-: The students are why I'm there,
the students are why I really love the job.
It's those seemingly very small successes.
It would ordinarily be a small success,
in a child who is typically developing,
but to see these skills in students
who have struggled for 15, 16, 17, 18 years
it is a wonderful leap or bound in success.
With one of the students in particular
we were struggling all year
with trying to decipher his signs.
He has a lot of motorically related problems
that prevent him for doing anything really definitively.
And with sign it is very difficult
because he doesn't use both hands,
he only uses one for sign and his signs are very unique.
So, this is ordinarily a "more", he was doing this.
Well, some time in November it changed to this,
or this, or this.
So, we needed to figure out a new way.
He had a communication board
that he was using for his schedule mostly,
and I decided to change it to...
trying to figure out if he can use these definitive
always recognizable concepts
to the adults that he's working with.
And, we went from waiting sometimes 30 minutes
for him to do this, or even like,
what I'll call an approximation which is
him knocking on a table, again waiting 30 minutes
in between each time he would do it,
to him using the communication board,
I think it marked it 10 out of 15 times
in less than 15 minutes.
And he's graduating this year and it's a scary thought
to have someone who struggles to
get excited about communication,
but he was excited about communication.
And it was wonderful to see,
it made my entire week just better.