Communication and Teaching: Dealing with Challenges

You've prepared for your assignment as best you could and piled your bag of tricks full of useful stuff to help keep students on track. You've utilized every method possible to help students stay focused or return to the task at hand. But you are still experiencing a few hiccups with a student or two that is making class time distracting.

Raising a "Normal" Child - Learning to be Successful

My previous post introduced you to my family's horrifying discovery that we are not perfect. As parents, we made mistakes in the education and social upbringing of our son.Once strong willed, he was now fraught with anxiety issues and had difficulties engaging in social activities at school. The next phase of our lives involved acceptance, communication, and better expectations.

Anxiety can be frustrating

My son and I started having afternoon "conversations" where he would tell me about his day from going to school to coming home. At first he did not want to tell me about his "bad days" because he didn't want me to be mad. But, since I got called or emailed practically every day about his behavior, he learned he couldn't hide "bad days" from me. I also taught him, by being calm and nonjudgmental, that I accepted he would have "bad days," but this did not make him a "bad person." He had a hard time articulating his feelings, and many times his answers to questions were "I don't know." So we worked on finding the right words to describe various moments of his day.

Raising a "Normal" Child - Preschool

I think the worst part so far about raising my son is having the expectation that school will be a place to watch him thrive and be challenged, and then have that expectation blow up in your face when you instead feel like school has opened your eyes to the possibility that your child is somehow broken. I have come to realize that my husband and I realize we are not alone in this experience, and this post is for other parents who are feeling overwhelmed by their children's inability to "behave" in school. (Warning: it's long, and the beginning of a series.)

Disorganized does not mean broken

I can't imagine any parent being happy to discover that their child has some sort of disability. In the United States, ADHD is the most common disorder affecting children today, if these statistics from the CDC are accurate. But in my quest to discover why my child was "broken," I discovered why there are people out there that think ADHD is a myth. As it turns out, my son is quite "normal" after all.

When he was a toddler, he was happy and inquisitive. He was also stubborn and strong-willed. He was every bit as much a carbon-copy personality of myself, tempered with the tactile need to experience his world through his hands - like his dad. There didn't seem to be anything odd or abnormal about his behavior or development. Although an only child, he did have opportunities to play with other children at parks, playgrounds, and family gatherings. Not once did we think he had socialization problems.