Tips for Special Ed families in High School

Here is a comment I posted to a blog about preparing for an IEP (Individualized Education Plan) meeting:

Here’s is a tip I heard about in a meeting of Disabilities Services Coordinators from a number of Universities and Community Colleges in Pittsburgh:

If you have a child who is a Junior or Senior in high school and you are tracking them for a specific community college or university, invite the Special Education Coordinator (or whatever they are called at that school) to one of your IEP meetings. This allows them to get an idea of how your family works, what the child’s educational environment has been and what their current development is. This allows your family and their office to work much more efficiently and smoothly to make your child’s post-secondary school experience as successful as possibly.

w00t for working inside a complex system!

Inspirational Quote:

Your official job title is “NerdHerder”. What does that entail?

Until we can get the electrodes wired into their seats, I’m forced to pace around my team with a big stick.
Atlassian Blog

Fudge Castle! (Fun with food)

ok, totally in a different vein, here is my second to last tea party at CMU for Spring 2008 (my first year).

Picture by Christie Ibaraki

Using a recipe from Ice Cream Treats for Fudge Sauce, a box cake, a kosher box cake and a full box of lacies (super chocolate and nutty cookies) I made a chocolate cake castle with a hot fudge sauce moat and a kosher township outside (with no crumbs touching).

I had been wanting to make a fudge sauce moat and since my suitemates had a prospie (prospective student) visiting who was keeping kosher for Passover (as was my suitemate) we picked up the kosher cake mix a Giant Eagle (or geeegul as Pittsburgers pronounce it).

Fatalities: one kitchen towel (but it’s better now).

Inspirational Quote:

“I believe in looking reality straight in the eye and denying it.” - Garrison Keillor

Some things that work (Part 2)

This is related to my last post on Linda Hereshoff’s Special Education program at Jordan Middle School.

The next program that I would like to bring up is NYLC (or, the National Young Leaders Conference). This was lot of fun but more importantly, it was illuminating and well conceived. I had the chance to play a Representative, a Supreme Court Justice and a policy analyst–in the process discovering I love legal research.

Through the same program I will be attending the Presidential Inauguration in January.

The program is run like a sped-up session of Congress. The entire Conference was structured around a piece of legislation, bit of which were Amended and presented by student teams. Our legislation covered “safety”; ie, everything from terrorism to gun control.

Presenting policy was a blast. Me and another student were in charge of presenting modifications to federal weapon’s laws. He and I got the job because we were the only people in our group of 20 who had ever fired a gun. He was from rural Alabama so once I convinced him the restrictions were necessary, we had honed our arguments for the general caucus’s Amendment approval process.

I particularly remember presenting our Amendment in front of the committee–made up of other students–and caucus without my notes because I had had to give them to the committee unexpectedly. I had had to hand-write out 3 copies 10 minutes before my presentation so I basically had them memorized. Therefore, when a committee member asked for some piece of minutiae evidence I gave him chapter and verse of it from my notes.

The whole caucus went “oh!”.

The Amendment was accepted 40 to 2 in favor in my caucus.

My boyfriend, Matthew, attended another session of NYLC as well as the follow up Law Forum:

NYLC (especially the law forum) was an excellent educational experience for me. It gave a more in depth look at our government and legal system, not just by telling us how it functioned, but by inviting prestigious speakers and letting us enact demonstrations of our own, and thus showing us.

These programs require teacher or student referrals and cost a lot of money, but they are impressively run and a great deal of fun.

Inspiration Quote:

It would not be possible for Noah to do in our day what he was permitted to do in his own…The inspector would come and examine the Ark, and make all sorts of objections.
-Mark Twain “About All Kinds of Ships,” 1892

Some things that work (1 of 3)

I spend a lot of my time working through and within programs that don’t work. I am sure many of you do as well. So I think it is important to praise those who do well. I think a good system is one which is effective, efficient, and kind. In that spirit, I picked out one today (probably more later):

Linda Herreshoff’s program in the Palo Alto Unified School District’s Junior High School, Jordan Middle School. She works with students on the Autism Spectrum including students with Aspergers and other high functioning kids. Linda is a lifesaver for students with disabilities–her work has improved so many lives in this area it’s difficult to give her enough credit. From classes on how to tell jokes to working with parents to forming solid relationships with students (who, like all 11-13 years olds can be prickly critters). She is a wonderful teacher and person.

Inspirational Quote:

“You see, Asperger’s is unlike other ‘visual’ conditions. You can tell if a child is physically handicapped, you can tell if a child has Downs Syndrome - simply by looking at them. But an Asperger’s child looks COMPLETELY NORMAL! It’s what’s happening on the inside that is their detriment. If they tantrum, act out inappropriately, or do things that other children typically don’t do - it just looks like their parents are to blame for failure to ‘bring them up right’ or ‘discipline them correctly’. So again, my goal is not only to help Evan and others like him, but it’s also to help the general public know more about these types of pervasive development disorders.” Liller Family Blog

Other Story-Archs (Part 2)

I was surprised at Al Jazeera’s coverage of “Israel at 60″. While Al Jazeera often linked with terrorism by the Bush Administration (according to Al Jazeera and the British newspaper the Daily Mirror) they usually don’t get any cred for good reporting or interesting perspectives. Their three part series on Israel at 60 is not the standard fair I saw at CMU which was a lot of stuff about Israeli culture and free food and “never forget”. Al Jazeera is more negative, their story-arch emphasizes faulty assumptions of historical Zionism (”Zionist mythology has propagated the idea that Palestine was a barren and scarcely inhabited land. But that was far from true. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had lived for centuries in the land that Jews were now laying claim to”) and the plight of the Palestinians.

Same image, different coloring.

What is fascinating is how this story-arch feels so different from others found on Israel’s 60th B-Day. It has many of the same threads–worries about Israeli Arabs, interest in the movement from the socialist kibbutz system to modern capitalism, questions about Israel’s identity–but the coloring of those threads (the tone of the piece) changes the effect utterly.

Al Jazeera’s English edition is not always beautifully written (like the New York Times) or neutrally written (like the Economist tries to be) but it is surely one of the most interesting news sites on the web because of its solid writing and reporting perspective.

Inspirational Quote:

Today, Malcolm’s online reporting and many others’ like it do offer such information sooner — perhaps even too much of it. He is operating in a whole new world in which deadlines are minute-by-minute; reader comment is swift and often severe; and the tools range from audio and video to BlackBerrys and laptops.

It is ’round the clock — it’s demanding,” says Malcolm, 64. Not only is the process of delivering political news via blogs a lot faster than traditional models, “it is a lot more unpredictable,” he adds.

Andrew Malcolm on blogging

Other Story Archs (Part 1)

I have been thinking about story archs for some of the scholarship applications I am looking at (how do I tell a coherent story about my interests in 500 words of less) and also reading a lot of news. Because of this I got curious about how other regions’ news sources tell the same story as US/European sources at the same time. For example, I had been hearing about a picture which captivated the Chinese Blogosphere (or at least part of it) of the handicapped athlete having the Olympic Torch ripped away from her by a Tibet protester (US news sources called them “free Tibet” protesters. China Daily, where I got this picture, called them “Tibetan separatists”). It’s the kind of meme which shows up so many places it is hard to track. I have seen this one mentioned in comments on articles and blogs, but it took me a while to finally find a copy of it:

(In case this was horrific enough, the man pushing her wheelchair in a blind athlete. yeah.)

This story focused on the valor of the athlete and the violence of the protesters. I guess with all of the news this week, the Paris protests seemed more outrageously aggressive than violent (no one fired into the crowd and no one was killed). China Daily also made no mention of the powder-puff blue garbed Chinese guards (the Economist called them “thugs”) who menaced protesters (ineffectually it seems) away from the athletes in Paris and San Francsico.

Next time: Al Jazeera’s take on Israel at 60 is surprisingly balanced.

Inspirational Quote:

“He is the author of 10 nonfiction books and father of four.” about Andrew Malcolm

Hilary v Barak–post response to MSNBC article

This is something I posted to the MSNBC article “Hilary: Obama is out of touch with families”. There’s a lot of vitriol against either Hilary or Barak by supporters of the other in the comments for news stories like this and I wanted to say my piece about how we need to structure the debate to come out of this contest with a Democrat in the White House. Enjoy!

Perhaps I am being silly here, but who here support[s] John McCain?

Anyone?

Going once…

Fine.

So, rather than trying to find the most effective way to put down Hilary (she doesn’t have a normal family because her husband cheats and her daughter overachieves. Well, anyone seen the divorce rate or the growth in women attending Law and Med school? Husbands (and wives) cheat and their children fight their way to the top. Her family outline seems pretty darn normal to me) or the best way to put down Barak (out of touch. Well, yes, all three of the candidates are millionaires. I don’t care what their personal net worth is if they support the policies I support).

How about we distinguish how they will beat John McCain, because right now he’s the lumbering turtle in this rabbit race and to be effective in November both candidates must finds ways to distinguish themselves by beating *him* down.

Clinton doesn’t want to spend 100 years in Iraq.

Obama doesn’t want to overturn Roe V Wade and bring coat-hangers into the bathrooms of our daughters, mothers and wives.

McCain is the real enemy, I am cool with passionate debate but I know come November, I will vote for *anyone* rather than John McCain.

Both candidates do it for me.

I still support Clinton. However now every argument I have with my Obama friends always ends with “but I will vote for either rather than John McCain, who hates babies”.

(Btw, I say John McCain hates babies because he would rather they be born and then starved, beaten or microwaved to death than that they be aborted. Sounds like hate to me).

See, I don’t mind being vitriolic when it is against a candidate whose view on abortion, equal rights and proper military deployment are anathema to me.

Inspirational Quote:

But language is a treacherous thing, a most unsure vehicle, and it can seldom arrange descriptive words in such a way that they will not inflate the facts–by help of the reader’s imagination, which is always ready to take a hand and work for nothing, and do the bulk of it at that.
- Mark Twain Following the Equator

Clever Spam

Sometimes it takes nothing but pure cynicism and an eye for grammatical errors to tell what is Spam. Especially when craigslist replies mean someone might be contacting me for a job…

from H & F FABRICS <patricksnell2008@live.com>
reply-to patricksnell2008@live.com,
[...]

I have been directed to bring to you the offer of work online from Home/Temporarily and get paid weekly. We are glad to offer you for a job position at our company, H & F FABRICS. We need someone to work for the company as a Representative/Book keeper in the USA/CANADA. This is in view of our not having an office presently in the USA/CANADA. You don’t need to have an Office and this certainly wont disturb any form of work you have going at the moment. Our integrated yarn and fabric manufacturing operations use state-of-the-art textile equipment from the world’s leading suppliers. Order processing, production monitoring and process flow are seamlessly integrated through a company-wide computer network.

* The average monthly income is about 1500.00 USD.

Your tasks are:

1. Receive payment from Customers

2. Cash Payment at your Bank

3. Deduct 10% which will be your percentage/pay on Payment processed

4. Forward balance after deduction of percentage/pay to any of the

offices Payment is to be forwarded either by Money Gramm or Western Union Money Transfer) or any Local Money transfers take barely hours, so it will give us a possibility to get customer’s payment almost immediately. For example you’ve got 3000.00 USD, you take your income: $300.00 USD Send to us: 2700.00 USD,First month you will have 5-10 transactions on 3000.00-4000.00 USD so you may calculate your income.For example 10 transactions on 3500.00 USD gives you $6300.00 USD Plus your basic monthly salary is 1500.00 USD Total: 3000.00 USD per month After establishing a close co-operation with us you’ll be able to operate with larger orders and you’ll be able to earn more.Our payments will be issued out in your name and you can have them cashed in your bank or other Cashing Services.Deduct your weekly salary and forward the balance to the company via western union money transfer or money gramme money transfer .We understand it is an unusual and incredible job position. This job takes only 3-7 hours per week. You’ll have a lot of free time doing another job, you’ll get good income and regular job.But this job is very challenging and you should understand it. We are looking only for the worker who satisfies our requirements and will be an earnest assistant. We are glad to offer this job position to you. If you feel that you are a serious and earnest worker and you want to work for H & F FABRICS, kindly email us and let us know about what your intrest is.

Kindly send all reply to patricksnell2008@live.com

Best Regards

Patrick snell

Also, Patrick Snell is CNN correspondent, not the head of a fictitious scamming clothing producer. Also, see the ScamAlert posting. While the warning is a little hysterical, it is right–if an offer sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Inspirational Quote:

But the truth is, that when a Library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn’t anger me.-Mark Twain Letter to Mrs. F. G. Whitmore, 2/7/1907