Special Education in the Time of COVID

I am not a special education teacher. I used to teach university students for four years. I taught animation, drawing, Photoshop, Macromedia Flash, Autodesk Maya, and even screenplay writing for animation. The best thing about skills-based courses is that students often gravitate towards them because they know what they want and what they are capable of. The only problem you may have would be the usual lazy bunch or the ones who are online shopping during classes. The classes are in computer labs. Everyone has a workstation. I also prepared online modules for about two years and wrote English tests for Korean pilots for about a year.

I have been teaching second-grade for six years now, though. So, it is what I am the most comfortable with at the moment. Again, I am not a special education teacher but my interest in this line of work was piqued last year when I had a boy I suspected to have some sort of special needs. Mind you, he had not been officially diagnosed. However, he had very short attention span, flapped his hands about, and only did what he wanted to do. On the other hand, he was very smart and could read very well. I used to give him my calculator for comfort, and it kind of worked. Unfortunately, he had also labelled himself as “not smart,” which was heartbreaking.

This morning, I had asked our principal to allow me to attend a special education session. I knew that I would have a few slow readers. The greatest instance was last school year’s as the children went back to face-to-face session after more than a term at home. We are back to online classes this term, though, because of the recent surge in COVID cases (with Delta strain, as well). Therefore, I wanted to know how I could involve special needs children through the virtual teaching setting. There is no fixed solution for all children. A teacher must still discover a child’s quirks and needs. However, there were several resources recommended by the speaker that I truly appreciated:

• Read Aloud (Chrome extension)
• Stop Learning Loss
• Seesaw

Other resources given where similar to the ones recommended for children who need some form of audio-visual prompts to learn. Of course, application is going to be a lot rougher as we teachers will find ourselves almost plastered in front of the screen for more than half of the day. I got burned out the last time – as I got obsessive with producing engaging lessons, working from 5 am to 7 pm at times. I would try to do better this school year, especially now that I have so many freelance duties.

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Teaching When There’s A lot on Your Mind…

So, I am not really a bundle of joy lately but at least I have children at school who make me smile. Of course, admittedly, there are also those who test me so much that I sometimes end up wondering if I could have handled things better. Teaching college/university is much easier. I taught using a projector using software (Maya, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Illustrator or whatever – yes I miss teaching them) that catch students’ attention on its own. I taught in an air-conditioned lab and janitors cleaned up after me. I miss laboratory room T407 where I used to practically live. Teaching primary school is very challenging in it being the fundamentals, the basics, and the stepping stone. I hope I can master it, because right now I don’t think I have yet. One has to be careful. I am almost 35 and I can still remember a teacher who said something to me in not so nice a way when I was 9.

I never dreamed of becoming a teacher in the first place(i had other dreams: journalist, nun, doctor, animator) but I ended up teaching university for three years and now teaching primary school for almost one school year. It must be destiny, and I hope I could make it worth the while not just for me but for those I am teaching.