Let me get you someone else.....

This weekend I had to do something that I absolutely despise. I had to deal with a customer service call. A gift that I received for Christmas has already stopped working and I needed to figure out how to either get another product or get a refund. I called the dreaded 1-800 number and waited. I was on hold for a surprisingly short period of time and then detailed my story. After pouring upon this poor lady the demise of the device, she stopped me and stated, “Yeah, I can’t help you, you need to speak with returns. Let me get you someone else.”  She put me on hold and after a five minutes,  I spent another few minutes discussing my problem with the lady in returns. This very kind lady stopped me and said that she couldn’t help me and I needed to speak with the warranty department. She then put me on hold and again, for the third time, I, now a little more impatiently, articulated the reason for my call. The man on the other end asked a few questions and then stated the dreaded words I waited to hear, “You’ll need to talk with our return department.” Now this is the part of the story where I wish I could say I just hung up.  Sometimes I think the companies design it this way.  But, no, I did not hang up. I made myself feel better at the expense of poor Valarie, the warranty department customer service representative and of course demanded to speak to “someone higher”-whatever that means- and demanded help.

As I was getting over being mad about the situation, I thought about a teaching job I once had. One of my first teaching jobs was that of resource teacher (now known as academic support). I also thought about why I left that job. I loved my students. Over twenty years later, I’m still in contact with some of those students. The school I worked was in a difficult area. My students taught me so much about teaching, relationships, and life outside the bubble I grew up and went to college in the years previous.  Some of my kids were difficult to like. Some of my students were difficult to teach. Some of my students were both. I worked with one teacher who had my students waiting outside her door for me each day when it was time for resource. Each day she gave me a play by play of their day so far. She would also detail other students of hers that I “needed to serve” as well. 

Because I taught academic support, I felt strongly that I needed to give these students strategies to be successful in their regular classes. Sure, they were behind grade level but I was amazed how much they caught up with some one-on-one or small group teaching. We worked each day on the skills listed on their IEP, and many that probably were not. I worked these kids hard. I met them before school. I kept them after school.  One student, Travis, who was a 2^nd grader, amazed me with this progress. Travis was a smart little boy who was being raised by his great grandmother.  Before I could teach him reading skills, I had to teach Travis that he was safe at school and that I would never hurt him, no matter how hard he tried me. Once we turned his behavior around, his learning soared. In no time, Travis was reading at a level that was just a few months behind same age/grade peers. I thought it time to move away from the readers that I was using in my class to working on what he was doing in his class. I wanted to work on what he was doing in his own class so that I could start seeing if he really could transfer strategies. I started first by asking Travis to bring his work with him to resource. When that didn’t happen, I went to his teacher. This is when my heart broke. She was not doing reading with Travis. She gave Travis to me. She wanted that to be my job. About this same time another one of this teacher’s students qualified for services with me. Again I discovered that this teacher stopped working with this student on reading. To make matters worse, this student would end up spending hours with me each day because of his behavior in the class. These kids really no longer mattered to her. They were no longer her “problem”, they were mine.

Part of me wanted to understand the plight of the teacher. It was tough. It was hard. But then I was unable to make myself comprehend how the teacher could not see just how far these students could go if they had teaching from her and teaching and reinforcement from me. The more I worked in the school, the more it became obvious that this was the philosophy of the school. If other people taught the students- whether it be me as the resource teacher, the interventionist, or the behavior counselor- the regular teacher fully believed that they had no responsibility with that student.  As soon as I realized how bad this philosophy permeated within the school, I knew I needed to leave. It was not right to be the only  one working with our most involved students.

 As hard as it was to leave some of my students, I knew that I needed to be at a school where everyone took responsibility for all students and everyone worked hard for all students.

As an administrator, I sit in more IEP meetings each year than I can count. I attend six RTI meetings each month. I attend academic meetings with parents. I have informal meetings with teachers concerned about students. I am thrilled when a new placement into our academic support occurs and I can tell the parent that this is a great thing for the student. Not only will the student receive specialized services with our talented resource teacher, in many cases they will still receive services during our Walk to Read time, and they will still receive classroom instruction in small group. The more I have learned about what happened some 20 years ago with my students, the more I realize that this practice borders on malpractice.

I want nothing more to have each classroom full of students who are ready to learn, on grade level, and behave respectfully without being off task. I would be remiss if I didn’t say I think that would probably be very boring, but to say those "types" are the only students we would teach would not be just malpractice, it would be criminal. To think we do not have a responsibility to teach every child we touch “like our hair is on fire” is not only sad, it is unprofessional. Don’t our kids deserve this? Doesn’t our profession deserve this?

I beg of you never be the kind of teacher like my customer service call this weekend-“Not my job-let me give you to someone else!”