:D Hi! I am going to night school for elementary education. I have recently started toying with the idea of heading toward special ed instead…..specifically LD. Any words of encouragement or advice? Can I help these students more as a special ed teacher in a resource room or as a general education teacher?
Re: New teacher-to-be has questions!
Laurie - thanks for the reply! I did some observations at some local schools here as a requirement for one of my classes and I was amazed at the short amount of time each student actually gets. Fortunately the class sizes were small so that helped but they weren’t really getting their 40 minutes that their IEP calls for. It’s not the teacher’s fault, it’s the school system’s.
Any one else out there care to offer their opinion? I am at a crossroad with my education and need to decide which path to take! :D
If you get the dream setting for a special ed job, then you’ll help them more. However, more times than not, in public school anyway, teaching special ed is very difficult to do correctly. It oftentimes is done very haphazardly because you are trying to fit too many kids into too few time slots. In my old elementary position, it was the norm for me to have a group of 6-9 multi-age students with varying degrees of disability and an even wider variety of needs sitting in front of me for a 40 minute period. In that period, I was supposed to service all of them, addressing their specific needs, even though some were in there for reading, some were for writing or some other form of language arts support, and occasionally, some might even be in there for math, all at the same time! If I got REALLY lucky, I might have a class where all the kids happen to be in there for the same thing and I’d be able to actually devote the whole 40 minutes to just them.
5 years ago I moved to our intermediate school where the scheduling is a bit easier, but even that’s beginning to become difficult. The hardest part of the whole job is that you really know what the kids need, but it’s almost an impossibility to deliver. I’ve often said that if some of the parents were to *really* take a look at their child’s special ed program, they’d be screaming to the supervisors!
In my school, we could use about ten more teachers, and then everyone would be getting the services they need!
I should mention that my district is considered to have a very good special ed program, so I can’t imagine what it might be like in some other districts.