handy.

since i only have less than a week left at Edgemont i figured i would make a tribute blog to my little kiddies. especially after today.... you know there are sometimes when you just realize that you are amazing at your job? if not, then you might not be doing the right thing... anyways, i had one of those epiphanies today.

my little first grader, name to be left out due to lots and lots of rules, has this "quirk" i like to call it. he liked to talk through his lovely hand "Handy" (yes, he is very creative with names). Handy makes him be in control (we've had to talk about Handy being in control several times), read better, rhyme better, and basically do everything better. you may wonder how a little hand talking can make a kid read better, i honestly have no idea.... but for some reason it does. he just moved here a couple months ago and is at a kindergarten level in reading, so i see him everyday and we've worked out a system where depending on how good he and Handy read, he gets extra time to play in the "sand box" (a little tupperware of cornmeal.... sssh....) at the end.

i wrote on his progress report yesterday how he talks with Handy, sometimes we have to be reminded to be good, but other than that he's doing really great. his teacher came up to me today and told me not to let him do it anymore because he's pretty manipulative and he doesn't need to do it. (which btw, i don't think he does it to be manipulative. he's only in 1st grade and when he does it he doesn't get anything incredibly cool from me)

and then ask we walked out of her class she said "-----, don't do your hand thing anymore. it's weird."

literally, that is what she said. to a first grader. who just moved here.

aaaannnnd melissa is left to clean up the giant mess she just made of destroying the one thing he likes to do.

and giant mess it was, we talked about it on the way back, how Handy was going to stay home today, and he went on and on about how he fed him really smart food, and taught him all the words he's supposed to read, and how he gave him a good night sleep and how he can't read without Handy.

and boy can he not. the sentence "the dog sat on the bag" went to "the dog went to mcdonalds" and while he was having a more than slight breakdown because he couldn't read, i had to figure out what to do with this whole mess his teacher had created by just whipping that comment out.

we worked through it today, talking about how Handy can secretly tell him the answers, how he needs to stay under the table, etc etc. meanwhile my supervisor and the other tutors are listening to me, as i'm the only one working at the moment, and are fascinated with this situation we have going on.

on the plus side they told me that i did a fantastic job working with him, because they would have not known what to do.... and i will admit, by the end i was pretty satisfied with our output as well.

anyways, sometimes you just know that what you do is the right job for you. for some reason, i get my little kiddies, the younger the better. i can't even imagine what it would feel like to be told that you can't do something anymore because it's "weird". it makes me really mad that this teacher decided to say that to him, not discuss it or do anything besides tell him as he's walking out the door. teacher's aren't supposed to do that-- granted we all have our bad days, which i will accredit to her behavior today, but it is unacceptable to say "it's weird" to a child.

so in conclusion, if you learn anything from my blog, please don't tell your children they are weird, or what they are doing is weird. there are other words/phrases to get them to change their behavior. =)