triplemoon18 wrote:
Kim D - I think my daughter likes the EA better because she has been told that she is the EA's favourite student in the aspergers program. She really listens to her and sometimes sneaks her to do her work in a hidden office, so she doesn't have to go to class and the teacher won't know. I think she likes the attention and who wouldn't? Her teacher has asked me to go over her behaviour plan with her to show her that she is to stay in class in the afternoon and that the EAs have other people to help during this time and can't spent it all with her. I think this particular EA is like a friend to her and from the stories I hear, they talk about how another EA wasn't as patient as she could have been with or they talk about how the teacher is annoying. I am not sure what to do about it because I am glad that someone likes my daughter and wants to help her, but I don't think badmouthing other EAs and teachers is the way to do it.
My daughter is quite charming and I think gets away with stuff she shouldn't.
Last year, her EA was also treating her as a favourite. It was so apparent because they had a weekly raffle and my daughter always seemed to win the prize.
Ah, the curse of favoritism! Sometimes a teacher just bonds better with certain kids than others, just as some people are more naturally drawn to one another anywhere else, but it's the teachers' job to treat everyone as fairly as possible. It makes me nuts when some teachers just let "spoiling" a child happen--or even encourage it. Other students might feel left out or don't get the attention they need, and they can lose trust in and respect for the teacher. At the same time, the strongly-favored students might "get away" with escape behavior and more inappropriate behavior in general. (Though I'm not judging your daughter at all!) They sometimes get the idea that all they have to do is be cute and in the worst cases, they end up missing out on a lot of learning opportunities.
Obviously, everyone's different, and each teacher-student dynamic is different, but like you said, it gets harder to be neutral when you're trying to encourage students to build social relationships--you want to take advantage of those opportunities when they come up, especially if it also helps the child do better academic work. It might make things better/easier in the short term, but you can see the bigger picture quite clearly. Unfortunately, your daughter's teacher might be unaware of what she's doing or just doing the best she can trying not to make things worse, and the same goes with the EA(s). It makes total sense to expect that teachers working with kids on the spectrum would have better, specialized training, but it doesn't always happen that way for a lot of reasons. From what I've seen, not a lot of people are "cut out" for the kind of work we do (though I love it!), some people who accept the job aren't aware of what it takes to do it well, and sometimes it's hard to fill the teaching positions at all. I think the quality and amount of training/teacher education varies greatly, and that's flat-out wrong.
Hopefully you, your daughter, and her teaching team will learn to balance things out better so that she does her work as independently as she can and earns positive consequences that don't go overboard, but regardless of what else happens, the staff NEED to stop bad-mouthing each other in front of the students! There's no excuse for that!
28 Oct 2014, 12:55 pm
