As a former teacher, I know first-hand that teaching is exhausting. Before Ethan was born, I taught public school for seven years and often stayed late, took work home with me and still felt like there weren’t enough hours in the day. (And, this was before I was a mother!) So, when Ethan started in PPCD (Public Preschool for Children with Disabilities) almost 5 years ago, I made it a point to help his teachers with as many tasks as they could/would delegate on a weekly basis. With each passing year, my volunteerism at Ethan’s school has fluctuated based on our family (and my work) schedule/responsibilities and on the teachers’ needs for assistance.

This is a bittersweet week for me. It has been my honor to teach two different 4-year-old classes, in the absence of a teacher battling breast cancer. I am happy to say she has recovered and is coming back to work. We have talked on the phone and through e-mail, and I will finally meet her in person tomorrow. I feel I already know her; a brave and inspiring soul. She will be walking in to her own class-but a class I created, decorated and nurtured, so... I am leaving a piece of myself behind.

Writing my last blog about the gingerbread boy meeting a gruesome death reminded me of something I’ve thought about many times over the years but haven’t put to paper. It’s about repercussions of our actions and how we teach those to our kids.
For example, the Gingerbread Boy teaches us that if you’re faster (but not smarter) than others and you taunt them, then you will be eaten alive. It’s your basic morality (or rather mortality) tale.

A method for teaching color sorting to students with Autism. More free teaching resources are available from http://www.PositivelyAutism.com/

How to select, use, and make file folder games (a hands-on learning strategy) for students with Autism. Presented by Nicole Caldwell, M.Ed. of http://www.PositivelyAutism.com

MATT EDITORIAL COMMENT: In the past, I had tons of ideas of things to write about or do. I quickly learned that my power of idea generation was much stronger than my power of idea retention, and soon I began to write things down as soon as I thought of them. Now, my power of … er… whatever you call the power of hoarding lots of little scraps of paper holding literature or invention or blog ideas in drawers and folders and a wallet… my power of “that” is much greater than my power of actually acting upon those ideas. Well, baby steps, as Bob would say.