Sunday, March 17, 2013

Why Spring Break May Save My Sanity

We just started our annual two week Spring Break yesterday.  It couldn’t have come at a better time.  There were a few times in the last few days of school that I thought I was going to lay hands on a child and throw them out into a snow bank.

You may ask yourself how it came to this.  Well, let me tell yah.  I have a very “challenging” class this year.  Challenging is teacher speak for a stress leave waiting to happen.  I have a child with brain damage and another that likely has Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and is academically functioning below a Kindergarten level.  Oh, you can barely understand the second little gaffer either.  I have two hearing impaired students, one of which didn’t get hearing aids until he was five.  That guy is understandably pretty far behind.  As an example, we were reading a book the other day and I discovered he didn’t know what a clown was.  We’re not talking about not knowing the word for clown.  He just had never come across a clown before.  Weird.  You might think that was a handful, but it gets better.  My last special fellow has extreme behaviour issues linked to ADHD.  This guy is completely governed by his impulses and his need for attention. 

In the past weeks we were having issues with brain damaged student having massive fits that ended up with her being sent home and having to be forcibly removed from the classroom.   That is when the attention seeker decided pooping his pants was a great idea.  It netted him a shower, a change of clothes and lots of attention.  This must have looked pretty good to him, because he proceeded to crap his drawers every day for over a week.  The final straw was when I found a very suspicious smear on the floor under his chair.  I have to tell you that cleaning pooh off of the floor is just not in my contract.

The rest of my class is full of pretty stable kids, but they do feed off of the chaos created by some of the rest.  Add to that the usual nuttiness of the last week of school before holidays and you may see why I was on the ragged, jagged edge. 

I am going to spend lots of time skiing, watching movies, reading, painting and playing video games.  When my mother-in-law leaves tonight (did I not mention she was here?) there may a couple of days where my wife and I retreat to our corners of the house and sequester ourselves. Ahh, holidays.

No comments:

Post a Comment