, a core content area teacher, or a related arts teacher, we have all seen the teacher who starts the year with this perfect idea of what his/her class will look like and the things that their students will do.  And then somewhere between the first 3-4 days, it all goes wrong. If you are disagreeing with me about the timeline.  Don’t.  It may happen later for some well-meaning teachers, but for most struggling teachers the students start misbehaving or seeing opportunities for misbehavior very early.  Usually, it’s right after the second day of going over rules and procedures and before the teacher starts teaching the content.  Although we have all seen the unfortuna...

So...I haven’t blogged in a while because well because Covid. If that word doesn’t cause you to instantly shutter, just know that I, along with almost every other human in the world have been struggling to exist. I mean right now it is taking everything in everyone to cope with this pandemic, this election, and live. So that is why I haven’t written a post, because I’m struggling.  And because of that, this is not going to be my usual post. This is just going to be a word of encouragement to you to just keep going. If you are teaching right now, whether it is in person or virtual, whether it is tiny humans, middle-sized humans, or regular-sized humans, just Keep going. This is an unprecedented year and it calls for less than extraordinary measures it requires us to do the best that we can for ourselves our families and our students. So this is just a small message to you to let you know that if you’re feeling that you are not doing a good job facilitating the chaos right now it’s o...

Nope.  I can't believe this.  I never would have thought that when we went home on March 13th that we would not be returning to school for the rest of the school year.  I also absolutely cannot believe that we may not be going back to school in the fall.  But, alas.  Here we are.  We are in a place where we need to start facing the truth that August may not look like it ever has before.  In an effort to get a head start on what may be a continuation of the eLearning format from the previous school year, I have started to create a virtual Google Classroom to house resources and interact with the students and staff in my building.  I was able to create this virtual classroom (which is an interactive Google Slide) with the help of a wonderful teacher in my building and a couple of YouTube videos.   This video helped me the most:  https://youtu.be/ZvzgaER9BIY  . The short version: search for items and furniture on the ...