My First Blog Post...Why a Blog?

I've been playing with the idea of starting a blog for a long time. Why, you might ask? Well, I've been in the business of teaching kids as well as raising my own for a long time and I've compiled a cache of helpful tidbits. In my never ending quest to become the most organized person I can be, I decided it was time to start storing what I know in a way that makes it easy to share with others. By others I mean fellow educators and parents. So here I go.......

Now where do I start? OK, background. My journey to becoming a special education teacher probably began in third grade when I realized that I couldn't spell to save my life. I also discovered I couldn't spit out multiplication facts as quickly as my classmates. The biggest problem was it was Brooklyn in the late 1960's and classes were "tracked". Kids were placed in a track based on how well they could read. Well, guess what? I could read and comprehend very well. Learning to read wasn't a problem for me. I was also a very verbal child, and a year younger than my public school classmates so I sounded "smart". (I started out in a Greek Orthodox parochial school and my parents thought it was a good idea to enroll me in kindergarten at the age of 4.) Low and behold, in third grade I entered P.S. 185 (the school around the corner) and found myself in Mrs. McIver's class. Mrs. McIver was old school in that the yard stick she held must have been fused to her hand from years of holding it tightly. It had a metal tip which she tapped on the blackboard to alert you to the information she wanted you to recite outloud for everyone to hear. For me, utter terror came in hearing , tap, tap, tap,"Andrea, spell_______ or what is 3X_____?" I remember thinking, "what is this?" "I'm supposed to be so smart." At least that's what everyone at my old school, St. Constantine, used to tell me. I guess I was smart through second grade. Reading and spelling easy words, and adding and subtracting were a piece of cake. Now I found myself in third grade where I could still rock any standardized test in reading, but came home with failing grades in spelling and math. I tried everything I could to remember how to spell those increasingly longer words, and math facts that yielded much bigger numbers. I wrote words 10 times each and practiced flash cards till numbers started jumping around in my head. Yikes!!

It's been a while since third grade and I did manage to get through elementary school, as well as high school, college and a Master's program. I've learned a lot about myself as a learner and figured out how to get around my challenges (thank heavens for spell check and calculators!). I've also been blessed with the opportunity to try to help others figure out how to get around their own challenges. Along the way, I've picked up a thing or two which I hope to share with all of you.