Quote:
Originally Posted by Poita
Trust me, we demand, kick, scream, beg and appeal. Teachers are pretty active and adamant with demanding more resources, we currently have *one* psychologist for 5 schools, which is a ridiculous situation, we have gone through all of the official channels and tried to get community support as well, but to no avail so far. We also have the situation of jobs being available but no-one to fill them. Why work in the schools as a Psychologist and make a quarter of what you could in private practice? How do you get a psychologist to want to work in rural areas? In some cases the money is there, but the people can't be convinced to come. We even offered to house them for a year free of charge!
Nightstalker, I am horrified to hear of your child's experience. It is part of the reason we sought out a school with a 'special needs unit' for our child rather than mainstreaming.
When I was working my way through my teaching degree I was very much in favour of mainstreaming from an ideological point of view. As I got more experience and realised that the one semester subject was the only training I was going to get on meeting the needs of students with special needs, I realised that mainstreaming would be unlikely to work for our child regardless of the best intentions of the school or teachers. In a mainstream classroom it is extremely difficult, even if you are trained and experienced, and especially if they don't qualify for a support teacher.
She started this week and loves it, the class is great and the school is wonderful. It was the right choice for us, it may be worth investigating.
I'd agree with most of what Mark has said, the curriculum is difficult and there is very little a teacher can do to stray from it. It has been developed with the best intentions and based on solid research and great ideals of inclusion and no child being left behind etc. but it isn't working in practice. There are some positives to it, but the overly lofty 'justice' goals tend towards encouraging mediocrity. I had a situation at a private Catholic school where I wasn't allowed to give a student an advanced reader (a book that was at his level) as it would make the rest of the class feel bad as they were nowhere near his level.
Needless to say the whole 'year' at that school was on a considerably lower level than at other 'lower class' public schools I have been at.
I also find schools that draw from lower socio-economic groups are sometimes better with better relationships and support from parents, they are often more willing to not be overprotective or precious with their kids. Of course there are problem parents at any school.
It takes a strong principal and a cohesive supported staff to deliver a great education, much like in politics, it often means you have to do things that may be a bit unpopular with parents and if the media gets involved it becomes a nightmare.
It isn't all doom and gloom, if as a parent you are involved, read to your kids, get to know your teacher and be supportive, then you are maximising your kids' chance for a great education and a successful life.
A little bit of support from the parents can make all the difference and it can stop you as a teacher wanting to pack it all in!
(I apologise for the typos, this rant was typed on my phone!)
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Well said, it is always a very different perspective when you are in the hot seat isn't it
. We also have a special needs unit at my college, the only one for quite some distance and currently have about 50 special needs students enrolled with various degrees of disability and thus various levels of funding avialable. It is staffed by specialist trained teachers and aids and they do wonders with the kids and I mean kids with severe disabilities. As a teacher my only training in special needs was based on talented and gifted kids as that was all I was expected to deal with coming from a physical science background. Under current teacher training courses there is just not enough time nor information given to allow us to be effective under the current conditions and expectations. I would imagine at least an extra 2 years of dedicated study at a tertiary level is needed to reduce the problem, that and much smaller class sizes with good role models when teaching these kids in mainstream. The involvment of parents is essential and many of our aids are just that, volunteers who give up their time to help out. Many go on to do specialised training in this area and make a career out of it. We have not sunk as low as your system in respect to offering and providing resources for advanced learners here and we actually run gifted and talented programs and dare I say it...stream kids into groups based on their ability. We do not exclude kids from the lower groups from doing higher level studies (here it is called WACE, same as HSC, VCE etc) but we also try to cater for the high flyers. It is working well at this time. Again the positive support of parents in many roles is paramount to a healthy functioning school in which all focus can be placed where it should be, student learning, growth and advancement.
Mark