Inclusive Education by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781135686673
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

The Neighborhood School

The school wasn’t ready to have Reed in a regular classroom, but they got ready. We decided to have him repeat second grade in the neighborhood school. He was small for his age and the second grade classes had fewer children in them. Reed has been in the neighborhood school for five years now. We’ve had our ups and downs, but we’ve worked things out. The resource teacher when he first started there was wonderful at working with the regular education teachers. For instance, Reed’s second grade teacher did creative writing for part of the day. But Reed wasn’t at the point where he could sit down and compose something on his own. So his resource teacher had Reed dictate something to her in the morning (she found out all our family secrets!). Then in the afternoon, when his regular class did creative writing, he would take what she had written down and copy it. They adapted the curriculum like that throughout the year.

In fourth grade, I thought Reed was going to have a real problem. At the beginning of the year, I took some information and materials to his home-room teacher, who said, “I’m too busy, Karen. Don’t worry. I’ve taught for a long time.” In other words, he said, “Buzz off.” I thought, “Well, maybe I need to buzz off and see what happens.” I told him I was just trying to support him and if there was any problem, I just wanted him to know I was concerned.

One day that year, I overheard Reed talking to one of his friends. His friend said, “I did really good on my test today.” Reed said, “I didn’t. I don’t do good on tests.” So I went back to talk to his teacher. Apparently, every Thursday they had a multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank history test that was about six pages long. I told the teacher that Reed didn’t do very well with that format. The process of reading and understanding the questions and filling in the bubbles and blanks just took him longer. I also told his teacher that I was really concerned about Reed’s self-esteem because he feels he doesn’t do well on tests. “I know what we can do,” he said, “We can send the test home on Wednesday night and he can do it at home.” I thought, “Oh, great! One more thing to do with everything else.” But I wanted it to work, so I said, “Let’s try it.” So Reed started bringing home his history tests. Often when we were in the car going somewhere, he would read the test aloud and fill in the blanks and the bubbles. It blew me away how much of the stuff he knew! I knew that he wasn’t just guessing because he got so many of the questions right. He had successes in science that year too. His teacher told me, “I’m delighted with what he knows. He raises his hand to answer just about every question, and even if he doesn’t know the right answer, he knows the context.

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