One of the many rituals of torturing the special ed kids is the comprehensive tests that administered every three years. Yes, in addition to the week-long standardized tests that are given to all kids every spring, special ed kids are routinely poked at by professionals to make sure that are dumb enough to qualify for services.
Ian just finished a battery of tests. He had six days of IQ testing, speech testing, handwriting testing, and educational testing. These aren't multiply choice, bubble filling tests. It's intense grilling by professionals who get in his face and demand answers to questions for hours.
For the most part, his scores showed us exactly what we knew already. He has higher than average spacial skills. He has poor verbal skills. He has bad handwriting. His teachers and I already knew this and talked about this in the two hour meeting that was necessary to arrange for the tests. We have another two hour meeting in a few weeks to discuss the findings of these tests.
The tests themselves are ridiculous. Kids with a speech and language disability are given verbal instructions to solve wordy problems. That makes sense.
The reports were sent to my house in a brown envelope last week. I quickly flipped through them. The report by the teacher who assessed his educational level was particularly annoying.
She explained that she asked Ian to give his full name, address, telephone number, and family members. He did that. She then reported that she asked Ian, "Where do your parents work?" Ian reported that Steve worked at X bank at home, and I worked at the New York Sports Club.
Now there's nothing wrong with working at a gym. A good friend of mine is a spin teacher at that club, but walking two miles on a tread mill while watching Kardashian reruns on VH1 isn't really my job.
Her question was poorly worded for testing a child with autism. She asked WHERE do your parents work. Ian was focused on the location part of that question. But thinking about it, I think lots of kids would have problems answering that question. People don't often work at one place anymore. Steve's employment situation is a little complicated right now and can't be discussed on the blog, but let me just say that he works for different companies at different locations.
And then how do you explain to a kid what you do? A big part of my job is watching the kids and attending stupid special education meetings. I guess if she asked Ian, "what is your mother's job," he would say that her job is being a mom and that would be partially accurate. But then there's everything else that I do when the kids are in school – the writing, the blogging, the looking for topics, and all that. I don't really talk about it with the kids, because it sounds so boring.
Jobs are pretty complicated these days. It's hard to describe a job that doesn't fit in neatly into the teacher, fireman, librarian category. It's basically impossible to describe Steve's job to people outside of the Investment Banking world.
Do you have a job that can be easily explained to children and elderly relatives?
Apt. 11d 
I am going anonymous on this one because I don’t want to be recognized. But my daughter listened to the very complicated stuff I talked about that I did, and boiled it down to: she is a national expert on telephone numbers (then would laugh uncontrollably at how utterly boring and silly that sounded). Even now that she is much, much older- that is her “go to” answer (but I have not done that kind of work in years).
So yeah- it is hard to get your kids to understand what you do and where you do it.
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My kids are thrilled to tell people that I’m the boss. I have a staff of 25, but really my job is still dealing with customers more than supervision. My title sounds a lot more prestigious than my work. My company is easily recognizable, so often I just say where I work rather than what I do.
Bert’s job is kind of the same way, recognizable company but complicated job description.
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I put bad guys in jail.
My husband teaches math (really, economics, but close enough)
So, yeah, pretty easy to explain.
Though I’m sure my kids have no idea where we work.
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This may seem like a silly question, but has your son been taught handwriting? Has he had enough time to practice it?
I ask because our youngest child has terrible handwriting. It took us some time to figure out that his school had dropped most of the time devoted to handwriting instruction. His older siblings received standard instruction, and have legible handwriting.
His school sacrificed time practicing handwriting for computer skills, a terrible trade-off in my estimation. Teachers judge students on their handwriting. As he couldn’t write well, he started to avoid writing. (Negative feedback loop, there.) I think he also started making jokes in class to get the image of “funny guy” rather than “stupid guy.” Much of the school day depends on handwriting. Standardized tests depend on handwriting. Write an essay… Legible handwriting helps.
We have had wonderful success recently with Getty-Dubay. We bought some of their books on Amazon, starting with “Write Now.” His handwriting has improved markedly. He’s also started to draw (spontaneously).
I realize that there may be other issues, as you are going through IEPs. I just wanted to point out that sometimes things we take for granted aren’t happening in the modern classroom. We were hovering on the edge of having our son evaluated for fine motor problems. It turns out, he could learn handwriting, as long as he had time to practice it.
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Yeah, Ian needs extra handwriting help. The SD is going to give it to him, so no worries. My older son has terrible handwriting, too, but never got help for it, because he’s a regular student. I should have paid someone to give him extra help when he was younger. One of my many parenting regrets. The school district told me that it didn’t matter, because everybody just uses computers now. I stupidly listened to them.
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Interesting that your schools blow off the handwriting. Ours keep arguing with parents that it is important (for reasons I don’t really understand, though it has something to do with development). But, maybe it’s just that they think it’s important because it is an educational signifier (like a firm handshake apparently means something in business).
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I guess I’m missing something. Steve’s job, no matter how complicated and obscure it really is, can be boiled down to “investment banking” with perhaps some additions about he does the behind the scenes computer stuff (I’m describing my brother’s job actually but its a fairly obscure job at an investment bank so it seems to fit.
For that matter I don’t see what the issue is with the teacher’s question. In fact it seems like a perfectly valid way to gain some information concerning Ian’s mental processing and verbal ability. Obviously its horrible if she somehow marked his answer as wrong. On the other hand I can see asking that exact phrasing to see if the student focuses on the where as a location or recognizes the more abstract question that is most often meant when you ask someone where they work. Plus its a question that doesn’t have a fixed short answer so it might be useful in just getting the student talking without memorized answers.
Finally, I’m being long winded today, I think you bias is showing. I suspect that the majority of people in the US still have one major job that really isn’t that hard to describe even if you gloss over the details.
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I remember in first grade we had to make a “this is my family” project to display on parents’ night. I think I described my father’s job as “tearing down buildings” (he was an urban planner who was involved with right-of-way purchases for the state). I’m also pretty sure I wrote that my mother, a SAHM, didn’t do anything, but her hobbies were cooking and cleaning. When parents’ night came, I mainly remember my parents were furious because I put their ages down, and they were about 10 years older than all the other parents.
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My wife can’t really explain my job, so I gave up on the kids years ago. I worked in a call center once and even though my 18 year-old knows I haven’t done that in a long time she still says, “My dad answers phones”.
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I teach history at the University of Ghana in Legon, Ghana, West Africa. That is pretty easy to explain. But, I usually describe my work as brain cultivation. A lot of people who have difficulty explaining what they do and where they do it are not actually employees. Rather they are what we used to call “independent contractors.” Writers engaged in such activity were generally referred to as “freelancers.” But, the same dynamic applied to a lot musicians and actors as well. On the lower end this work really did not pay enough to live on so you generally had to have a traditional job as well.
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Working in a university but not teaching is somewhat harder to explain to elderly relatives.
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I think its frustrating if you don’t get useful information from the time investment you’re describing with the testing (on E’s part, but also on the part of the entire system). Do the teachers also find the information similarly unhelpful? I do know that teachers tell me with some frequency that they find the information from repeated standardized testing unhelpful, but there are limited instances in which they’ve said they found the information useful (for example, when they realized that their class hadn’t really understood working with fractions).
I think the point of testing is supposed to be to figure out what kids are learning as well as what they are not learning. I’m guessing that part of your issue is that the testing isn’t doing a good job of assessing what has been learned (for example, the question on jobs, asked the way it was doesn’t elicit whether E knows information that he might otherwise demonstrate).
But, as Dave proposes, part of the point of the question might be to figure out whether generally used idiomatic phrases are becoming familiar to E. And, presumably as well, the tester does actually know how a larger group of children would answer that question (even if we don’t — I plan on testing out the question with my children.).
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You mean like being a janitor?
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Being a janitor at an American R1 school.
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What Dave said: I think most people with jobs have one readily described job at a defined place. I work at XX LLP, a law firm, in its Manhattan office, as a real estate lawyer.
Now a very young child, autistic or otherwise, might be a little unclear as to what a real estate lawyer, or any kind of lawyer who isn’t Perry Mason, actually does, but that is a different issue.
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“Now a very young child, autistic or otherwise, might be a little unclear as to what a real estate lawyer, or any kind of lawyer who isn’t Perry Mason, actually does, but that is a different issue.”
Hey, who actually knows what lawyers (or, almost any other profession does) beyond the versions we see on Perry Mason, Law and Order, Gray’s Anatomy, . . . .
One of my biggest pieces of advice for kids is to really find out what people in different jobs spend their days doing (i.e. photographers spend a lot of time marketing to customers, academic scientists spend a lot of time writing, teachers spend a lot of time filling out forms and managing their classrooms, . . . .
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When I was elementary age I would have said, “My dad is a shake rat and my mom is a painter.”
http://content.lib.washington.edu/cmpweb/exhibits/pwb/unwanted-jobs.html
As a little kid, I was pretty clear on what both entailed, as my mom had a studio at home in the early years and I occasionally got to go out into the woods with my dad on his cedar salvage expeditions.
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I saw something once about how most people on Twitter or something do not have jobs that could be in the Richard Scarry books (ie Busytown). Those are the jobs that are easy to identify and explain and have a location and hours. I am a librarian, so I’m lucky, but when my kid comes to my workplace, she sees no books, because I am a digital librariam. I couldn’t agree with you more that this is complicated. Hopefully, they didn’t take any points off because of his answer. i thought it was adorable. Apparently you talk about going to the gym a lot!
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I’m a housewife. When I said something to my four-year-old about how I used to have a job before she was born, she said: “You have a job now. Your job is to clean the house so that Daddy will come home.” She had observed the daily routine of daddy calls to say he’s leaving work, then mommy tidies up the house and somehow misinterpreted the causality.
Husband is an insurance underwriter — old economy job that’s easy to define.
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I am relatively sure that I have the job I do specifically because, when I was thinking about what I wanted to be when I grew up, it was one of the dozen or so jobs I could actually think of.
My friends in college all went off and became a consultant, or the tech guy, or the director of whatever at OMB.
I have one of the jobs that can be easily drawn in a Richard Scarry book, and I think that constitutes, somewhat, a failure of imagination on my part.
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Actually, I have absolutely no idea what a insurance underwriter is, beyond knowing it has something to do with insurance. I’m pretty sure that there were no insurance underwriters in Busytown, either. If I remember correctly, Busytown was occupied by people who moved stuff around, or built stuff, or sold stuff (and, physical stuff, the kind you can hold, and throw, rather than the stuff many of us move, build or sell).
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Is an insurance underwriter someone who figures out how much money one should have to pay to get a certain amount of insurance on something?
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“Hopefully, they didn’t take any points off because of his answer. i thought it was adorable.”
I too think the answer is adorable.
But, I’m presuming this isn’t the kind of test where “taking points off” matters, like it does when you’re trying to pass a civil service exam, or the bar exam, or get a high PSAT score, or good grades (so you can get into a college or medical school).
If it were a test used for assessment, the question is what was the tester trying to assess (understanding the idiomatic question or the content information) and whether they scored the question correctly with respect to what was being assessed. Well, and I’m guessing that they really didn’t care whether Laura worked in a gym or not (which could create its own confusions, if the answer of what Laura does was the goal of the question).
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I’m pretty sure insurance companies have double-decker desks, kind of like bunk beds for people who are sitting up.
The underwriters sit on the lower levels of desks, under the overwriters.
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“I don’t really talk about it with the kids, because it sounds so boring.”
I’d encourage you to talk more with your kids about the way you spend your time, and the real value you are adding both to your family and society. So much of the work mothers do in their home in invisible and uncredited, in part because no one talks about it. It matters.
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I think presenting my job to my sons’ 4-grade classrooms (in different years, that is) made me work out how to describe it well, but what I found was that having concrete examples helped most. The kids loved the dictation machine, 2-hole punch, sample pleading paper, file folder with prongs, and Rolodex I brought and described how I used. The teacher loved me because one of the stock questions is “What do I need to learn to do your job?” and I said the conventions, that is, spelling and grammar. The kids loved that I don’t ever bring work home. I am a legal secretary.
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My job is easy (I’m a teacher), but my husband’s job is harder to explain. I can’t even quite explain it. He doesn’t program the website. He doesn’t design the website. I guess he maintains the website. Even then, I’m still not sure what he does.
Btw, my son is also going through 3-year testing, and I’m a bit confused. His IEP is up in Feb (why, I don’t know, since we got the IEP in April 3 years ago). I don’t need him to have an IEP for the rest of the year, to be honest. My big concern is middle school and the transition. I said I’d have a private evaluator (Dr. L) do it, but she can’t do it till June or July, and apparently they can’t wait. I really don’t understand the whole thing, and that drives me insane. Maybe I should call the AANE.
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I agree with hush–talking more with your boys about all the work you do, whether mothering or blogging/writing, will make it more clear how much work you actually do. Women’s work is so often invisible or undervalued–why not try to reverse the trend with your boys?
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