Why I'm Going to Be a Teacher.

I know its been over a month since I last blogged and with the title of the post you can probably guess that I'm not going to be talking about how awesome (*cough*lame*cough) my life is. 

I'm going to be talking about my little guy I teach everyday. Except I don't really teach him, he's kind of super ridiculously brilliant and no matter how hard I try to give him a challenge he shows me just how brilliant he is. Telling time for the first time? Psh, easy. New set of Edmark vocabulary? puh-LEAZE! New activity schedule? accomplished independently. Sending Teacher Shannon into shock with making a complete sentence with his edmark words 100% independent without any prompting? His favorite thing to do.

A lot of you are probably thinking "so whats the big deal about this?"  This child, according to his first special ed teacher had no mental capacity whatsoever and could never learn. Um, this kid thrives off of learning. He's constantly wanting more. The only time he doesn't act out, is when he is learning.

So yesterday, I decided I wanted to try working with him on a speech device. Me and the teacher had to think long and hard about what type of device would be best for him to use. He's very mechanical and can have something torn apart pretty quickly. (he's taken apart 3 vacuums, and no one has been able to figure out how to put them back together). So our list of criteria for a device was- it had to be affordable and indestructible. (ha...ha...), it had to have images big enough for his little fingers to touch, it had to be portable, it couldn't have easily accessible power buttons/batteries, and it had to somehow clamp to his desk so he couldn't chuck it across the room. We decided the ipad would be the best bet. Especially when at a recent special education meeting, our teacher found an Ipad case that blocked the volume and the power buttons, AND it has clamps to clamp it down to pretty much anything. Thank you NASA for the technology in that case! (i'll post a picture someday, it's hard to explain what it looks like). You also may call us crazy for choosing an ipad since they're expensive. In the world of speech devices, $400 is pretty dang cheap. I've seen devices go up to $30,000.


We downloaded pictures to the ipad and into the speech program, held up a flash card and asked him who's name it was. He then touched the right students picture, again and again. Without me hand over hand prompting him. Me and Janice sat there in absolute amazement. The little guy can read names. HE CAN READ NAMES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! This is HUGE!! Janice was curious to see what he would do on the typing program when asked to spell his name. HE COULD DO IT!!! HE COULD SPELL HIS NAME!!!!!!!!!!!! He's been able to spell his name for almost a year now, but on the ipad he had the entire alphabet, when before he only had the actual letters of his name. Never once did he try to take apart the ipad case and throw it, never once did he get frustrated and cry. He was absolutely loving it.  So by this time it was snack time, Janice hurried and downloaded pictures of his favorite snack items and a picture of water, and set it up to say each item and the drink. The little guy then had to touch "I Want" and then what it was he wanted. He did it. He told us what it was he wanted. HE WAS COMMUNICATING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 I am so stinkin proud of that little guy. Yes, I almost did cry. Even now just thinking about it I'm holding back the tears. But they are tears of happiness, tears of exhaustion after working my behind off, and getting beat up nearly everyday just so he could learn. Every moment, even the awesome pink eye incident, was absolutely worth it. Every moment when I just wanted to give up, but had to keep being persistent, was beyond worth it.

This is why I am going to be a Special Education Teacher.