Tales from the Classroom

At the end of a very long day, I went to grab my favorite little friend T. from his classroom.  I was subbing in Special Ed, and T. has been involved in Sp.Ed. for help with writing for years.   He's a wonderful, smart, amazing kid, but that child hates to write.  (As I'm telling this story, keep in mind that T. talks in a monotone.  It makes the story all the better...)

I walked him out of the classroom and into the hallway.

"My body is just too exhausted to go on.  I can't write.  My hands are just exhausted.  LOOK."  He showed me his hand, and flopped it down to his side.  "I can't even make it stay up in the air."

"Don't worry about it."  I told him.  "I'll write for you.  You tell me what to write, and I'll write it down.  You don't have to do anything."

We got down to the resource room, and he slumped down into a chair at the table.  His entire body posture just exuded exhaustion.  His class had been doing research on insects, and they were synthesizing their research into books.  Each page of the book was dedicated to a different aspect of the insect.  The rest of the class had finished their books, but he was still stuck on the first page.  He had researched the mosquito.

The first page was about Habitat.

"I just can't write.  I can't make my body cooperate with me."

"I'm not asking you to write," I reassured him.  "Just tell me what to write, and I'll write it."

And so, we began.  He dictated the sentences while looking back at his notes, and I wrote down what he said.  He proofread my work when we finished the page, approved my spelling and punctuation, and we moved on to the next page, Body Parts.

So, he begins telling me what to write.  He begins describing the proboscis, and he tells me the name of the chemical that the mosquito secretes through it's proboscis.  It's this chemical that causes the bump on your skin.  I write down the name of the chemical, and he looks over at what I've written.

"You're not spelling that right, here give me the pencil."  He carefully erases what I've written, and then writes down the correct spelling.  We continue on, and I write what he says until he pauses and looks at my paper. 

"You're still not doing that right."  He then erases what I've written, and writes his own words.  He hands me back the paper and gives me that hard, steady look over the top of his glasses.

"I don't know," he says.  "You're not a good dictator.  You're messing up my spelling and punctuation.  I can do it better if I do it myself.  You've done you're best job.  You should be very proud of yourself, but I will take it from here.  You need to rest your brain for a while."

Funny kid!  I probably did need to rest my brain for a while!  He managed to finish the second page before our time was up and take him back to his class.

You know, I do wonder how bad of a dictator I was if someone who hates to write as much as he does decided that it was easier to write everything himself than to trust me to write it for him!