What Intervention Specialists Do

I decided a year ago that I was burned out being a regular "substitute teacher."  I was tired of walking into a class of high school students, and having someone in the front row look up at me brightly and say, "You know, we hate substitute teachers."  I was tired of trying to keep order, with kids occasionally trying to shoot dice in the back of the room for money.  I was tired of babysitting.  I heard about the position of Intervention Specialist, which pays less than that of substitute teacher, but which leaves the discipline to the regular teacher in charge of the class.  At the age of 73 (now 74 as I write this), I decided I wanted a job with less stress.

I have been an intervention specialist in three different schools.  One of them, the high school I described in the earliest posts on this blog, had a class of severely impaired kids who needed one-on-one or one-on-two tending.  There I was put in charge of a Korean young man who could not speak, and who could barely put shapes in a cut-out board.  He spent about half his time standing up and sitting down.  Another intervention specialist, a truly marvelous man, had taught him to be able to go to a faucet, turn it on, get himself a drink of water, and turn it off.  If you had seen this student yourself -- he was about 17 -- you would consider what this other intervention specialist had achieved with him to be just a little short of a miracle.

In another school, a middle school, I worked with a teacher and several other intervention specialists in a classroom with about a dozen kids.  We had a definite schedule, and almost every day went the same.  We met their buses as they arrived at the school, wheeled them (most were in wheel chairs) to the dining room, got their breakfast and placed it in front of them.  Some students needed to be fed.  Then we wheeled them across the playground to their classroom, where they learned basic skills intended to make them as independent as possible.

Sometimes we took them out of the classroom to places of interest.  For instance, a branch of the public library was located in the same neighborhood, about three blocks away.  We pushed their wheelchairs to the library, helped them read or get onto the library's computers, and generally allowed them to amuse themselves, with an occasional assist from us.  Then we wheeled them back to the classroom.  About once a month we took them on a major field trip -- would you believe bowling ?  We took them on the Bay Area Rapid Transit train to a station a few stops away.  Then we maneuvered them from the train level via elevator to the street level below, and pushed their wheelchairs about half a mile to the bowling alley.

In the bowling alley, were located bowling frames -- metal contraptions that the student could place a bowling ball on, then release it.  The ball rolled down the metal tracks to the floor and onward down the alley to the pins.  The trick here, of course, was that the metal tracks had to be aimed precisely in the right direction so that the ball continued on a straight path to the center pin.  If the metal track were not aimed accurately, the ball would simply go into the gutter.  After an hour or an hour and a half, which usually included some time for the students to eat the picnic lunch we had been provided with when we departed the school, we wheeled their chairs back over the half mile we had wheeled to get them to the alley in the first place, maneuvered them into the elevator at the public transport station, got them onto the train, and took them back to the classroom.

My biggest challenge with these students came with one of them who needed to learn to cunt to ten.  Over and over and over, we started counting. . ."One, two, three, four, five, six . . ." And then the student would stop.  Despite the literally hundreds of times we went through this exercise, he was never able to say "seven."
Once I said seven, he was able to resume and count all the way to ten.

Once in a while we took the kids to a nearby supermarket and had them buy the ingredients for smoothies or other classroom treats.  Some of them were quite able to give money to the cashier and receive change.  This may sound extraordinarily easy, but remember that these kids had to learn it because someday, if they were not institutionalized, they would need to be as independent as possible (they would probably stay in a group home as they matured), and that included being able to shop for themselves, at least for treats.  We take this independence for granted, but without this simple ability, the student grown into adulthood would not be able to take care of him or her self.

I often thought about these students and wondered what they had in store for themselves after their parents died.  Would a relative be willing to care for them ?  I think everyone working with them had the same thought many times, over.