Daughter had pneumonia this week. Like all week. In hospital and everything. Before you panic, know that she is fine, home from hospital, and currently running around at top speed neighborhood children (with doctor's approval). Here was the timeline... Sunday, feeling fine and jumping around in a bounce house Monday she progressed from feeling sick to her stomach and lethargic, to complaining that it was hard to breathe (but it often is when you are congested) to having obvious breathing difficulties (including retractions-- where you could see her ribs with each inhale) and a dreadful crackling noise in her lungs. So it was a trip to the ER. Got to the Children's Hospital at 11:30, nebulizer, chest x-rays, IV fluids for dehydration (but I suspect also because they knew we'd be staying)... Admitted at 3:30 am. Supplemental oxygen several days. Finally discharged once she was able to make it through the night without setting off the pulse O2 monitor without her mask. I felt guilty for staying at the hospital and not going in to work during the day. Which I technically could have done with husband and grandmas and many other helpful people in town. Except I would have been rubbish at work. And no one at work expected me to leave my daughter in the hospital so that I could rush in to assist in the instruction of facts vs. opinions. The eighth graders by the way are doing a unit on fake news. Really it is on how to tell if a source is reliable. Taught a similar unit to my college students last year. So they could cite reputable sources when writing a paper. Unsurprisingly both age groups have trouble telling fact from fantasy in the age of instant digital publishing. The weird sleep/wake schedule that I had (waking on the hour as they came in to check on daughter or when the alarms went off on the IV or the oxygen) may have helped with my adjustment to daylight savings time. I will not encourage other children to require hospitalizations in the spring to facilitate my entry into increased daylight. It was of course the children's spring break this week. Happily the elder children were able to go do fun things with a grandma. As we speak I am dying my hair blue. Highlights, I should say. I went to a regular salon and they told me they didn't have bright enough colors for me... so they just lightened my hair so I would be able to put in my own color. Isn't that just a fascinating bit of trivia. I a having a bad attitude about students with bad attitudes. There is just ONE student in each of my classes who is persistently A. disrespectful and B. disruptive. It makes it hard to get things done. For anyone. The problem is that for all of these students there are all kinds of mitigating circumstances in terms of why they are acting out. Stuff at home. Not having appropriate boundaries. Or appropriate levels of support. The fact that they came here as refugees with interrupted schooling. The vague (or specific) feeling that people have already given up on them. They need a teacher like in any one of those inspirational teacher movies who will give them tough love and not take any of their crap and then they will remarkably get top scores on some national exam and get a scholarship and deliver a heartfelt speech thanking their teacher who made them the man they are today. Because of course they are boys. I cannot be that teacher. I can be the teacher who gives them a fresh start every day. Not holding the previous day's behavior against them. Not sitting there waiting for them to fly apart so I can have them removed from class (which I have not resorted to very often). The problem is balancing the needs of the WHOLE CLASS against the needs of the one student. Whose needs are so great they could suck all of the caring and compassion out of any one teacher. And what happens to everyone else? I am loathe to remove a student from class... Typically they are already doing poorly because they are not paying attention in class. Removed from class they will certainly not do any better. But if they are clearly NOT learning and their presence is preventing other people from learning... temporary removal from the classroom is the appropriate course. It is perhaps telling that these three students have one thing in common (otherwise they are VERY different): each one has parents who... a call home will have no effect. The parent is either at a complete loss for what to do and/or they have given up. Which makes the school/home partnership rather incomplete. I don't want to be yet another person who gives up on these students. I don't see their other teachers giving up on them either. But I don't think the students see how much the staff at the school is trying to do for them. They just know that we won't let them do whatever they want to (the way they often can at home). We had a student leave the school this year because he didn't like that teachers kept telling him to do things. He would prefer if he could just hang out and talk to his friends. Wouldn't we all. Grateful Crap: oxygen Equatorial actions: went back to work eating something besides hospital food (although it was surprisingly good. made fresh. with real ingredients) meds: 200mg lamotrigine Comments are closed.
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K. BuchananQuaker, teacher, parent, |