I remember his first year at school so well. Unfortunately not for good reasons. There were many little incidents along the way that concerned us, however, we powered through. My wife and I felt that his teacher had no involvement with him. The worst part is she as much as admitted that she let the EA’s handle him pretty much exclusively. On one of his report cards, she actually copied and pasted off another kid’s card and forgot to even change the name.
So we were looking forward to starting the summer. A period in which my wife had full intentions of doing everything in her power to increase our son’s ability in speech and writing. We were going to be monitoring him closely. The hope was to curb some of his violent tendencies that appeared when he got upset.
My wife had some incredible luck in breaking through his speech barrier. Even though he did not develop clear words at that point, they were understandable. We did not have sentences yet, it was only one and two words at a time. He was trying his best, but anything was an improvement over no speech at all and we were at that point not that long before.
On the issue of his violence, it was interesting to monitor where it came from. At home, we got one episode a day and could usually go two or three days without an episode. At school on the other hand he had the tendency to strike out at least once, often twice a day. Now not all of these episodes were actually rough enough to hurt, but they were of concern.
What had been my opinion for a while was that in his first year, they were trying to get him to conform to “school routine”. I felt that instead of working on one thing at a time, they were pushing him on everything at once. This was accomplishing nothing but frustration and confusion. Basically, we were hoping the summer would give a clue that we were right (or wrong). Then move on to working with the school (or on the school as the case may be) to develop a plan that works. So they could continue to move him forward from what we managed to develop over the summer.
At the time we had no clue just how much his relationship with his EA’s was damaging his progress. We still had not had any luck in getting him toilet trained at this point either. The EA had “worked wonders” with the previous child she worked with. However, in hindsight, it was quite clear that the lack of bond and her insistence on immediate compliance to the rules made it impossible for them to make any serious progress.
We also realized later, that the system they used at that school of one EA in the morning and a different one for the afternoon was not a system that worked for our son. It was tried over the years he was in school and each time it was tried, he failed to thrive.
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