Then there are days where I really do not enjoy my job. Since starting in August, I have been sick four times thanks to the rugrats and their runny noses, with each cold lasting at least a week, and the lingering cough lasting at least two to three more weeks. The first week of our honeymoon I had trouble falling asleep every night because my cough kept waking me up, and popping by Walgreens for some cough suppressant was not an option on Bora Bora. I feel like I have paperwork coming out of my ears. It seems like I have an assessment or an IEP due every single week, which is probably because I do. Sometimes the kids I work with are absolute pills, refusing to cooperate or work on the things I have painstakingly planned for that therapy session, all because they didn't get the card they wanted while playing Candyland with me and because I refuse to let them cheat. (I'm sorry, but at seven years old, you need to learn to deal with it when you don't get your way. You are way too old to be throwing a tantrum over not getting an orange card so you can go up the Rainbow Trail on your first move. If you've played Candyland recently, you'll know what I mean.) What's most frustrating for me is that the kids who are often the most defiant and incorrigible are the ones who need my help the most.
Then there are days where I just feel plain depressed. Being in poorer school districts has been a very eye-opening and humbling experience. It truly makes me appreciate what I have so much more. At one of my sites, the parents of a child who has made so much progress to the point where he might no longer qualify for speech and language services when he turns three, are hoping that he will score low enough (7th percentile to qualify for services in the schools) so that he will be able to enroll in a speech and language intensive preschool, which is funded by the school district. My colleagues and I believe that he would benefit more from a regular preschool; he needs typical peers to act as language models for him, and he's a bright kid who picks up things from others pretty quickly. However, if he doesn't qualify for services through the school district, his parents can't afford to put him in regular preschool, and so he will stay at home, not interacting with children his age, until he goes to kindergarten at age five. Will he need speech and language therapy once he gets to kindergarten? You betcha, because he won't have had his preschool years to catch up with his peers on his speech and language skills.
Even more depressing are some of the kids at the elementary school. Many of them come from single-parent families, but one of my students has four siblings, and their mom doesn't have a car, so she takes them to school on the bus. If one of them is sick, all of them stay home, because they're all too young to take the bus to school by themselves. Many of the students I work with have some serious literacy issues, too. One of the teachers commented that if all of his students' parents read to their kids for just 20 minutes a day, all of his students would be reading at grade level. But how can their parents read to them when the parents are illiterate themselves? And then many of the other students come from families where dad beats mom or dad is incarcerated. And so many of these kids come from families where education is just not a priority. Putting food on the table and paying the rent take up so much of mom's or dad's time that checking to make sure their kids have done their homework is not anywhere on the radar. One of my kids told me today that the reason he was absent all last week was because he didn't have any clean clothes because his mom didn't have time to wash them. This is just so not the reality that I grew up with.
On a happy note, there's a second grade kid that I thought had abruptly moved away or dropped out of school. I just found out yesterday that he's had the chicken pox, and that's why he hasn't been here for the last two weeks. Hurray - not that he has the chicken pox, but that he'll most likely be back when he recovers. I'd thought I'd never see him again, and he's one of the kids for whom I have very high hopes speech-wise by the end of this school year.
There are some days where I miss my old job. There were definitely things about it that constantly made me want to scream, but I miss Mango (and the zillions of productive emails we sent on a daily basis) and my fun-loving Charlie's Angel-posing officemates. I miss taking lunch whenever I wanted to for however long I wanted to and going to Manpuku every day. I miss saying to my office, "I think it's time for a Peet's run," and having my boss insist, "I'll buy if you fly." I miss taking vacation whenever I wanted to, for however long I wanted to because I had vacation time up the wazoo. I miss dressing up like an old pioneer woman for classroom presentations. Actually, I don't miss that, never mind. I do miss my old job in a lot of ways, but then I remember why I went into the field of speech language pathology in the first place, and I still feel excited about all the potential good I can do. Ask me again in ten years if I'm still feeling this idealistic.
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