so. once a week i carpool down on to this middle school in dress attire. dress pants, dress shoes, dress(ish) shirt. not quite the nines, but we're talkin' sevens- sevens, at least.
i walk into the same classroom and experience study hall as i've never experienced study hall before. there are three to five kids, tops, all with some type of handicap or learning disability and sometimes with an attitude that matches puberty and simmers from whatever situation in home life burns underneath. it is frustrating to know i don't have the ability to help them with the basic concepts. i'm there for homework completion purposes and moral support. yeah, i can kindle the smallest sparks of critical thinking, but when application begins- it disappears behind the blankest, most semi-willing eyes.
it's not my job to try and explain the concept of a fraction to an autistic boy- i just facilitate numbers going into the calculator. i can't re-explain the whole process of why sound helps you figure out the population of one group of crickets as opposed to the other. an elaborate conversation boils down to answers that seem to be from my responsive 8th grader, but as soon as we come back to writing our words on paper, my only reward is a, "so... what's the answer?" no regrouping or pointing or re-evaluation will get me anything but a misspelled sentence that has come from words caught straight out of my mouth and slapped on paper with minimal coherence, if any.
the scribbles on the paper are factory work.
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