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Day 4 Thursday November 6th, 2003

Today went much like the other days. I started out in the IRC and then went to a class with my student. Donny greeted me with that wave and smile of his again, which made me smile. I got to work with Ashley and she really opened up to me.

In the IRC she was working on finishing up a Thanksgiving project that involved some coloring. We were supposed to work on math worksheets, but Cherie told us to finish up the coloring first. We colored for a good long while and she even wanted me to color a part and then her color a part, which I thought was very kind of her. While Ashley and I were coloring, she told me about her family and about school; and she really seemed to warm up to me. Although you couldn�t see a big smile on my face, I definitely had a very large one on my heart, and a normal one on my face.

The bell rang and off to science class we went. Ashley was supposed to write the final draft of a paper that had been assigned to the class. Her writing skills are very low but she worked hard and did very well. She had a lot of trouble with spacing the words, making the letters right, and keeping the letters on the line. Ashley kept asking me �Here?� to know if she was spacing the words right. It was slightly irritating, but cute and understandable. One thing I noticed today when working with Ashley is that although she fits in well socially and has a higher skill level than most of the others, she is seriously lacking in the amount of time it takes her to get things done.

Day 5 Thursday November 13th, 2003

Today I arrived a little later than I normally have been, due to class running a bit long for me. Because of this I didn�t get to spend anytime with Ashley in the IRC. I did go with her and Rick to science though where they did an experiment.

The experiment was actually fairly tough for a 6th grade student of average intelligence to do, although you have to challenge kids in order to help them learn. It was especially hard for Rick and Ashley though, due to their disabilities. Through the cooperation of Cherie and I, the two of us were able to have Rick and Ashley cooperate so that they could get the assignment done. Rick seemed to inadvertently distract Ashley a lot, but when we could keep him on task, things went a lot more smoothly between them.

It was nice to see Ashley and Rick working together. With the two of them being fairly well more advanced than some of the others, it wasn�t as if it was an impossible task. Yet, the cooperation they showed gave me a sense of pride that these were students I was helping that perhaps my helping was actually helping as intended.

Conclusion

Working with students that are disabled is no easy task. It takes a great deal of patience, time, and effort in order to get things accomplished. Teachers of special Ed don�t have it easy, and I admire their dedication to what they do. It is nice that there are teachers and people out there in society that care as much for the disabled students as they do.

My goal in this project was to learn about and how to work with disabled students. That was easy enough to accomplish, although there is still much I need to learn. However, that was only the goal of the project. My goal was different. The goal I had was to learn patience. Patience was my goal for a lot of reasons really, but mainly because I was fearful that I would not have what I needed in order to work with the students. I knew that I could be patient; in fact I�m a very patient person. Yet, when something is different or can�t be figured out immediately or only with a little bit of work, the level of patience I have drops quite a bit. I was worried that if I let it get too low, that I might not watch my tongue and probably say something mean or degrading to one of the students, which is something you should never ever do.

With the help of Donny, Rick, Taylor, and Ashley I feel as if I�ve reached my personal goal. Due to the understanding about them that I gained on this project, I can now not have the level of patience drop quite so much. It will of course still drop some from time to time. No one can have complete patience. But I have learned some mastery over it through understanding and that was what I really wanted to accomplish with this project.

Authors Note:: Certain portions of this project were deliberately left out due to technological difficulties and confidentiality issues. In no way does this adversly affect the content of this project. If you require any further information concerning this project please email me. Thank you.