What I'm ranting about this week

I had a good discussion this morning with Nicole Eredics on our BlogTalk Radio show "The Inclusive Class" about whether inclusion is right for every student, which of course involves a discussion of all the stupid ways school districts are doing it wrong and planning for failure. You can listen to the archive at the link above.

I also got a rant in on my About.com site about Ron Clark's pronouncement on CNN.com that parents should just shut up and listen to teachers who know everything. Hey, welcome to 2011, Ron, parents get to have opinions now.

My monthly contribution to Hopeful Parents was posted on Tuesday, a little whine about waiting.

What are you ranting about this week?

I'm on the radio tomorrow

Tomorrow at 9 a.m. is the beginning of "The Inclusive Class," a radio show I'm cohosting with Nicole Eredics. I hope it will be the beginning, anyway; I'm in charge of the switchboard, so there's always the chance that I'll hit the wrong button and we'll be off the air. Assuming we stay on, you can here Nicole talk with Kathryn Burke, author of An Accidental Advocate, on the topic of "What Is Inclusion?" I'll be manning the chatroom, so if you're registered with BlogTalk Radio, hop on and say hi.

A few new things

• My monthly contribution to Hopeful Parents went up very, very late (my time) on Saturday. It's about my son's somewhat problematical work experience this summer. Read it here.
• My About.com site has its own shiny new Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Aboutcom-Children-With-Special-Needs/203015833087281?sk=wall. Stop by and like me, please!
• Over the weekend, I started up a listing of celebrity parents of children with special needs. It's way too short and missing some obvious folks, I'll bet. See who I've got and then help me think of more.

Google+ Invites

I'm still having fun on Google+, and now have 150 invitations to share at https://plus.google.com/_/notifications/ngemlink?path=%2F%3Fgpinv%3DRlOJUjgrI3A%3A6sw1tGl7ArA. If you've been curious about it, give it a try. You may also notice some weird-looking posts on this blog like the one two posts down -- I'm trying out posting here directly from Google+, and though the formatting's a little different, it seems to work.

Learn About My New Radio Show

Woo hoo! Just recorded the promo for a Talking Special Needs Network show I'll be doing with Nicole Eredics of The Inclusive Class, and I'm totally excited that I sound lucid and relatively like myself on it. Give it a listen below, and tune in to the show starting September 9 at 9 a.m. Eastern time; you can also listen later in the archives.

Listen to internet radio with TalkingSpecialNeeds on Blog Talk Radio

Flipping the Classroom: Useful for Kids With Special Needs?

I'm kind of intrigued by this idea of flipping, whereby kids watch the teacher lecture on a screen at home and do what would normally be "homework" in the classroom. Seems like something that might benefit students with special needs in inclusion classes -- more hands-on activity, less having to sit quietly and process information. I'd way rather listen to instruction with my kids and help them understand than have to do homework that they don't get and I don't have the information to help well with. Not sure how you get around the problem of making sure everybody has a screen to watch the lecture on -- my son has friends who don't have computers -- but it's something worth thinking about. Flipping the Classroom: An Introduction | Gradebook Flipping the classroom is a new phenomenon that entails leveraging technology to completely change the traditional teacher-learner paradigm. View or comment on Terri Mauro's post » The Google+ project makes sharing on the web more like sharing in real-life. Join Google+

ADA and My Marriage Both Turn 21

I wrote about the 21st anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act yesterday on my About.com site, and it totally didn't occur to me until this morning that something else important (to me, at least) happened in July of 1990: I got married. My marriage is 19 days older than the ADA. That seems impossible, that people with disabilities did not have those rights at the time my husband and I walked down the aisle. It doesn't feel like I've been married that long, certainly not as long as there should have been legally spelled-out rights for people with disabilities. Either I'm a lot older than I think, or ADA's not nearly old enough. Probably both, but let's pretend it's the latter.

Be Respectful

A boy my son has known since first grade lost his father last week. His mother passed away two years before, and we have no idea what's going to become of this kid, whose disabilities are not as immediately obvious as my son's but nonetheless there. My son has clashed with this young man somewhat over the past four or five years; it sounds from the various reports I've received that this friend knows how to push my son's buttons and enjoys getting a rise out of him (my son being incapable of NOT reacting in those situations). Still, it's been heartwarming to see how genuinely sad my son was for his friend -- bringing poster board to their summer job so his coworkers could make a card, asking to say prayers and light candles, speaking in low and respectful tones whenever the subject comes up. Summer is a silly, silly time for him, and sometimes it's easy to overlook how much he's really grown up. I hope it doesn't always take something sad to see it.

Google+, anyone?

Not that I need more shiny things to distract me, but I'm giving Google+ a try. It's a little empty now, and needs to be filled up with lots of parents ready to talk about special needs and adoption. If you're on Google+ already, look me up at gplus.to/mamatude. If you need an invitation, leave a comment here with the e-mail address you want to use for Google+ and a little bit about yourself, and I'll send you one. (I'll also delete your comment, so you won't have to worry about your information being visible to anyone.)

Summertime, and the Living Is Easy

Summer vacation's about a week away for us. Boy, do I remember how I used to dread this part of the year. I so valued the routine of school, the way it occupied the time of kids who could not for the life of them occupy themselves at home. The end of the school year meant a transfer of expectation for time-filling to me, and as much as I loved spending time with my kiddos, oh my gosh, it was a lot of time to fill.

Read the rest of this post on Hopeful Parents

Poop Happens

You know how we talk about one bad experience freaking our kids out for days and days afterward, leaving them all disrupted and disorganized and prone to extreme behavior well after the thing that caused it is over? I'm feeling like that now over a confrontation last week, and really, shouldn't I have gotten over it by now? It wasn't even an IEP confrontation over something important like my kids' educational future. It was a confrontation with a neighbor who screamed at me while I was walking my dog, because I was "letting" my dog poop on the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street in front of her house.

I put "letting" in quotations because ... well, I don't know about your pooch, but mine doesn't ask permission. She just squats. I can let her finish and pick up what she left, or I can pull her away and strew dog feces all over the sidewalk. Surely my hysterical neighbor wouldn't want that, either. Yet she just kept screaming at me until the dog finished, I bagged it, and we got the heck outta there. I yelled apologies to her, I swore we'd avoid sullying her lawn in the future (though, again, sometimes, you know, that decision is out of my hands), and I left all jangled and somewhat hysterical myself. And I'm still jangled. And avoiding her house, which is causing me to take very convoluted and looping walks. And defending myself in my head.

Yesterday I talked with another dog-owner in our neighborhood, and she has also been screamed at by said lady, and feels similarly defensive about it. When did dog owners become public enemy number one? Doesn't "not being screamed at by your neighbor" count as a quality of life issue, too? Does she scream at the rabbits and squirrels who cross her lawn, the birds who fly over it, and forbid them to use her grass strip for unhygienic purposes? Can adults not be civil to one another? I can see her being angry if I did this every day, or didn't pick up, or my dog was digging up her tulips, but the screaming in this instance seemed aggressively over the top.

And so, I'm feeling like my son does when someone yells at him, grumbling and snapping at everybody but the person who done me harm. How are dogs received in your neighborhood? Have you noticed a dip in acceptance of canine neighbors by the non-pet-disposed? Or do you just wish I'd get off your lawn?

My Backpack Ate My Homework

That's my son's planner for this school year. I've loved the large size of the Aspire student planner, and also the format -- each day is a column, with subjects running down the side. It's been a great way to communicate with his paraprofessionals, keep track of his homework, sign off on assignments, and report on where in his backpack the completed homework may be found. But ... oh, that backpack, that two-ton thing full of folders and notebooks and books and what-all. You can see from the shape of this poor planner what riding around in that backpack does to his school supplies (and also, his paper-picking habits). Paperback novels for English class are faring even worse. Folders disintegrate. I've had to replace spiral-bound notebooks that come unwound. A couple of calculators have just been demolished. Does your child's backpack eat his school stuff this way, or does my boy just pull and push and drop and cram in a way that shortens those paper products' lifespan? We need some sort of iron-plated, extra-tough, quadruple-reinforced school supplies -- though that would just make the whole thing heavier, wouldn't it?

Be True to Your School

Point of etiquette: When talking to another parent, is it okay to say bad things about the school that parent's children attend? Should you at least take that parent's "temperature" first, make sure they also want to badmouth the school, before you rip into it? If the parent clearly is happy about the way the school has served his or her children, should you not back the hell off and not talk at length about how violent and underfunded and miseducating it is? Would it not be bad manners to go on in that vein, particularly when the other parent starts to defend the institution? It seems pretty clearly so to me, yet on evidence of many conversations with one family member and a discussion just this weekend with a parent I barely know, not everybody feels that way.

You know, our school district is not perfect. I've certainly had complaints. There are things I wish were different about the huge high school my son attends and my daughter just graduated from. But you don't sit down next to me and say, "Well, I couldn't wait to get my child out of THAT school" or "We have to move so we can get our kids out of THAT school" and expect me to smile and nod. It doesn't matter if you don't mean MY kids when you talk about how undisciplined and unruly the students are, and you're not talking about ME when you say that all parents are uninvolved and lazy, and you don't mean OUR teachers when you say they're underfunded and unable to do their jobs. It's just rude. Isn't it? Am I oversensitive? Is there any way to hear that kind of conversation and not feel judged for letting my child stay THERE? Or furious when the speaker implies that, oh, well, for a kid like YOURS it's okay?

If you've been on the receiving or the delivering end of this sort of thing, share your thoughts in the comments.

Busy Boy

This morning, my son went to school an hour early to pass out Earth Day buttons with other members of the high-school Conservation Club. First period, he'll check into homeroom and then go get his picture taken with the other club members. Second period, he has to change out of his Earth Day shirt and into a uniform shirt to go work for a couple of hours at a supermarket as part of a school job-training program. Next Thursday, he'll be out of school all day, on a hike with his Environmental Science class. The day after that, he's going with a couple of friends to the Junior Prom.

These are the kind of opportunities I was afraid he would never have. And now, of course, because that's just the way we special-needs parents roll, I'm afraid that it's too much for him. What if we've gone from being not ambitious enough to being too ambitious? How will we know when we've exceeded his stress-management limit without him having a meltdown in the grocery aisle? He's got a lot of good adults watching his back at school, and I have to trust that he'll always have eyeballs on him. But I sure am happy when he walks through the door at the end of the day, still in one piece. I'll be a nervous wreck for the both of us.

Crossing Over

If I told you I walk my son to school because he has to cross a busy road, you probably wouldn't think anything of it ... unless I also mentioned that he's a junior in high school, about a week short of eighteen years old. Then the thup-thup-thup sound of helicopter parenting would begin to beat in your ears, and you might feel silent pity for the teenage boy whose mother just won't let go, the adolescent with disabilities whose mother won't give him wings, the young man who never has a chance to fit in because his dang mother is too busy fluttering around him, removing all challenges, limiting him with her smothering concern.

And I will tell you that yes, my son may be mompecked and overprotected, but that's better than being a wet spot in the road.

Read the rest of this post at Hopeful Parents.

ID Badges

Here's a mystery: My son loves ID badges, makes up his own ID badges on the computer and prints them and laminates them and wears them constantly when he's at home, makes badges for friends and makes them wear them, is constantly fascinated with the badges of workers and teachers and other people he sees. Yet, when he has an actual real ID badge of his own that he has to wear, he wants no part of it. It's so weird to get a note home complaining that his boy who has 50 homemade badges hanging up in his room is in trouble for not wearing his school ID. What's up with that? Why is that badge of all badges not worthy?

32 IEP Meetings and Counting

Of all the melancholy transitions that come with your last child graduating high school, IEP meetings are one thing I will. not. miss. I'm relieved that my son looks ready now to continue to college rather than remain at the high-school for all his extra IDEA-promised years, because friends, I need to get off the IEP train. I'm done. I'm fried.

Read the rest of this post at Hopeful Parents

College Girl

My daughter is coming to the end of a successful first semester at college. And boy, are those words I thought I'd never say, both the "college" part and the "successful" part. As much as we try, as parents of children with special needs, to stay afloat in the sea of bad testing scores and professional predictions of doom, as much as we try to believe in our kids' abilities, there's always that voice that says, Maybe those experts are right and my children really won't amount to anything. You worry about hoping, and it's easy to doubt achievement.

Read the rest of this post at Hopeful Parents

Adoption Awareness Month

Two stories of interest here in Adoption Awareness Month:

+ I did an interview with Danette Schott at S-O-S for Parents about adopting my kids back in 1994 (!) and what we've learned along the way. Take a look, if only to see photos of how cute my kiddos were then, how cute they are now, and how very old I have become.

+ According to a blog post on adoption.com, Taye Diggs of Private Practice is producing a show called Matched that "will focus on adoption professionals in Los Angeles" and "the lawyers, doctors, and caseworkers who make the process happen and how it takes its toll on their own lives." It's apparently a fictional show and not reality TV, but ... yikes. Maybe it's just me, but of all the people involved in the adoption process, it's really the lawyers, doctors, and caseworkers we want to spend time with? I guess it makes sense from the point of view of having an unchanging core cast to focus on, but it kinda makes children and families the equivalent of corpses on a police procedural.

End of an Era

This has been a growing-up kind of year for my son. He's out of self-contained and into inclusion classes at school. He's growing his hair out from the buzz cut we gave him years ago so he wouldn't have to comb his hair. Though his head's no longer stubbly, his face is. These were all expected transitions, and ones we fought for (me, the inclusion classes; him, the hair). But there's one step toward maturity that I totally didn't see coming.

He no longer wants his toy cars.

Read the rest of this post on Hopeful Parents.