Constructing Kasun, Educator

It’s Sunday morning, and I received a response from a coworker in my district about a student who I am trying to refer for special education services.  I have a professional relationship with this individual and I respect her work, and I’m stuck here wondering about my response to her email on a non-work day, one where I have a small luxury of time to contemplate.

Here’s the backstory.  My student, “Claudia,” (not her real name) is an incredibly well-behaved, kind student at one of my sites of alternative education.  After a few sessions with her (like all my students, I see her once a week), I realized that her reading comprehension abilities are low, especially relative to beautiful fluency when she reads.  When I try to scaffold understanding in a story to a past event in the story, it feels like shooting at fish in a pond.  Rarely do I hit the target with techniques that work with other students (who are also developing as readers).  Furthermore, when I try to get her to empathize with characters, I can’t find any wide range of emotions from prior experiences in this student’s life.  I look in all directions and find find few cognitive pegs on which to hang understanding with her. 

Her teachers who work with her every day echo similar concerns, so I decided I would take the next step with a student who doesn’t learn the “NORMAL” way, and that is a referral for consideration for special education.

I’ve referred several students in the past and am familiar with the Byzantine and seemingly smoke-and-mirrors process of helping get a student additional support (often hinging upon dominant personalities involved in local screening committees and their subjective backgrounds, biases, and experiences).

So, here’s a thumbnail sketch of the process of referring an ESOL student for special education:

Submit the 8 to 20 pages of forms necessary and supporting evidence to my district’s Dual Language Assessment (DLA) team.  Wait for a couple months (sometimes six or seven if the summer is involved… and then maybe watch the kid get lost if she transfers schools or moves from middle to high school).  The DLA is completed, and if they suggest that there may be something amiss with the way the student learns, the Local Screening Committee (LSC) meets.    Submit a new round of paperwork all over again to the LSC before they meet, and sometimes learn after the meeting that the committee met and they failed to invite you.  If the LSC can be convinced that this student has learning issues beyond the regular difficulties of learning another language (and this is often a heated debate where polarized sides get angry and frustrated and don’t really hear each other out), then the second battery of testing is ordered.  Next, a couple months may pass between the testing and the next meeting of the LSC.  The LSC then decides whether or not the testing indicates that a student should receive special education services.  And then ANOTHER meeting is set later on to write the student’s Individualized Education Plan (IEP) describing which additional services a student may receive and what goals are to be set for the student’s achievement.  The amount of time involved for the original referring ESOL teacher is now up to about 20 hours of work in between checking in on the special education office to make sure they’re following up on the child and scheduling meetings and making sure they remember to invite the ESOL teacher to meetings.  The fastest I’ve ever seen this process work is about six months.  I’ve seen it drawn out over two academic years. 

Back to my email from this morning.  It had taken me a couple months to submit the original referral for “Claudia,” because I didn’t know exactly what to write.  The form itself is intimidating and cold.  Have a look at my district’s forms (not unlike most school districts’ forms)http://www.fcps.edu/ss/linkedfiles/se5.pdf http://www.fcps.edu/ss/linkedfiles/se5a.pdf

Students suddenly become broken down into symptoms and problems, and the teacher takes a cold clinician’s eye toward the “interventions and duration of interventions” and records them.  So this warm child who is a responsible worker in the afternoons with her mom at a salon, who smiles everytime she sees you, who worries about her friend who has an abusive boyfriend, is suddenly reduced to “problems and interventions.”  I don’t deny the need to be methodic in considering how we work with students, but this clinical approach is deadening and reductionist.  There’s so much I want to say about “Claudia,” and yet the form kills the life in both my student and in me as I approach the boxes, acronyms, and bold letters on the forms.

My colleague’s email was suddenly a real, living conversation about this child… and it was only about attempting to get a home phone number for the girl’s mother (the one listed no longer works).  But I found myself wanting to spill my thoughts and worries, our tiny victories as teacher and student, with this woman who had tested “Claudia” this week.  I felt relieved that the tester demonstrated in her email that Claudia was a living child, not a clinical piece of evidence. 

I breathe deeply and hope we achieve seeing the students’ humanity in our jobs as educators, beyond the layers of legal paperwork and bureacracy.  And hopefully we breathe life back into our work and into the children in education.

Like anyone who has registered with the Georgetown Center for Contemporary Arab Studies Outreach Coordinator, I received an invitation to attend a writing workshop led by Palestinian author Ibsitam Barakat.  Participants would read her memoir about her childhood and then participate in a day-long session with her on February 2. 

I wondered what the session might be like.  Would pain and bias eclipse open dialog and the ability to use writing as a vehicle for exploration and understanding?  I knew the Outreach Coordinator and had admired the way she had coordinated prior programs.  I decided as a writer and teacher that I wanted to attend.

Before the session began, I spoke briefly with Ibsitam.  I was impressed with her intensity and how hopeful she was.  She said she was interested in constructing, in bringing people together, that all of us want and need to grow, and suddenly she drew an ecological parallel, “You’ll never meet a tree that doesn’t want to grow.” 

Ibsitam challenged our thoughts on growth at personal, societal, and historic levels, right from the start.  “There is no freedom without cutting through fear,” she explained, encouraging us all to break through our fears of others, our exclusionary beliefs (religions, group identities, etc.).  Despite a painful childhood scarred by war, flight, and fear (all richly described in her book, Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood), she is able to advocate for a policy of “zero attacks,” where blame is not cast in dialog in order to resolve conflicts.

And then we were writing about our most personal feelings, memories, ideas.  Various educators in the audience shared–stories of loss, stories of structures of oppression through the personal experience, of, for example, being an African American woman in the US.  Ibsitam valued our voices, our experiences, and wove them together with historical experiences, her own, and the histories of peoples–including Arabs and Jews–throughout the milennia.

We wrote several times, and in the writing and the ensuing discussions, the room was a connected class of 25 teacher-writers.  We supported each other in our frustrations at not being able to support children as we want to, the mindsplitting prospect of not reaching them on the personal levels and the awful pressure of teaching the mandated curriculum verified through highstakes tests.  We listened with empathetic ears, and there was suddenly a community of empathy, respect, and care. 

Ibsitam achieved this for two reasons, I believe.  First, she is wise.  Second, because we believed in the idea she offered us, one of a compassionate power stengthened by virtue of being in community.  I look back on my journal notes from that session and carry these memories as glimmers of hope for how a world can live in peace, by sharing our stories and listening, one story at a time.

Information about Ibsitam’s book is available at http://www.amazon.com/Tasting-Sky-Palestinian-Ibtisam-Barakat/dp/0374357331.

To learn more about Ibsitam Barakat’s ideas, scroll down to Ibsitam’s name and watch the interview:  http://culturesurfer.com/VideoIndex.htm.

I have a student working on a found poem right now, so I’ll also do some quick writing next to him.   As I’ve commented before, one of the best ways to write is right alongside the student…  it’s like a spiral where both of us are generative, knowing the other is hard at work.

As I was making my hour-long commute to this site this morning, I was thinking through some ideas.  I’ve been thinking about how our jobs as teachers is in many ways to just sit inside the pain of our students’ lives.  While sitting there, hopefully we provide both some comfort and guidance through the pain.

Which brings me to my own students.  All of them are at sites for the pained (remember, these are “alternative schools”).  That’s a different way of looking at how we otherwise label them…  kids who are “at-risk,” “behavior problems,” “substance abusers,” “difficult.”  How about just pained?  Isn’t that the deeper root of why they’re here?  Pained by the harsh realities of a world which lets so many of them be disposable, kids on the fringe whose lives are too difficult for most of us to want to look at, to want to understand the larger factors which contribute to their lives?

So I sit next to my student, feeling strange inside this pain.  We spend so much time trying to run away from pain… television, music, food, and, in the case of my students, less socially acceptable forms of numbing (fights, drugs, acting out and under-achieving at school).  The one right next to me works, pouring over a text as he tries to lift meaningful pieces of text to craft a new piece of literature.  And as he works, he’s creating, and hopefully I can help him see that he can be a creator of new things, pieces of meaning which elevate him and anyone who reads his work from his point of pain.

And at the same time, I try to communicate that I’m willing to be next to him as he works through all this, inside the pain.