This is it! The final push before summer comes to a close for me. While officially I'm already working since I had workshops and training stuff most of last week, the first day of school is 3 days away. All weekend I've been trying to get the house in order, yard stuff put away for fall, and of course massive amounts of cleaning done so when I do get home from work the place isn't a total disaster area. Unfortunately, between Mace (who always tries his best to keep the place clean but is not always successful) and Cassie our wonder dalmation (who sheds and tracks in grass, mud, and God knows what else from outside) the house will stay clean only a matter of days no matter how diligent I am. But its the effort that counts right?
The workshop I attended with the Sander's County Special Education Co-Op staff last Wednesday was incredible. I met an amazing group of people who are truly dedicated to making a difference and outdo themselves to provided the very needed services to our special ed students across the county. I was super impressed with our morning speaker, the district superintendent, who was truly motivating and showed how special education in Montana has changed in his tenure as a teacher. I also was able to talk to a para-professional (which technically is my job title as well) who for the past 5 years has been working with a set of autistic twins in her school. She gave me some great ideas for assisted learning activities for the student with autism I'm going to be working with one on one most of my days. It was also great to get her contact info in case I run across something I don't know how to deal with or just need to vent some frustrations with.
Over the next two days I'll be meeting with my own school's staff for PIR days. I still haven't figured out what PIR stands for and apparently the teachers have been calling it that for so long now they can't remember what it stands for, but the main idea is that they are a series of training and teacher development days throughout the course of the school year. Tomorrow we're all heading to Quinn's Hot Springs Resort outside of Paradise MT at 6:45 am to attend the Montana Behavioral Institute workshop together. I think that all the staff on the district (Plains, Thompson Falls, Hot Springs, Noxon, etc) will be attending this workshop as well so it should be a great way to meet some new people. I'm not sure what exactly this workshop is supposed to entail but maybe it will give me some ideas for dealing with behavioral problems that I might come across. Tuesday we'll be doing CPR training and a bunch of staff meetings and scheduling so that we're all on the same page for school starting up on Wednesday.
So now that I'm on my 3 day countdown I am even more excited and anxious to get the ball rolling. I guess this is my next mini-adventure in life. Guess we'll see where it takes me.
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