Today is Nat’s final IEP.\u00a0 I feel very teary.\u00a0 Kind of scared.\u00a0 Also excited, because I just love his team and I always love to hear about Nat’s progress.\u00a0 There are always surprises from the teachers and house staff, things I didn’t know he could do, lovely interactions I hadn’t heard about.\u00a0 They all adore Nat, and are moved and delighted by him.\u00a0 It has (nearly) always been this way, in all of his 17 years of school.\u00a0 There was one terrible painful year, a really bad fit, a nightmare placement, but shouldn’t I put that behind me by now?\u00a0 Otherwise, a clean, bright school record.<\/p>\n
Nat loves learning.\u00a0 He loves the whole structure of school.\u00a0 He hates learning a brand new thing because he doesn’t know exactly what he is supposed to do with it.\u00a0 As soon as he figures it out — and it is usually with lightning speed — he whips his way through it.\u00a0 Sometimes they have to keep adjusting his goals.\u00a0 Other goals have never been met, but have always been just what they’re called:\u00a0 goals.\u00a0 We will have to bear it, that some goals are not going to be met.\u00a0 At least not during the school years.<\/p>\n
There ought to be institutes of higher learning for the cognitively impaired.\u00a0 I would bet that the large majority of these folks picked up on the joy of learning a bit later in life than the “normal.”\u00a0 Why do you think it’s called a Developmental Delay?\u00a0 Delay implies that there was a pause before the expected progress kicked in.\u00a0 What if someone (like Nat) discovered the joy of learning at 15 or 17?\u00a0 I think this is the case with Nat.\u00a0 He learned that he could trust this school; he learned that he got satisfaction out of the new task, he learned that he could learn more about this crazy world if he learned yet another task (a lot of “learn” in this sentence, as is necessary).<\/p>\n
He even learned that communication + people = acquisition of new knowledge, which = accumulated experience, which = greater comfort.\u00a0 The more he learned, the happier he has been.\u00a0 The more he understood, the more he could understand.\u00a0 The world of education was an ever-widening outward spiral. I see him as a small star at first, rotating outward, colliding with all the detritus of the universe, accumulating mass and energy, exploding, reforming, until now:\u00a0 he is a sun.\u00a0 Warm, radiant, bright, beautiful.\u00a0 Ready.<\/p>\n
So now, in about 17 months, this particular mode of learning will come to an end for Nat.\u00a0 I suddenly feel that the goal for both Nat and me will be to find him more goals, to continue to move his target — not too far as to frustrate, but just far enough to intrigue him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today is Nat’s final IEP.\u00a0 I feel very teary.\u00a0 Kind of scared.\u00a0 Also excited, because I just love his team and I always love to hear about Nat’s progress.\u00a0 There are always surprises from the teachers and house staff, things I didn’t know he could do, lovely interactions I hadn’t heard about.\u00a0 They all adore […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pSTth-qt","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1641"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1641\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1642,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1641\/revisions\/1642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}