Why are they in this class?

In my placement, there are several students with IEPs, in emotional support classrooms, and in low level English/Communications Skills classes. Many of the students exhibit disinterest in school and often their reason for being has a lot to do with motivation.  Many of them do not want to be in school and their parents don't push them to do well.  I have encountered many students that seemingly have so much potential but very little drive.  Most recently there was a student who was frequently absent and as a result in ISS.  She would come in to school a day maybe two and then find out she had ISS because she had missed to many days.  She didnt' want to be in ISS so she would leave school.  My co-op told me that her mother was into drugs and out of the picture.  She lives with her father who gives her very little guidance or discipline.  When she was in school she did well and has a lot of potential, her problem is that she didn't come often enough.  Finally, Friday kids came in to class and told us that she had dropped out of school.  They said that her family told her she would never graduate and was wasting her time, she should just quit.

This is the part of teaching that will really bother me.  I can never imagine encouraging my child to do poorly in life. This has really stuck with me all weekend.  How do students get so far and then just give up?  How do we as teachers help our students to see more in themselves?  We are truely here for more than just teaching students about novels and sentence structure.  With the diversity of these students learning abilities and the diversity of their family lives we really have to know who they are and how to motivate them.  How do we do this?  How do we help these kids from falling through the cracks? 

Another obsticle I encountered over the last two weeks was making sense of the kids that I saw in the Emotional Support classroom. I had the priviledge of working one on one with a student on a writing assignment he had to complete for another class.  It was an essay about any topic of their choice and it was one month late.  He fortunately (but unfortunately) has an IEP and points would not be taken off for late assignments.  He plays sports - basketball, football, and track for the high school so he chose to write about being part of a team.  He had one paragraph written before we sat down together.  So he started to write more and showed me his work after writing two "rough" paragraphs.  So I started asking questions about what he was writing and helped him to correct a few sentence fragments and runon sentences.  He then began to write more.  I must say I was amazed!  What he wrote was truely from his heart and he wrote very well.    We worked on editing his assignment and he was finished by the end of class.  This student is always engaged in class and participates.  I asked my co-op why he was in this class (these students spend most of their day in the same room) and she said she is still trying to figure it out.

So while there are students falling through the cracks, there are some that are put in places like emotional support and left there.  These students are constantly being assessed but what are they being assessed for?  What makes them different from students in mainstream classrooms?  How do they go back to being mainstream?  I could probably name 5 students in the mainstream Comm. Skills class that should be in emotional support instead of the above student.  Who is making these decisions of where these students are being placed.  Atleast 50% of her Comm. Skills students have IEPs, how often are they addressed?  Or are we just assigning IEPs for students in the early part of their education and leaving them there?  What goals are set for these students? I am hoping to talk to the Special Ed. teacher to possibly get some of these answers to my questions during my next observation.