Honest Sentiments

(Lillian, aged 2)

This is my Lillian, she moves through life with an unabashed (and contagious) joy. Lillian will be four next month. She is curious, kind and loving.  She inspires me to try to be a little less structured and to be a little more playful in life. 

I am less than a month into my current job as a special education paraprofessional. I love to laugh with the students that I work with, but I save the majority of my silliness for joking around with my team members - a group of eight fantastic and talented women, and two skilled supervisors. I love my immediate team mates - I am grateful for our shared laughter and support. 

I currently dread going into work on Mondays, this was not my experience in my previous position as a Reading and Math Interventionist. But I also did not work with combative students in that position. The children that I work with now are unpredictable and one of them, whom I no longer work with, left me seeing stars and hearing the clang of my teeth after he hit me in the face (twice.)

He hit me because he has severe autism and wanted to see my reaction, he also wanted to escape his assigned general classroom.

I never realized that educators could go into work and be hit, scratched or bitten by a student, or that this would be deemed as all a part of the job. I was told that it is important that I not blame myself for what happened, that it could have been anyone that he hit that afternoon. This was said out of kindness by my direct supervisor but it did not leave me feeling better. 

The experience left me feeling badly about the choice I made to seek out this opportunity and made me feel protective of my little Lillian who will (presumably) attend this early elementary school in a year or so. I send my children to school to learn and prepare for success in the outside world. My hope is that their education does not include hits from classmates.

I should add that the student that hit me, also hit a classmate in the general classroom the day before he hit me. I was unable to prevent him from back handing a 2nd grade girl, who like Lillian, has blond curly hair and a sweet smile. Like me, she was kind to him, and didn't deserve to be hit. 

I certainly do not think that the student that I was assigned to wanted to inflict pain on me or make me feel unsafe at work, but all students and staff deserve to be safe. This experience compounds with others to make me feel unsure about what my future work situation will be. For now, I will file this away and try to take things just one day at a time.

Sincerely,

Colleen