Preschool

Last Wednesday was my first day as a Special Education Itinerant Teacher (SEIT) for a 4-year-old girl, working with her one-on-one while she's in her preschool classroom. She's mandated for 10 hours of SEIT a week, which sounds like a lot to me, so I was worried she would have all these problems and be really hard to handle. Her IEP goals are things like, "She will sit and listen to a story for 5 minutes 80% of the time," so I thought, geez, this girl can't even sit and listen for five minutes??

But I met her on Wednesday, and she's sweet. She has a lot of energy and loves to talk, but when I first arrived, she was in a music class, and she did fine listening to the teacher's directions and taking turns playing instruments. The letter in the file from her teacher, which was only written a few weeks ago, said she'd only just learned to write her name, and that she doesn't know any letters other than the ones in her name. But on Wednesday we played an alphabet bingo game with another little boy, and she could name every letter. The only ones she confused were the W and the M.

The funniest thing was her reaction when I told her my name. Her eyes got wide, and she said, "Your name can't be Vicky -- you're white!"

I said, "Sure it can. Vickies come in all colors."

She digested this information for a few seconds, then announced happily, "I'm Puerto Rican!"

When we were in the hallway later going to another room, she suddenly called out, "Vicky!" and went running into the arms of another teacher -- who is Asian. Guess that's where the confusion came from. ;)

Friday morning would've been my second day with her, but she never showed up -- I guess she stayed home sick -- so after waiting around for half an hour, I left. I won't get paid for that, either. Hopefully she'll be there tomorrow.