Funny story

My work days are either very awesome or unbelievably horrible. Rarely do I have a middle ground, which I guess is to be expected when you work with special needs kids. All of my kindergarten students have autism, along with some other secondary diagnoses for most of them. So, it makes sense that when these kids are focused on work and able to stay on task with little help from me, the day runs smooth and I feel an intrinsic sense of worth knowing I'm helping these special little kiddos function at a relatively typical level compared with their peers. On the other hand, when they are in full autistic mode, I leave the classroom ready to pull my hair out. Today was one of those latter days. I had one student throw a toy dragon out the window to see if it could really fly - it didn't; another one spent all day pinching any child he came in contact with just to see what other people's skin feels like; another one cried most of the day when he wasn't first to answer a question or the first in line; and yet another precious little one insisted on everyone calling him "Professor Quiggle" because he thought he was the character in one of his books. I think the funniest part of the day came from an older student in the building who was throwing a massive tantrum for getting "out" in a game of Hot Potato ~ as he was being "escorted" by a couple teachers away from the other students, he yelled "Don't you know I have autism?! This is what I do, so you better get used to it!"

Oh the joys of my job :)