Early to Rise

Sunday! Ewwww. I was up late last night, (think 3 in the morning) and when my alarm clock rang at 7 I was in no mood to get up.
I dragged myself out of bed, and forced myself to get dressed. Sunday is my glasses day. There's no way lenses are going to go into these tired eyes!
The day didn't go as badly as I'd expected.
The principal called a meeting DURING class time. Now that is the strangest thing. These girls were running up and down the hallways while we were stuck in the resource room learning how to use a new teaching chart called the about point chart. When I'm ever going to use it? I have no idea. The principal heard of something new, she got excited over it, and pushed it on us. Yay. The other teachers said this happens every week.
I get so angry with these charts, the principal may think she's helping us, but in reality, she's not letting her teachers use their own creativity. She seems to have this dream of making all her educators just like her.
Sorry, I'm too spunky for that.
Well, anyway, by the time I got into class, there was only 20 minutes left to the period, and I had them take out their writings and continue. I will be so happy when these writings are handed in. I'm anxious to start something that's on a seventh grade level.
It's not so much that these letters they're writing are not on a 7th grade level, it's just that a ten page letter is asking a bit much form the girls. I want to start a writing that won't look so scary to the girls. (Then maybe I can start getting them used to the idea of not getting a syllabus for every project they do!)
The day was over quickly, I had some good laughs in class 7b, as usual, and as soon as that bell rang I was out of there!
Well, not really, I was actuality stopped for a minute by my learning disabled girl.
She looks so overwhelmed most of the time, like she doesn't even know where to start. I told her to copy someone else's notes for tomorrow, and I would then discuss with her what she'd be responsible for.
Really, I just wanted time to think.
It's hard for a teacher to devote so much time to just one student, and that's why this girl is the way she is today. The teachers have all given up on her within the first month of school and she spent 9 months of the year just sitting in class doing nothing. I needed to come up with an idea to help her.
I know plenty of LD people, and most of them are just LD, not dumb. Most people don't know the difference between the two. I saw right away that this girl was far from stupid. She would laugh at the jokes I made in class even before some of her classmates did. She caught onto things quickly. I think her problem is comprehension. She reads beautifully, but she cant' understand what she's read. She can't write notes as I'm speaking, because she has to pay a lot of attention to be able to understand what I'm saying, but as soon as I say something that gets her even slightly confused, I lose her for the rest of the lesson.
Maybe she panics, or maybe she just doesn't have a large attention span. I have no idea. But she's definitely smart enough to fool her teachers. She's done it up until now!
I went out and bought her a 1" binder this afternoon. I decorated it and put her name on the cover. I then went and typed up a weeks worth of history lessons in about a half a page. I added some review questions on the bottom, and put it into the binder.
This is my idea. I can't make her responsible for everything, she's nowhere near that level. What I did, was summarize some high points of my lessons, written on a third grade level, and I plan on making her responsible for that summary.
Her homework is to read the page, and get those questions done. Each page can take her a week to do. She gets one or two question a night, and eventually, these questions will be her tests.
I was nervous the entire time I made this binder up for her. Am I going too far? Should I tell the principal about this? Will it work? Am I just being insanely idealistic again? Sometime I think that I just think too much. I drive myself up the wall sometimes with al those thoughts flying around my head.
Whatever it was, I spent time on that, and then I fell asleep on the couch, for most of the afternoon.
Teaching sure has a way of wearing you out...Or maybe it was the fact that I went to bed at 3?