“I’m not a little kid!”

This book is everything.

I enjoy the incredible opportunity to work at a school where all of the students are special needs. That being said, we all know how diverse the special needs community is; from Emotional Disorders to Intellectual Disabilities, Learning Delays to Other Health Impairments, the field is vast and varied. That’s why, even though all our students are special needs, it can still be challenging to place them in the right classroom. Our students are loosely grouped by age, but our mod/severe students can also be grouped by learning level. This opens the door for a lot of movement and shifting between rooms to find just the right placement.

This year two of the “High School Room” students were moved to my Independent Living Skills class. While it wasn’t a bad move by any means, I do have a broad, and I cannot emphasize this enough broad, emotional maturity range in my classroom. Prior to the addition of these new boys, excuse me young men, my most emotionally developed student was functioning around a 6th grade state (aka poop jokes are funny and sometimes I need a hug). So it was at this level that I operated. I make fun facial expressions, I crack middle school appropriate jokes, we read stories about our feelings, and we sometimes enjoy a good Magic School Bus episode. Needless to say, we had a lot of fun and I understood where the lines were.

With the addition of these new students, our little classroom community began to break down. A new dynamic started to develop. These young men were significantly more socially and emotionally developed than my old crew, and they chaffed at our norms, my tone, the content, and well me in general. I’ve always been confident in my ability to connect with students and form a relationship that is specific to us. It’s something I pride myself on, but in the distance learning platform I have really struggled to form those bonds with my new students. They often refuse to turn on their cameras (an expectation I have of all of my other students) so I cannot see their reactions to my tone or my comments, or my explanations. It’s like teaching into a void. I have discovered as a result of this just how very much I need that visual feedback to modify my behavior so that we can form that relationship and I can get their best work out of them.

August was okay, September way okay, but as we rolled into October and the bond still hadn’t formed, they started skipping classes, not responding during group lessons, and not turning in their assignments. I had tried so many times to connect using all they ways I knew how. I’d tried humor, I tried one on one heart to hearts, I tried being firm, and for a couple days I would think I had gotten somewhere, but then they’d ghost me again (see that there, I’ve even tried picking up some of the cool young people lingo lol).

Finally it got to the point where I had to set up a meeting with the mental health team, one of the students, and their Dad. I prepared for hours for this meeting. I reviewed his transition goals, I made an agenda for myself, I gathered all my data, I conferenced with my principal, I came up with multiple plans and responses to possible scenarios. We got into the meeting and the first thing I did was ask the student how he was feeling. It was a revelation. The first thing he expressed was that he had no idea that he was moving to my classroom, and he didn’t understand why he was there. I’m not saying here that no one talked to him about this move, but I cannot imagine what it must have been like to be moved into a new classroom, with a new teacher, during distance learning and a pandemic, when you have an emotional disorder. I spent some time going over what I try to teach in the class and basically tried my best to sell this young man on how he could benefit from what I had to offer. As we talked and developed his feelings further, I could tell he was getting upset. Finally he blurted out “I’m not a little kid!”. I was shocked, I have never treated this young man like a child, I used adult, but academically appropriate language with him. Where was this coming from? “I know you’re not a little kid, why do you say that?” I asked him. Turns out this whole time he had been upset that the books that I assign and the curriculum I use has cartoons for drawings.

I don’t know if you are familiar with the Unique curriculum, but they have cartoon drawings for all of their resources, even the Transitions (18 -22 year olds) curriculum, and this is the Transitions curriculum I use in my classroom. I had to sit with this for a minute, because honestly this has been by far and large, the biggest challenge I have faced as a Transitions/ young adult special needs teacher. All the reading material that is reading level appropriate and videos that are conceptually a good fit for my students, have elementary content and or speak to them as you would an elementary aged child. It’s infuriating. I often make my own resources, but I’m not that prolific. I cannot write all the books I need to keep my students reading, I cannot remake all of the Transitions material I need to teach a full years curriculum every year, I just don’t have the time.

So I told him, “Listen, I am going to tell you something, because you’re an adult and I think you can understand this on an adult level.” (He’s 20). I told him about how the stories and lessons I use in class during ILS (Independent Living Skills) are from a program that the school bought for us to use and putting real pictures into those stories would be really expensive. I explained to him that they could make the things we learn about affordable to us by making their own drawings. It turned out to be a really good conversation, he felt validated and we came to some common ground. He agreed to try to look past the drawings and get what he needed from what I had to offer him and I agreed to continue to look for better reading material.

Now, that’s not to say we aren’t still struggling sometimes to understand each other, and I am still trying to reach that second student, but we have made progress. And excitingly enough, after hours and hours of research I finally found a chapter book that is at a low enough reading level, but is also high interest and the class is smitten with it. I cannot cay enough good things about “Lucky Dogs, Lost Hats, and Dating Don’ts”. If you are in the need for Hi/Lo (high interest/ low reading level) material for young adults, this book hekka good (I’m still trying out “hekka” it sounds ridiculous to to me).

So what’s the takeaway here? Talk to the students more, listen to what they have to say, stop trying so hard, let the relationship happen naturally, and let me know if you find any other hi/lo young adult material. Fo reals.