(grumbles)
Nov. 6th, 2003 10:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jayMy back still hurts, so I'm off to a chiropractor tomorrow. Lots of ibuprofen has left my stomach sore. And the crown of my head is blistered (AK removal, with liquid nitrogen) and both of my feet are blistered (plantar warts being likewise frozen with repeated applications of LN2). So I'm sore in several places, and generally grumpy, so if I've failed to respond to comments or email promptly, please forgive me.
Today was David's annual Individualized Education Program (IEP) meeting, at 7:30am this morning before school. At the end of last year, he was moved from a mainstream class to a special day class, supposedly because he wouldn't be able to handle the lack of adult attention in a 32-student fourth-grade classroom. Instead, bundled into a classroom with eleven same-aged children operating at academic levels one or two years younger, he has complained of boredom. And excessive noise. And lately, over the past few weeks, both his school performance and behavior have deteriorated. On our part, we've been asked to dress him in longer clothes (he's outgrowing his older things, and likes to hide underneath his shirt) and ask him to not loudly discuss bodily functions in public. The latter reducedpatgreene to tears, and she went through the day in a black hole of depression, berating herself as a bad mother.
I feel that those were smokescreen issues -- they kept us, the parents, off-balance while allowing the teacher and school administration to dodge the salient issues. Which to me are that David is not being adequately challenged in school, or adequately supported in his classroom.
Today was David's annual Individualized Education Program (IEP) meeting, at 7:30am this morning before school. At the end of last year, he was moved from a mainstream class to a special day class, supposedly because he wouldn't be able to handle the lack of adult attention in a 32-student fourth-grade classroom. Instead, bundled into a classroom with eleven same-aged children operating at academic levels one or two years younger, he has complained of boredom. And excessive noise. And lately, over the past few weeks, both his school performance and behavior have deteriorated. On our part, we've been asked to dress him in longer clothes (he's outgrowing his older things, and likes to hide underneath his shirt) and ask him to not loudly discuss bodily functions in public. The latter reduced
patgreene to tears, and she went through the day in a black hole of depression, berating herself as a bad mother. I feel that those were smokescreen issues -- they kept us, the parents, off-balance while allowing the teacher and school administration to dodge the salient issues. Which to me are that David is not being adequately challenged in school, or adequately supported in his classroom.
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no subject
Date: 2003-11-08 03:07 pm (UTC)It's not a sign of bad child-rearing; it's a perfectly normal phase.
As to whether he has more gas than other children, there are three options, and I have no idea which is likeliest:
1) They're making it up/they notice more/he's making a bigger deal of it than other children/other children make a bigger deal about it -- in other words, it's a perceived problem, but not one a neutral observer could detect.
2) Many boys seem to acquire a skill of burping on command; perhaps he's developed a similar skill of farting on command. This would be a behavior issue in need of addressing.
3) It's an actual physiological issue, which could be addressed through dietary changes -- in this case, you'd probably notice it at home, too.
In any case, it's something to be addressed tactfully, not confrontationally, both in them bringing it up with you and you bringing it up with him. Which it certainly doesn't sound like the specialist did.
Good luck getting an appropriate system in place for him!