Fancy talk

David had another IEP and I went for the meeting today. He still doesn't have any learning disabilities. The base scores are set at 90 and he scores above that on everything but fluency. I think the majority of D's problems are the same as mine. He just doesn't speak the same language as everyone else, but no one has discovered the language we do speak. It sounds the same as everyone else, and looks the same, but it is very different. Until someone can tell him in a way that will make it click in his brain he will have to learn it himself. I learned that early in my education. I had to teach myself in school, because I didn't have a clue what the teachers were trying to tell me half the time.

English was my worst subject, until 9th grade. In 9th grade I was lucky to have a teacher that knew how to teach. Mrs. McKenzie, she was a tiny little thing, maybe 5 feet tall on her tip toes. She always had a cup of tea on her desk. She would not stand for any crap in her classroom, and everyone knew it. She was very old school, even back then. I think most of the kids were intimidated by her, but I flourished in her class room. I actually learned things that I didn't think I was capable of learning when I went to English class. She would give me reasons why this was this way or that was that way. I loved turning my homework in to her, because it would come back with notes all over it. She would explain why something was wrong, and she would give me examples. For everything she found wrong she found something right, so I would have a page full of red ink with positive and negative feedback that I desperately needed. Up until that point I had just gone with what I did know, but she gave me the courage to try new things. She never made me feel like she was judging me, and that is the way I had felt through school. She was a very intuitive teacher. She understood how the learning process worked for me, and she used that to teach me. I was never lucky enough to have another teacher like her, one that could actually teach me in a way I could understand. I hope that one day D finds a teacher like her. One that makes things a lot clearer for him.