What advice would you give to a first
year teacher in Special Education?
You have to enjoy what you are doing, overall. You can’t beat yourself up over every little thing that goes wrong because, I’ll tell you, our students are better at being difficult than we are at being whatever we were supposed to be. They’re coming in with a long history of problems, maybe sometimes generationally. It’s really difficult. Even though I can be trained and I can have a real good idea and I might even be right, who knows? But that may not be the time for it or it’s not the place for it, and then you have to be satisfied with making small steps, maybe two steps forward, one step back, two steps forward, two steps to the left, one step back. It’s a weird dance that we have to do and we have to be happy about that. To work with young people, I think is a sign of optimism, particularly working with a difficult group of people. There is an optimism that has to be there because you feel like people deserve something good.
