One particular experience that I want to bring individual attention to because to me I think it really helped my development of becoming a teacher. There was one girl in my class who I’ll call K who had pretty serious cerebral palsy and a difficult hearing problem in addition to the numerous social and linguistic difficulties that went along with her condition. She was probably one of the sweetest students I have ever met and I met her very early on in my tutoring. On my first day the teacher put me one on one with K so I could help her through her math worksheet. Talk about throwing somebody into the deep end. I was a freshman whose first teaching experience was this and I’m placed with a student with numerous challenges and I was terrified.
I learned though that I really enjoyed working with K despite the obvious difficulties that went along with it. It was extremely frustrating at times and on occasion got to very disheartening points but then she would say something absolutely unexpected and funny and I was hooked again. I helped K a lot throughout my time at the school because it was clear that she was one of the students that needed the most help. I found it surprising how much of her day was spent in the normal 3rd classroom. She was there for basically all but 20 min everyday where she would go and work with a speech teacher.
Her involvement in the classroom really reminded me of what I read in Kliewer’s article about including students with disabilities into the main stream classroom. I believe that it was a benefit to K because she got to interact with the other students and they were able to become more comfortable with students like her. Socially the environment was very respectful with all the students trying to help out K whenever and however they could. It also seemed like she was learning at pace with the other students despite her disability. Though requiring some extra tutoring K was always on top of her homework assignments and did pretty well on tests.
Meeting K was probably one of the most educational experiences of my life. She taught me patience and helped me improve my skills of working with disabled students. I feel my experience with her will only make me grow as an education student and I will become a better teacher because of it.