Another change on the horizon

Going away to college is huge, but there’s another transition coming up in our household. It’s hard to guess how big it will be. Msk is going to be finishing middle school in a year and a half. After that comes high school. With a kid with significant challenges, high school is a big deal. College seems hard to imagine, so high school might be the end of the school phase of his life. Or not… who knows?

Questions need to be asked, and they are hard as hell for me to write down, much less answer:

• What goals are we shooting for – academically and in terms of life-skills?
• How long do we want school to last and what comes next?
• What kind of supports will come when high school is finished and what types will end?
• What school will best build on his strengths and help him cope with his weaknesses?
• After working hard to find an inclusive setting are we going to need to find a separate autism specific program?

A year and a half seems like a long time, but I know it isn't. There's lots of work to be done - assesments, school visits, team meetings, internet research...

It's intimidating to think about this process, how to start and what path to follow. Nothing to be done, but get down to it, I suppose. As the King from Alice in Wonderland says, "Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop."

The short list

I find myself obsessed with this college search for this kid who is suddenly 17 years old. I started the savings plan about 14 years ago, so maybe it's natural to be a little eager to see this plan realized.

So, with engineering as the planned major and within a half-day's drive as a location we come down to this list:

University of Maryland College Park
University of Maryland Baltimore County
Johns Hopkins
Drexel
Carnegie Mellon
Lehigh
Bucknell
Rochester Institute of Technology
Rensselaer
Swarthmore
Stevens Institute of Technology

The balance between being excited and overwhelmed is tough to reach - both for me and my daughter.

LEET-DEET

For years msk  has said leet-deet. Actually he says "leet-deet, leet-deet, leet-deet, leet-deet, leet-deet, leet-deet, leet-deet, leet-deet." It's often one of those stand in phrases that mean something in msk-code. I've interpreted it as frustration, if I pay attention at all. If he's not saying it loud, it might just be a noise he likes to make.

I never really thought a whole lot more about decoding it because when msk is in the midst of being frustrated, asking a lot of verbal questions is a bad idea. Generally, verbal communication is frustrating for msk, and questions are more like interrogations (under the bright light in the police station) in his mind.

So, leet-deet, was just one of those echolalic phrases that sometimes indicated distress and dealing with msk's  distress is usally about taking a deep breath, radiating a sense of calm and if at all possible removing the object of frustration with little or no talking.

Sometimes though, I just have a hard time reaching that place of calm. Lately, college applications and financial worries related to college choices, have shortened my patience. On Saturday I was driving with msk  and he was verbally repeating some sort of you tube clip or computer game. I said something meaningless to him out loud (something on the order of "how's it going?"). Small talk is never msk's  forte and when he's in the middle of a recitation, this type of distraction forces him to stop recreating what's playing back in his mind, make the obligatory, but pointless, "I'M DOING OK, MOM." Then there's my obligatory "It's OK for people to talk to you, so don't yell at me please." I think he said he had to start over and I said something about his self-talking was getting on my nerves. Probably not the high-point of my parenting empathy and understanding.

Anyway, there was a level of frustration in the car and silence as I drove. Then I heard a frustrated "LEET-DEET, LEET-DEET, LEET-DEET" at the same time I noticed that my turn signal was stuck on after I had switched lanes. It finally clicked. The noise of the turn signal was driving him crazy."Leet-Deet." means stop that annoying noise. The rhythm, the tone, and the emphasis were all exactly the same tone as my car.

Mystery solved.

College Apps

I’m not sure how to make this into an interesting post, but I thought I should capture some of the things I have learned at this stage of trying to find the right college for my eldest to attend next year since it seems to be taking up a lot of my time and energy at the moment.

• There’s a difference between early action and early decision for college applications – action is on the college’s part, as in they’ll tell you if you get in; decision is on the applicant’s part, as in you only get one and you promise to go there
• Applying to 10 colleges is not an outrageous number, it seems to be about average for the people I’ve talked to
• Application deadlines are all over the place – this means there’s not a single super-stressful date, but it also means that there are nearly continuous deadlines through senior year
• Colleges seem to have all sorts of money for some spectacularly designed mailings, although I’m not really sure how many hours of reading/attention time they get per dollar spent
• Some schools (UMCP for example) pretty much make you apply by the early deadline because that’s the deadline for honors programs and scholarships and what college applicant isn’t at least hoping for a scholarship? This means that you really need to figure out your list of colleges early so that you can check if any of them have early application deadlines for things you are interested in
• People who love graphs and databases and number crunching should find the $20 fee for full access to US News & World Report’s college database worth the money. I started trying to build something similar in excel before I found it. I thought all they did was college rankings (which I’m a little skeptical about), but they have all sorts of information, like tuition, student to teacher ratios etc
• No matter how much time, effort and money you pour into working with your kid on this stuff there will be parents who have done more, much more.
• Your child will love and/or hate schools for reasons that seem really stupid. I’m trying to use these 17 years of experience with this child to remember patience and diplomacy when I try to nudge for or against a specific college as well as remembering that this is not my college education we are talking about, although I will be sinking a lot of money into it…

Vengeance

Remember that light-hearted post I was promising?




I don't often talk about my husband here, but he is, of course, the love of my life. He's go a penchant for god-awful Hawaiian shirts. It started as a joke, but I think that now he actually feels fondness for their hideousness.



I have been known to hold a grudge. In 9th grade we read The Scarlet Letter. I hated it mainly because I hated the characters. At that age I had very little tolerance for the idea that different times had different values. At 14 I was sure that I understood sexual freedom and hated prudes... based on theory and reading of course.

I realize the silliness in retrospect, but still, I just can't seem to find an sympathy for Puritans.



The connection? Puritan brand Hawaiian shirts and Hester, Dimsdale, Chillingsworth and all the rest, turning in their graves.

It makes me smile every time I do laundry.

Perspective

So here's the post that has been knocking around in my head ever since I read a comment with this link on a blog that I had resolved never to read again.

What do you know about school choice in Baltimore? How can you say with such certainty that children that are assigned to a school that is failing, in so many senses of the word, are not better off at an alternative school? Because of some sort of vague national surveys? Because you've never set foot in Baltimore? Because you've never talked to anyone with actual first hand experience in a charter school in Baltimore?

I hate to use the term, but it seems to me that you are an outside agitator. Your goals have nothing to do with improving educational outcomes in Baltimore and everything to do with political correctness. If you can make your point by storing up anger and tearing apart unity, that's fine.

The pundits on the national education scene have no interest in msk's challenges in finding a school that valued him and his special needs. School choice means privatization to them, regardless of the fact that a charter school may have been started by teachers looking for freedom in developing an educational philosophy. No, it's all about corporations taking over our excellent public school system and trying to make a buck. But Baltimore's schools didn't strike me as excellent and big changes, even though I know they are painful, have made very positive changes in msk's education.

I realize we all have different perspectives - teachers, students, administrators and parents. We have to actually listen to those first hand experiences and value them, as opposed to dismissing things that don't fit into your grand theory.

Venting is over. Sorry. Next post will be light-hearted, I promise.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Time to make some changes

I’ve been finding the time that I spend writing on the web a lot more frustrating than it is satisfying lately. At the same time what I’ve written, and the reactions to it, seems to be taking up more and more of my energy. I’m not talking about what I post on this blog – clearly I haven’t been spending much time here. I’m talking about Ed forums where I’ve been commenting on other people’s posts, primarily Inside Ed.

This feeling reminded me of a friend’s conversation with his dad when he reached the age where mind altering substances were becoming a significant part of his life. His dad explained that drinking and the like were a normal phase of life, but that you need to remember that you’re doing these things because you want to and you enjoy the sensation (if not the next day’s hangover). The important thing, he said, was that if you no longer enjoyed the experience, if you felt compelled to partake, that you stand back and change your ways.

Obsessively reading, checking and mulling over Ed issues no longer brings me joy. I’m resolved to make a change. I will not be commenting any more. I’m going to try to limit checking on blogs to a reasonable level. I haven’t posted too much about general Ed issues on this blog, but I’m going to switch the tone to be more personal and less political.

This is a more than little hard for me. I feel like the 13 or so years I’ve been a parent in City Schools, and the wide varieties of things I’ve seen at different schools and as the parent of a special needs child, have given me a pretty strong base to talk about schools and the changes that are going on. That might be true in some settings, but on the boards, judging from the reactions of other commenters, I don’t think that my opinion has swayed a single reader. I’m not complaining, I’m just stating what seems like a plain fact to me.

I’m not saying I won’t be posting here anymore; in fact I plan to post more often. This is going to be a year of transition in our household as my eldest starts applying to colleges and making that big choice. I think I should be spending my on-line times searching out information to help her make the best choices possible. I plan on sharing what I find here, which I think that should be the source of some pretty good blog topics.

In addition, msk is getting close to high school and I think, realistically, that there will be some big issues about placements and life planning going on as that gets closer. It's a hard topic - planning for a transistion to adulthood and independant (or as independant as possible) living. That should be some pretty gripping posts - it's hard just to through down these few preview sentances.

So there you have it - changing and growing... fun times indeed!

End of an era

I don't think I've ever written about popular culture before, but this is different. Harry Potter started at a scholastic school book sale for us about ten years ago, so it starts with a school tie-in.

I plunked down the cash for the first two books of the series (all there were at the time) and brought them home. I knew my 7/8 year old could read the books, but they were too much for the 6 year old. Besides, it had been a while since I had read books aloud to them. At this point they were enjoying reading series of smaller books voraciously and on their own.

So, that night, I started by reading a chapter (or two) to them. Then it became something we had to do, every night. I didn't realize the committment I was making at that point. It turned out to be seven books. And each one got longer and darker. But the tradition was set.

As time went on they were more than capable of reading the books themselves, and they did read them on their own, but the first read was always me, out loud.

Not much later we started another tradition. We watch all the movies at the Senator. This Friday at 9:45 we have tickets for the last movie.

Across the years the little girls have turned to teens almost ready for college. My hair has turned grey and I now wear bi-focals to read.

It's hard not to get a little choked up at the end of such long term commitments. I did when I finished reading the last book. I probably will at the end of the last movie.

Maybe not all bad...

It doesn't take a lot of surfing around the web to find hatred of "high stakes testing" - look at some of the comments here or poke around here or here. I admit to being fairly ambivalent over the time period when my "neuro-typical" kids were taking MSAs (or whatever they were called over the years). It seemed like a big chunk of time pulled away from standard learning and I really hated the simple minded writing strategies they were learning. On the other hand my kids love a test and it was kind of nice to have evidence of "advanced" standing when a not-too-talented teacher tried to say poor performance was based on a kid's intelligence as opposed to the constant bullying that was going on.... but that's another story for a different post. It was also nice to have an objective data point when looking at schools and I enjoyed working the graphs and analysis tools they had on the state website.

The other day I got msk's first MSA (of the alt variety) report. It puts all this discussion in a totally different light. When you have a significantly disabled kid, education is always a source of contention. I've read more than a few articles decrying the "waste" of money that is required to educate "those" kids. Before IDEA you were pretty well screwed. Now, there are legal obligations, but if you don't fight, fight, fight for your kid... well, bad things have been known to happen.

But we fight, and negotiate, and politic, and work real hard, and pick the right school... and good things happen. We live in a society were verbal skills are seen to equal intelligence. Msk doesn't do well in that light, having very limited verbal abilities. Now though, I can point to his MSA math score as being on the border between "proficient" and "advanced". Admittedly his reading was in the basic level, but I'd argue that might be related to test-taking motivation/anxiety and having a not too thrilling year in English.

This from a kid that spent two years in a school that was all about behavior and totally not about academics. From a kid that spent two years after that doing mod-MSAs because of the level of his disability. He's worked so hard for these results and he makes me very proud.

Retour d'un voyage en toute sécurité *

So, day before yesterday, we returned home. I'm a worrier, but I think all my worries were unfounded:

• msk might have stressed a little, but he made it through the week unscathed
• even though my husband and I have had little time together as a couple we do have things to talk about and share a common sense of what is enjoyable to do on an adult vacation
• French engineers (at least the ones I met) are more interested in getting things to work than making me prove my "Subject Matter Expert" standing
• I can enjoy myself thoroughly without worrying about what's happening at home with just a few skype contacts

I'm sure there more posts I can make from this experience, but right now I'll just post this to let you know we're all OK.

* My French is horrendous, but babblefish tells me this is how you say "return from a safe journey"