I just spent the last hour and a half cleaning up the sludge in the basement. This sludge was the result of the plumber snaking a pipe under the basement floor. Needless to say, I'm eager to put this day behind me.
There isn't much to talk about today. I did a classroom observation and starting testing a 1st grader today. I don't remember first grade being that organized but then again, I don't remember much of last week either.
I managed to get through about half of the evaluation before it was time to bring the kid back for their snack time. The student was a real trooper. When I brought her back for snack time, there was still 10 minutes to go. The kid said we could go back and do some more but I didn't want to get caught up in a subtest and have her antsy for snacks if it ran over.
The room that I used for the testing was good but had the downside that the back room was used for another class and the teacher that used it didn't seem to have any sense of volume control. When you are in a room that is about the size of your average non-master bedroom, I don't think you need to shout when you are standing two feet away from all your students. It wasn't even like the teacher was shouting at them, she just talked loud enough for it to be shouting.
For the rest of the day, I managed to get a significant amount of paperwork done. So far, I have had exactly one teacher give me PLAAFs (Present Levels of Academic Achievement and Functioning; replacing the older and much snappier PLEPs) for my meetings on Thursday. That is a turn out of one third. An email will have to go out first thing tomorrow.
Toward the end of the day, one of my other special education teachers stops by my office at HQ and shows me a piece a paper that a parent had sent in, asking the teacher to fill out. The paper is asking for certification that the student has "physical evidence of a visual or perceptual disability." It is for the student to receive services from an outside agency for dyslexia. I tell the teacher that I would have to speak to my supervisor first or the agency itself. The one thing that makes me leery is the "physical" part of the statement. That smacks of medical diagnosis which isn't me. I'm not going to prevent the student from getting the services that his parents are seeking but if the agency needs a medical doctor's signature then that is what they should get.
At the end of the day, I get a chance to speak with my supervisor about the risk assessments. I ask if she has been hold back on giving me risk assessments. She states that she has been doing so but she doesn't have time to talk to me at length and would like to speak to me tomorrow. She assures me that it has nothing to do with my personal life. I respond, "Well if it professional, that makes me even more concerned." My boss tells me not to worry. I go back to my office, worrying, and speak with my officemate/confidant. I tell her that I'm worried that our boss is concerned is concerned about my clinical ability. She says that it isn't that: that our boss recognized that she had given me so many risk assessments and so many evaluations last year that it severely impacted my organizational abilities and I was swamped at the end of last school year. So our boss doesn't want to do that to me again. I tell my confidant that I hope that is the case.
I'm not the type of guy that has a lot of male pride. I have more geek pride than anything else. I don't have a big competitive streak. I don't go in for a lot of the "measuring" contests that are stereotypical for my gender. The one thing I do have a hang up about is pulling my weight. I don't like to be coddled or feel like I'm being coddled. Although finding out that I was being coddled and not having recognized it might bother me more. So I have that feeling at the moment.
The whole pulling my weight thing was probably the thing that made it difficult for me to be a supervisor in my previous career. I believed that I had to do as much work, if not more, than everyone else on my treatment team, which made it difficult for me to delegate. In addition, I had to do the dirtiest jobs because I felt if I did them then it would be hard for my staff not to do them. So I went to the worst neighborhoods and saw the most difficult clients. That is my biggest hang up. Professionally.
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