No, it was very moving.
Yes we are!

I burned the last teacher's name....ARGH!!! I'm almost out of time and out of batter. :mad2: I lost track of time after putting the last batch of cookies into the oven because my nephew's fever spiked up to 104. Gonna eat a burn letter cookie, have a smoke and try to cut out a long teacher's name with whatever left of the batter. :(

Whew! I had just enough to make the last teacher's name although it's thinner than the rest. :p: Icing tonight. Gotta run now cuz I'm late for service!

service?

Prayer and meditation

Did all y'all have teacher's assistants? I never did...not through elementary school or high school. Is this a newer thing?

apparently so. i never had one either. then again, we're old, remember? :p:

Yeah...all the grades in one classroom. Filling the stove with wood. Yep. ;)

you got to fill the stove? i had to walk 20 miles through 6 feet of snow out back to go cut and chop up the wood!

But that was back in the days when you could count the number of students in class on one set of fingers and toes (even allowing for frostbite issues from all that walking in the snow). Now they need at least two sets, and they can only just count the number of Asperger's and ADD/ADHD on one set of fingers and toes, not to mention the psycho kid who -in the good old days- woulda been locked up somewhere else entirely

I don't know. I seem to remember classes that weren't like, tiny. Probably 25 students. And I remember a kid we called "hyper" who most surely would be diagnosed with ADD these days. Still, no helpers. Not even helping parents. Ever. Well, unless a mom brought in snacks for a birthday. That was it.

Those teachers must have really had it rough!

Class sizes here are heading for thirty, with approx half a dozen ADD/Asperger's diagnoses in each class who (allegedly) don't need an assistant, and then one kid that does -full time- -in almost every class. Eight years ago, when Hebe first started, they were around 20 and there was one kid in the entire school who had a teacher assistant assigned to them, and they were fairly severely physically diasbled.

I think in the old days in the UK, they would either have been written off as a little in the stupid side or put in a special ed class. But no, we didn't have teacher assistants either.

Yeah, I think the recognition and mainstreaming of certain conditions would require more help in the classroom.

Half a dozen in each class? Yikes!

Thanks for the info. It just struck me, and I was curious.

To be fair, our school philosophy makes it easier for these kids to be mainstreamed, so i think we have a higher proportion than other schools, but I am comparing the same school over eight years here. There are more diagnoses, and class sizes are getting bigger.

The other thing is, whilst many of the teacher's assistants are great and an asset to the classroom, some are failed wannabe teachers who were failed for very good reason :(. There seem to be very few hiring criteria here. We have one who really doesn't seem to like kids at all and is very short tempered and mean to the kids, picking favorites and making little secret of it, and we had another whose charge was explosive and occasionally needed restraining. She was too overweight/unfit to move fast enough to get to him in time. Fortunately she got reassigned. She's a lovely person, but really, that was a poor match-up.