Community Chat

[sparklestar]

I saw a side of my daughter today that took me by surprise. Generally, she is not an overly emotional person, unlike her mother who cries over a Hallmark commercial. So she is working on getting her masters in teaching and participates in tutoring children who are (and forgive me if I say this incorrectly) learning challenged or have learning disabilities, observes classes on some days, and participates in other programs as part of her studies . So today she came home after a day of observing in a regular classroom setting where they incorporate a couple of children who are learning challenged into this class. So in talking about her day she told me that one of the children (or “my kids” as she calls them) sneezed right in her face and she had slobber all over her, but she didn’t seem overly upset by that, she says it comes with the territory. However, as she continued she told me about this one little autistic boy who was sitting in his chair with a teacher squatting on each side of him (he is known to bolt or run) . They both were going to be assisting him with a project. So as he sat, he looked to his left at the one teacher, then to his right, back to the teacher on the left and again turned to the teacher on his right. As he stood up they were prepared for him to take off and run, but instead he walked over and took a chair and dragged it to the one teacher so she could sit and then repeated the same steps bringing a chair for the other teacher. As she told me this, tears streamed down her face. She said “I witnessed the most beautiful, amazing child today -- I mean he is so hard to understand because he is not able to speak well, and when he tries it sounds like he has a mouth full of marbles and he drools all over -- but to me he was so beautiful and I was just in awe of him and it just made me cry right there Mom.”