How Do You Think the School Can Help Your Child?
Our incredibly inefficient 7th grade special education “facilitator” – who has not facilitated anything, and in fact has made many things more difficult – emailed me. She asked me to please fill out the attached Parent Report form for our upcoming meeting.
“When is the meeting?” I emailed back. No one had informed me of an upcoming meeting – and parents are, by law, supposed to be notified so that the meeting can be rescheduled if necessary.
But instead, we find out that the meeting is next week. I’m certainly glad they require a Parent Report, or we may never have known.
The form asks several questions: What are your child’s learning strengths? and What have you noticed about your child’s behavior? etc. I always do fine answering them – until I get to the last question.
How do you think the school can help your child?
I am always stumped by this one. At first, I walk away from the form because it is too troubling. I come back and stare at the question a bit longer.
How do you think the school can help your child?
I want to say: I honestly don’t believe the school, as it is, can help my child. My child needs a completely different school system. Montessori would be good, I think. Dylan learns best in a hands-on environment with plenty of interaction and stimulation. He needs very little from his teachers. He excels when given a huge project, plenty of time, and gentle guidance.
Please, could you just change the public school system to one in which kids can learn by doing, instead of by sitting in a mind-numbingly boring classroom listening to someone drone on at the front of the room? Could you eliminate worksheets and homework, just for my son?
Or at the very least, could you give him teachers who don’t care if he stands on his head while he works? And could you be sure he’s not penalized for curiously studying – by touching – every single thing in the classroom?
Also, it would be good if he could sit on an exercise ball, or hang from a set of gymnastics rings while the teacher talks. Again, this is only necessary if he has to listen to lectures. If you can arrange the Montessori method for the school system, he won’t need to bounce because he’ll be too busy learning.
Instead, I stare at the page. Dylan is struggling so badly now, I doubt there’s anything we can do – except putting him back on stimulants – that will help him succeed. I know I won’t get what I ask for, because of some dated school policy that I won’t learn about until next week. But I make my requests anyway, instead of voicing my true feelings.
How do you think the school can help your child?
“Perhaps there could be a way for Dylan to re-hear classroom lectures – audio-recording them? – so that he can go back over them and gather more of the information. We also need to be sure he’s getting – and going over – notes from the lectures. Recently (and finally), we’ve also learned that his best success in math – and possibly his only success in math – is when he works one-on-one with someone else.”
How do I think the school can help? Really? By changing absolutely everything.