Some of what I do is routine, the other part of what I do is sheer instinct. Never in my life could I have imagined being at the helm of creating and developing the intellectual and behavioral limits of children - until today.
I was besieged by a litany of comments that were made by a team of educational professionals that I have worked with on a special project. My client, "R", had struggled with reading and was in an educational environment that lacked the structure to provide her with the remediation and skills needed in order for her to become a well-versed, fluent reader. She also had not been exposed to the knowledge base that her peers had already learned and so - I was given the task: to create a system where she would learn what typically takes most children 5 years to learn, in 9 months.
This was not an easy task. I racked my brain for weeks and spent hundreds of hours creating a plan that I thought was ambitious and crafty, but would require more endurance than willpower. My team of professionals and I had meetings upon meetings and discussed the matter before the actual implementation. We talked about the pros and cons - obstacles and distractions, laughter, tears and all. It was inevitable that I would have to conjoin two conflicting methodologies to solve a problem that nobody had diagnosed was there - but only I was able to see it. How could this be? This client has spent thousands of dollars on therapy and psychologists here in Atlanta? How could they miss it? I don't now and frankly, I didn't care anymore. All I know is that the client had put the future of her daughter's life in my hands. As always, I felt like the "fixer" - and that's all I know how to do. Fix other people's mistakes.
So we have spent less than four months working on the plan. After hours of phone calls/meetings/emails and text messages - everything (surprisingly) went as planned and all goals and objectives were achieved. When I picked up the phone in the last week, my team had inundated me with the important details of what has happened and was excited to share with me the significant milestones that she had clearly reached. Even the conversation with my client's mother started off in the most jovial manner where she stated, "the psychologist cannot believe how much she has improved in one quarter. She doubted that it could happen." I'm sure that may be the mentality that most people have in education - but I do not feel that it is the norm.
At the end of the day, it's times like these where I feel that sometimes learning is not about setting limits like in Calculus class, it's about discovering your potential for being limitless!
I was besieged by a litany of comments that were made by a team of educational professionals that I have worked with on a special project. My client, "R", had struggled with reading and was in an educational environment that lacked the structure to provide her with the remediation and skills needed in order for her to become a well-versed, fluent reader. She also had not been exposed to the knowledge base that her peers had already learned and so - I was given the task: to create a system where she would learn what typically takes most children 5 years to learn, in 9 months.
This was not an easy task. I racked my brain for weeks and spent hundreds of hours creating a plan that I thought was ambitious and crafty, but would require more endurance than willpower. My team of professionals and I had meetings upon meetings and discussed the matter before the actual implementation. We talked about the pros and cons - obstacles and distractions, laughter, tears and all. It was inevitable that I would have to conjoin two conflicting methodologies to solve a problem that nobody had diagnosed was there - but only I was able to see it. How could this be? This client has spent thousands of dollars on therapy and psychologists here in Atlanta? How could they miss it? I don't now and frankly, I didn't care anymore. All I know is that the client had put the future of her daughter's life in my hands. As always, I felt like the "fixer" - and that's all I know how to do. Fix other people's mistakes.
So we have spent less than four months working on the plan. After hours of phone calls/meetings/emails and text messages - everything (surprisingly) went as planned and all goals and objectives were achieved. When I picked up the phone in the last week, my team had inundated me with the important details of what has happened and was excited to share with me the significant milestones that she had clearly reached. Even the conversation with my client's mother started off in the most jovial manner where she stated, "the psychologist cannot believe how much she has improved in one quarter. She doubted that it could happen." I'm sure that may be the mentality that most people have in education - but I do not feel that it is the norm.
At the end of the day, it's times like these where I feel that sometimes learning is not about setting limits like in Calculus class, it's about discovering your potential for being limitless!
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