SED, BD, AN . . . whatever your emotional and behavioral special education “teacher label”, like me you may find that you ask this question a bit more frequently than other teachers. I usually get there around this time of year, sometime between Winter Break and Spring Break when the pressure is on to demonstrate growth but most of my students seem to be demonstrating only regression.
Now that I’m in a new building for the first time in many years, I am happy to say that I’m not asking that question about my job assignment this year, but as I found myself at home on an unexpected snow day, the question has presented itself in a new way: What am I doing with this website?
Everykidcanlearn.com went online in 2018, the result of a particularly rough school year, a four day training and a desire to “start a business”. Two years and very little “business” later, I’m sitting here wondering what I‘m really trying to do and why I’m still keeping this site online . . .
It’s you. Really, I mean it. I want to help you help kids. You decided to work with kids that other people don’t get, or even avoid altogether. You face the pressure from administrators to keep them under control, from families to understand their unique needs and from the kids themselves to believe in them no matter what. You try to bring order to chaos, manage the unmanageable, and somehow keep your own sanity.
I’m there with you. I don’t have any magic answers, but I have been doing this for a while now and I’ve learned ways to survive and help challenging kids thrive in school. If I can help you do the same, I want to do that. So I will stick around a while, post some thoughts from time to time, and see if anything happens.
Please keep doing what you do for kids with emotional and behavioral needs. I will too.
Until the next post - Jesse