What are your major challenges and
how do you meet them?
The main challenge for me is how to teach students those skills that will help them function best in society once they get out of school. There are a lot of pushes in the educational system. We’re talking about standards, we’re talking about exit exams, and we’re talking about all kinds of other exams. It’s a real challenge when you work with a difficult group of students, who didn’t develop these problems over night. This is something that has been building up for years and years, and by the time you get them into high school, if they are still in high school, they’ve burned a lot of bridges and they have a really bad opinion about what school is and it’s very understandable. If it’s a place where you and I go that where we are just being looked upon as dumb people or a place where we don’t fit in, it’s not a place where I want to go. So we have to, first of all, have these young people come in and get re-connected with the school because we’re kind of on the far end of the services spectrum. There are not many more public school services available if someone fails with us. And then we have to do kind of a high-wire act. We have to live up to the requirements of the educational system that’s going standards-based education and gearing towards or working towards exit exams, while also trying to find a way to use the standards to teach the students the things we feel they really need to know. The challenges we face every single day are, “What skills are the most important?”, “What difficulties are these children, young people, bringing to school every single day?”, “How do we compensate for that?”, “How do we teach them to compensate for it?” Again, setting goals, achieving goals, finding the best way possible, and how’s it going to fit into society. It’s really difficult when you are working with a group of students who have long histories of failure to come up with new and innovative ways of making the stuff they’ve already seen and failed. How do you make it look interesting to them? You’ve got to be innovative; you have to be willing to take risks. You need to have the support of the people you work with because it’s really difficult to come up with new ideas. You have to realize that society doesn’t always support what you’re doing. You may feel like your students need to know this skill, this skill, this skill, and this skill, but what’s being legislated is they need to know this and this and this and this and this, and you have to find someway to wed the two.
