Bi-Polar

All of my students have the disability entitled "emotionally disturbed." Most carry another label as well. Sometimes this is "OHI" (other health impairment), sometimes it is "ADD" or "ADHD”, the sort of things you would expect to see for the variety of strange behaviors you can observe in a classroom such as mine. About three fourths of my students had fetal alcohol syndrome, and about half of those students were born addicted to another substance as well. Half of my students carry the title "bi-polar" somewhere in their IEP. This also happens to be the title that best describes my classroom right now. Somehow I fear that my job is promoting this title for me as well.

I must be taking on some of the emotions that my students go through on a daily basis. As much as my students can’t decide if it is more beneficial to make good choices or to make bad ones, I can’t decide if teaching is rewarding or simply degrading.

Yesterday I hated my job. Absolutely and utterly I hated every part of being in that school and in that classroom. I wanted more than anything to be taken away to some other world where Newark didn’t exist and kids didn’t talk and people just… well, I didn’t get that far into the scenario because the important part about my daydream was that I wasn’t a teacher and I didn’t have to hate everything.

Today I was my students’ biggest advocate and I remembered why I decided to be a teacher in the first place. I got cocky and defensive when my students were assigned a new counselor that hadn’t the first clue of how to interact with BD kids. She said to me, “so what should I do?” when she walked in, and then suggested “less structure, right?” I scoffed, and I thought I might pull my hair out of my own head just to have to deal with her. I realized that I am in that classroom for a reason. I even found myself in the office begging them not to send me to a workshop tomorrow because I need to be in that classroom with my kids.

This is the point when I start recognizing my own bi-polar tendencies because I know that tomorrow I can guarantee that I will be happy to be away from the school, and Thursday I am about 90% positive that I will be miserable to have to return to my classroom.

I am beginning to think that “Bi-polar” is a classification that must be over-used, while simultaneously all too accurate for a BD classroom, and it’s teacher.

Crisis

From the moment I got the class in the auditorium this morning I knew that Amber was a little off, and I wanted to ask her if she'd had her medication, because I knew that she hadn't. When we got to the classroom she was okay for a few minutes, but then she just got out of control... She was screaming and yelling, cursing, and generally off the walls. She had a stick and was hitting the door frame trying to make pieces of it fall down (from the numerous other times the frame has been broken by students this year), and trying her best to make me snap or something. She was standing on tables, and running around the classroom, refusing to do work, and speaking over me anytime I tried to talk at all. She was calling me by my first name, and yelling at me calling me a b*t*h and a slut, a cracker and a honky. She was asking, "Jill, have you ever been raped?" and then announcing to the class that "Ms. Glassbrook's a slut." She then stole my keys from my desk and called the office, yelling "void" when they answered, thinking that it would make them KNOW that nothing was wrong... but they got the message anyway. Then she went in the hall and locked the door, making it so that others couldn't enter the classroom, including the crisis counselor, the principal and vice-principal.

Eventually, we got Amber to return the keys, and we had to "send her to crisis." In Newark, if a child is so out of control that there is nothing any of the professionals in the building can do to help them, the police and EMS are called in and the child is taken in an ambulance, on a stretcher to the hospital. Early in the year this is what happened with 2 of my students, and it was determined that they were in the wrong placement, and that my class was not restrictive enough for them. Today, it happened for Amber, and soon I am sure that we will have to decide that my classroom is not restrictive enough for her. Coney was always saying that "as a special ed teacher you have to love to hate your job, you have to believe that there is something that you can do so that your students don't need to be in your class anymore..." The problem is, I think that I am working things backwards in my classroom. I hate my job. I know my kids are brilliant, I just don;t know that I am the one that can help them get to where they need to be-- and I just keep moving them to more and more restrictive placements.