Story of the Day 6/7/2011 #2

Apparently, you don’t use the word asshole, very often, in ASL.
At dinner, Sarah explained the more common ways to describe someone- the words that are more commonly used.
I am having a problem with this.
Several years ago, when Sarah was in 6th grade, she had a teacher at the Deaf School- a math teacher, who was an asshole.
I thought about the other words that Sarah showed me .
And they just didn’t fit.

I let Sarah know which teacher I was thinking of.

This teacher, C.M., had received, as part of Sarah’s IEP, instructions that she was supposed to be providing math enrichment to Sarah, because Sarah would otherwise be bored with the regular math work.
This teacher decided that she wasn’t going to be bothered, and opted to ignore what was written in the IEP.
I brought to the school’s attention that the enrichment work was not being provided to Sarah. The teacher then argued to the supervising teacher that Sarah was not only not good at math, she was struggling with it. She argued that Sarah really should be moved to the lower level math class, and not given enrichment. She argued that the teacher who had Sarah, the previous year, had no idea what he was talking about when he had suggested this.

Now, in order to get the school to follow the IEP, I had to give permission to have Sarah tested.
This is not normal. Normal is telling the supervising teacher that the IEP is not being followed, and they deal wit it and make sure it is followed, but this teacher was so adamant that the IEP was wrong and that she was not going to follow it , and the administrator was so un willing to fight with her that I was forced to do this.
The school’s psychologist, Terri, ten tested Sarah and presented her findings at a case conference/ According to the tests, Sarah was gifted in math. The teacher’s response to this was to spend 20 minutes of the case conference arguing with the school psychologist that she didn’t know how to do testing.
Following this case conference, not only did the teacher not provide the enrichment, she started behaving viciously towards Sarah- behavior that was noted and reported by another staff member to the supervising teacher.
As a result, Sarah was eventually moved to another, lower level math class.

Why to a lower level math class?
Because C.M. was teaching the “ on grade level” section. The Deaf School is small, and each grade has an on-grade-level section - and a section that is about one grade level behind, and sometimes a section that is even further delayed. The best that could be done was to move Sarah to the lower math section.
Which happened to be wonderful.
The teacher in this section was friendly and flexible. He gave Sarah a seat that was separated from the other kids , where she could do the appropriate lessons, and not what the other students were working on, and he gave her real enrichment work, and after working with her for a while ,he recommended that she be skipped up a grade level. Actually, he recommended that she be skipped up two levels, but Sarah wasn’t comfortable with that, so she was skipped one level.

Meanwhile, I was still searching for just the right ASL word to describe this teacher.
And , now, so was Sarah.
In the end, Sarah looked at me and said, “Asshole”.

Apparently, even in ASL ,, this is the only word that really fits.