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1. How long have you been teaching special needs children?

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1. How long have you been teaching special needs children?

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Since January of 1992

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2. What made you choose the teaching profession and, in particular, teaching special needs children?

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2. What made you choose the teaching profession and, in particular, teaching special needs children?

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All I truly wanted to do was teach P.E. and coach. It was very difficult to get a job in P.E. as the market was flooded. I had a professor talk to me about getting my master’s in SPED. I didn’t want to initially because I thought of SPED as the really low functioning kids (wheelchairs, diapers, drooling, etc.). He had me read some books by Torey Hayden. She taught emotionally disturbed kids…truly emotionally disturbed kids who had traumatic childhoods. The author talked about how everyone thought the kid was just a ‘bad kid’ but once they trusted you, you could teach them…someone had to take a chance on them. That interested me. I started my masters in Behavior Disorders so I could work with the ‘bad kids.’

I did my student teaching in Wichita. My dream was to teach in inner city Chicago, NY or DC, but my parents were not supportive of that at all. I chose Wichita, because it was in Kansas, big district with some inner city kids, and my aunt and uncle lived in Derby so I could live with them for free during the semester. Before graduating in December, I was offered a job as a long-term sub at Wells. I took the job and started teaching there in December before kids left for winter break. I spent summers working at JDF – juvie jail.

I spent 2 ½ years teaching at Wells and I was hooked. I knew that I really loved teaching the tough kids that no one else thought could/would achieve anything in school.

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3. How have your ideas toward teaching changed with each passing year of experience? Can you recall your ideas about teaching when you were a teacher education student like me? What were they? What are they now?

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3. How have your ideas toward teaching changed with each passing year of experience? Can you recall your ideas about teaching when you were a teacher education student like me? What were they? What are they now?

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I’m sure they have. When I was a student and a new teacher, I was determined to change the world! I read everything I could get my hands on (which wasn’t much at the time compared to now), I had files and files of notes and ideas about how to deal with behavior and how to teach the kids that didn’t want to learn. I worked on school stuff all the time.

Parents were different then…so were the kids. ‘Bad’ kids then were different than they are now…not necessarily better or worse – just different. I think in the beginning I was as invested in making sure the parents knew that I was there for them as much as I was there for the kid.

I wanted all of my kids to experience success somehow everyday. It didn’t necessarily have to be an academic success – just success. I don’t think that has changed.

I think the biggest thing that has changed is how I deal with kids and parents. When I started, I didn’t have parents that constantly made excuses for their kid’s behaviors. They may not have supported me in a way that would elicit change in the kid’s behavior, but it wasn’t the ‘us vs. them’ situation that it is most days. I was on the phone with parents multiple times a day to discuss problem behaviors, report success, check on absences, etc. I never dreaded it because the parents wanted to work with me help their kids. I don’t remember ever calling a parent to discuss a kids behavior issues or academic failures and the parent blamed me. It was that way for several years in the beginning. It didn’t change overnight, but there is a distinct difference dealing with parents now than there was all those years ago.

I still want my kids to be successful. I still believe that I can play a huge part in that, but I’m not sure how much I am able to affect a student’s behavior outside of the school day. These days it seems as though kids want you to give them something tangible to change their behavior. If you gave a kid a bag of chips back when I started, it was a big deal and it was always a reward. Now it feels like a bribe…which is why I don’t do it anymore.

I do know that regardless of whether it was then or now, the toughest kids will do pretty much anything for you/with you if you can gain their trust, spend time with them talking about whatever they want to talk about, and will call their parents to tell the lots of good things before you have to make a negative call.

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4. How does teaching children with special needs differ from teaching other children? What are some challenges you face in teaching special needs children? What are some rewards in teaching special needs children?

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4. How does teaching children with special needs differ from teaching other children? What are some challenges you face in teaching special needs children? What are some rewards in teaching special needs children?

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Kids are kids. All kids want to be praised, receive feedback on how they are doing along the way, seek attention from trusted adults, etc. The challenge with special needs kids is that they generally haven’t learned appropriate ways to seek attention from peers or adults, do not know how to accept positive/negative feedback appropriately. In fact, most SPED kids know how to respond to negative feedback much more appropriately than positive feedback.

The rewards are mostly the same as working with other kids, but with students with exceptionalities, every milestone they reach seems bigger because you know what that kid had to overcome to meet it. It is so much different than for the typical ‘normal’ kid.

I think that it’s more important to cherish the moments, because they don’t happen at typical intervals like they do with non-exceptional kids. Most gen. ed. teachers have kids that make gains everyday…at least one of their kids every period has a moment of understanding that just makes the teacher’s day. But with SPED kids, those moments are hard fought for. They are often few and far between so as their teacher you have to learn to celebrate the small steps so that the kid and YOU don’t get discouraged.

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5. What advice can you give me for teaching children with special needs in the regular education classroom?

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5. What advice can you give me for teaching children with special needs in the regular education classroom?

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Always read their file before they arrive. When that kid steps into class you should recognize them from all the pictures you saw in their file; you should have a pretty good idea as to what they need to be successful in the classroom (IEP accommodations); know their diagnoses and exceptionality; and then the day the kid arrives…meet the kid that will actually be in your classroom. Don’t forget or discount all the info that you learned by reading what the kid’s previous IEPs state, or what previous teachers say about the kid or their siblings…just don’t own it until YOU know it.

Everything you read and hear about a kid will always be true, BUT it is only true in the moment that it happened/was observed. At some point in time the kid was probably an epic pain in the butt, but he wasn’t that way for you (at least not yet). He may never be that way for you.

He may have a ton of accommodations on his IEP. Always try to start without implementing all of them. You will find that IEP managers write a laundry list of accommodations for kids that they usually don’t need or want. Let the kid prove that they need the accommodation. Then when they do it themselves, praise the hell out of them. A SPED kid completing an OGL assignment in the same way the gen. ed kids does (no/less accommodations) is the equivalent of a kid wearing big boy underwear and not soaking himself in the first hour. (Talk to your mom about how exciting it is when the parent doesn’t have to buy diapers and haul them around everywhere. It’s like losing 20 pounds and getting a pay raise all in the same day.)

Never ever treat the SPED kid, like a SPED kid. Kids will always act exactly the way that you expect them to.

Consistently put small challenges out there for them, and then praise them for any small amount of growth. More importantly, document these small moments so that eventually – a week or a month or a year later – you can show them…”Hey Mikie, look at this!!! Last month you could only manage 5 of the math problems when everyone else did 10.” “Hey Mikie, do you realize you read the entire story on your own today?”

Remember it’s the little things that count, because the big things don’t happen very often.

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6. What changes, if any, would you make to the educational system with regard to special needs children? Consider such aspects as inclusion, funding, state assessments, etc…

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6. What changes, if any, would you make to the educational system with regard to special needs children? Consider such aspects as inclusion, funding, state assessments, etc…

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- I would make parent involvement mandatory. If parent’s don’t attend the IEP after you have tried to schedule with them and they cancel on you multiple times (3); then services can be amended.

- If the student makes no effort to do the work, no homework, no significant growth year after year, then exit the kid. SPED services are a tool; not a cure. If you are diagnosed with cancer and refuse to do anything to help yourself everyone knows that they will die. In education, we put billions of dollars into educating kids that have no desire to be educated through traditional means. If you have a 6th grade boy who reads 12wrc with 56% accuracy at the 1st grade level there is a bigger issue that isn’t being addressed. More often than not, it goes directly back to a student whose parents have no expectations for them to be educated…and they probably are not educated themselves. These are the kids that need to be provided an alternate route – technical ed; job prep, etc. I’m not saying this because the kid is ‘obviously a moron’, but because not all kids care about reading or math when it’s just a bunch or words on a page that they can’t relate to at all. Yes, teachers should do a better job at making all parts of educating kids relate directly to real life, but for this to happen, the government needs to allow teachers to teach.

- Remove the option of teaching reading, writing, math, as a core or intervention, from a computer based program. If you can’t read…a computer isn’t the answer.

- If kids are not meeting standards then they don’t move on. Instead of organizing schools by grades, group students by academic ability. If you are 11 years old in a class with a bunch of 7 year olds that are kicking your butt in reading and math because they do the work (practice); you are a whole lot more motivated to get yourself together than if you just keep moving along with your buddies year after year.

- Administrators can ONLY be out of the classroom for a maximum of 5 years. At the end of 5 years, they have to return to the classroom full-time for one year before returning to their office. They must do this for the first 10 years. After that they should required to teach at least one core class of the toughest kids for the school year once every 3 years or so. (Not a specific plan that I have thought out, but admin need to return to teaching periodically so they remember what it’s like in the real world.)

- SPED teachers should be paid differently than gen. ed. teachers. The work load is different. If a SPED teacher is assigned to be a CWC teacher, and is doing nothing more than a para would, they should fired.

- SPED teachers should have more support in writing IEPs, etc. during their first 2-3 years. It would be great if they had to intern with a SPED teacher for a semester for student teaching and then another semester just to learn how to do all the paperwork.

- Fire Betsy DeVos

- All decisions at every level (classroom, building, district, state, nation) should only be made when teachers currently in the classroom have input on how the proposed idea would work in the ‘real world’.

- If teachers suck. Fire them.

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7. If you could choose another career field, would you? Please explain your answer in detail.

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7. If you could choose another career field, would you? Please explain your answer in detail.

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Yes, I would be a lawyer…specifically a Guardian ad Litem. It is the lawyer the court appoints to investigate what is in the “best interest of the child” in cases involving divorce, custody, child in need of care, juvenile offenders, etc. It’s not always a lawyer in every state, but in Kansas it is. Other states allow mental health workers, etc.

About 15 years ago, I began volunteering as a Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) for children in Butler, Elk and Greenwood counties. They have CASA in every state across the nation. Most of my cases are CINC cases. The kids are in DCF custody for various reasons, and I meet with the kids regularly to see how things are going, make sure they are being treated appropriately in foster placement…I am the ‘voice of the child’. The CASA is the ONLY person involved in the case whose job is to tell the judge exactly what the kid wants. I have to submit a report monthly, and then a court report a week before the hearing.

I always liked it, but after about 8 years, my supervisor started giving me juvenile offender cases and CINC cases. These kids were just like my ‘bad kids’ at school.

I currently have a case involving 3 siblings (12 year old girl; 8 year old girl; 5 year old boy). This is their 3rd time being in DCF custody. The boy has severe apraxia. He is unable to speak. He can say ‘Mimi” and make some sounds, but I’ve never heard him say 2 words together. His 8 year old sister has apraxia as well, but not a severely. She never shuts up, but you can’t understand hardly anything she says. The kids have been physically, verbally and sexually abused by both parents, multiple uncles and grandfather since the day they were born; yet, DCF still wants to reintegrate them back into the home. I’ve had the case since the beginning of September and through investigation, and multiple interviews with schools, kids, foster parents, etc. I think I have enough for a judge to finally terminate parent rights.

I know that the courts and welfare system is overworked, underfunded and often employs people who have been a part of the system with their own kids at some point in time. I would love to be the Erin Brockovich of DCF and CINC cases so I could expose DCF and many foster parents for the fraud they truly are.

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8. Are there any comments you wish to add to close this interview?

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8. Are there any comments you wish to add to close this interview?

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T, if you truly want to be a teacher I will support you 150% too the moon and back infinity. BUT if you aren’t sure, do everything to put yourself in a position that will allow you to KNOW you want this before you get your degree and walk into any classroom. The profession is full of people who became teachers for summers off and because ‘Hey, anyone can teach. How hard could it be.’ But you know what…it’s hard! Everyday…and summers off aren’t all they’re cracked up to be because you really don’t have time off if your are a going to be a great teacher.

Teaching involves a commitment that no other profession requires because any other profession that works as hard as teachers gets paid much better. And I can’t think of any profession that is disrespected as much and held accountable for so much that we have no control over. We need teachers. Good teachers with kind hearts, strong minds and the fortitude of a German tank. You have that. Your mom and dad raised you to be a strong woman in every area of your life. You need to move forward with that ‘take no crap’ attitude from ANYONE in your life and conquer whatever lies ahead of you. Just know that as a teacher, if you go in half-heartedly, you will affect generations if you are lazy or uncommitted to being the best teacher on earth every day.

I don’t doubt your abilities or your willingness to commit to the profession. I just want you to go in eyes wide open. Teaching is not pretty, but there is not another job on this earth where you can wake up knowing that you are important to someone; that someone just woke up to see you, that someone will remember you years and years after the last time they saw you. It ain’t always pretty, but it’s always worth it.