Commonly Confused Words Quiz

Once upon a time there was a boy who lived with his family. The boy, whose name is Adam is twenty - three years old and is a single parent to a two year old girl named Austin. Austin’s mother left her there when she was only five days old. When Adam’s father went out that day to get the news paper, he saw the beautiful sight of a little baby and brought her inside only to find out that his son was the father. At first, Adam’s dad did not want to accept the fact that his son was a dad, but he soon changed his mind when he realized that he would lose his son. Adam decided to keep his child because he figured the effect of losing her would be greater then the effect on him and his family. He soon found out that raising a child would alter his life drastically. Once you have a child it is not your life any more, it’s all about your child. Adam decided to start the trek to finding Austin’s mother by writing a letter on stationery and sending it out to see if anyone knew where she was. While he was trying to find her he took Austin to get baptized at his church in front of the altar because he felt it was his rite. One day when Adam was out on the track taking his daily run he became stationary because of what he saw. Standing right in front of him was Austin’s mother. He asked her why she just up and left town and she said because she felt like everyone was having fun except for her so she wanted him to feel what it was like to be strapped down by a baby. Tonya who’s Austin’s mother came back to see her and Adam said she couldn’t because she was at day care and Austin doesn’t know her in principle too. Tonya said that she would go to the site of the day care and speak with the principal about picking up her daughter. By this point Adam was getting pretty upset and said that this is just not fair, you come back into her life and do care whether it is going to hurt her or not. By now the weather was starting to look like it was going to rain so the two of them went back to his car and he told Tonya that he would give her all of his loose change and bills that he had on him to pay for her air fare, if she would just leave and never come back. Adam knew that all Tonya wanted was money, because he cited her once saying “ I never want kids, it's too much of a hassle”.

When

Throughout the years special education has gone through a lot of changes. It has gone from segregation to inclusion. It all started back in the 1800s when people were afraid of others that were different. They would treat people with disabilities very badly. So they came up with the idea of making special schools for them so they would not have to worry about teaching children with special needs. They also just wanted to get them out of the society. If it were not for the advocators and the parents of the children with special needs, they would probably still be taught in different school. The advocators and the parents were able to get laws passed stating that their children have the right to an education that is in the least restricted environment as possible. Now since the no child left behind act of 2001 and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) children with special needs have been able to receive special services that help them learn better and be educated with there peers. Because of these laws more children with special needs have been able to graduate and get jobs out in society. Which for people who have a disability it is their dream to be able to function in a non-disabled world. By having students with special needs learning with their peers it also allows there peers to see that some people are different. Overall, there has been many changes, but they have all improved the way the world treats people with disabilities.

Who

The first schools for people with special needs where developed between the 1800s, and 1900s. While these schools were forming there were two goals that were hard to achieve first to provide human treatment; and second remove the disabled from society. According to Sacks “in 1817 Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and American minister and educator, established the first American residential school for the deaf” (3). Samuel Howe formed the Perkins Institute for the blind and supported public financial support for teaching and providing help for people with special needs. A man named Eduoard Seguin helped create the first home for the mentally challenged.

During the mid 1800s, a woman named Dorothea Dix, an educator and social reformer, helped people to view mental institutions differently. She got them to see them as hospitals for people who are ill rather then a prison for the criminally insane.

At the end of the century Alfred Binet invented an intelligence test named Binet-Simon. This test measured the intelligence and determined peoples mental status. Lewis Terman made improvements on the Binet-Simon test and named it Stanford-Binet. He also invented the first Longitudinal test for gifted children.

Nationwide compulsory school attendance in the early 1900s, flooded schools with thousands of new students, and policymakers had to find ways to deal with children who did not fit the mold. A lot of the students stayed in school until they could withdraw. There were many jobs available to someone who dropped out of school so there were not many consequences.

Why?

For years students with disabilities were excluded from schools due to the lack of educators who had the knowledge to teach children with special needs. Before the 1800s, the public feared people with disabilities because they did not understand why these people were different and because of this the public treated ones with disabilities in cruel ways. A lot of children with special needs were deserted and left to die. Witch hunts, burnings, and exorcisms also were common means to an end for such “problem” children (Sacks 2). There were not may people willing to support children with disabilities.

In 1933 parents started forming special education advocacy groups and ultimately were the main people in improving education opportunities for their children. The Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the Civil Rights Movement extended equal protection under the law for minorities and paved the way for people with disabilities to receive the same treatment. The Education for All Handicapped Children Act was passed in 1975. It is also known as the Public Law 94-142. The Public Law 94-142 required schools to provide students with a any range of disability with a “free appropriate public education.” It also requires school districts to offer education in the “least restrictive environment” possible. These laws were put into affect because people started to finally realize that children with special needs deserve an education also.

What and How

When people think about special education I think the most important question that pops into their head is, “Is inclusion effective?”. I think this is the most important question because not only does it affect children with special needs it also affects the typically functioning student. So even though inclusion affects everyone in school, the average person may not know what inclusion is exactly. The word inclusion can be a very frightening word to someone if they do not know much about it, so at the end of this paper I hope you will be able to come to your own conclusion about weather or not inclusion classrooms are effective.

Inclusion in school require a shift in the paradigm, instead of getting the child ready for the regular class, the regular class gets ready for the child (Tomko par 4). In an inclusion classroom there are a lot of things that need to be done in order to accommodate for a child with a disability. Some of the things that need to change in the classroom is the way the teacher teaches, different equipment needs to be available for the student with the disability, expectations of the student and keeping a list of what goals have been meet. The teacher may need to change the way they teach because the student may learn slower than the other children. The teacher also needs to have high expectations for the student to strive for, but low expectations when it comes to the activity that the child can perform. If the teacher does not teach to the students level then that student will not know what is going on. If they do not know what is going on then they have a tendency to act out in order to get the attention they want. The typically developing children and the teacher also have to adapt to having an inclusion teacher in the room. An inclusion teacher is a special education teacher that comes into a regular classroom for a few hours a day to make sure that the child with the special needs is doing alright. While he/she is in their they may also help a student that is typically developing just to give the regular teacher some extra help. In an inclusion classroom the teacher is the one that has to change the most, but it does effect the typically developing student also.

Pros and cons of Special Education Classrooms

Some of the pros about keeping children with special needs in a self-contained classroom is the child can get more attention from the teacher. If they need any special equipment to help them learn it would be available. They provide structure and routine for students who need them in order to concentrate. In a segregated classroom the students also have a teacher that is qualified in teaching students with a disability. There are not that many positive things about students with special needs being in a segregated classroom, but it all depends on what the parent is looking for in there child’s education.

There are a lot of negative reasons to put someone with a disability in a self-contained classroom. For starters they would not be with their peers, so when it would come time to live in the community on their own they may not know how to handle knowing that not everyone is like them. The same goes for their peers, when they go out into the community to work they may not know how to work with someone with special needs. Children that are not in a special education classroom may have difficulty getting the equipment they may need to learn because general education classrooms do not always have they tools they need. Also even though there is a special education teacher that comes into the regular classrooms to make sure that the special education students are doing ok they are with the regular education teacher and he/she usually has not been trained in how to teach to a student with disabilities. The student sometimes does not always get as good of an education as what they might get in a special education class because the regular education teacher can not slow down every time they need him/her to.

During the 1800s

While I was looking for sources I found a book called History of Special Education in Ohio and in this book it talks about the development all the way to the compliance and provision of full service. This book does not have any new information on special education, but it does have information starting back to the 1800s and going only until 1985. It has information on the development of programs for the handicapped like the blind, deaf, crippled, and mentally retarded. After, it informs you about the state leadership and program refinement. It tells you about the first schools that were made for people with disabilities. In part three of this book it informs you of more expansion of programs for the disabled. I believe that this book can come in handy when I am writing my paper on the history of special education because I do not have a lot of information on what it was like in the 1800s. I just have a few things here and there. This book spends more time on the programs that were made for people with special needs so this way I can elaborate on them some and not the law as much. At the very end of this book it tells you about the legal foundations for special education. This may be nice to know in the future. Over all this book looks like it can help clarify anything that may have been confusing in any of my other sources.

Different Placements

When a parent finds out that his or her child has a disability they have many choices to choose from when deciding how there kid should be taught. Now there are many people who think that they should be with their peers no matter what, but there are some parents who like to have their children with peers that have a disability also. The four different placements are inclusion class, resource room, self-contained class, and out-of-district placement. An inclusion class, also known as mainstream placement, is where the special needs student is in a regular classroom with his peers. There is also a regular teacher, and a special education teacher will come in and out during the day to help all the kids, but mainly the special education student. In a resource room is where a student is placed that need a lot of help understanding a subject in order to keep up the grade. The resource teacher is usually a special education teacher and they usually help a small group at once. A self-contained class means that the child with special needs is removed from the general school population for all subjects and works with a special - education teacher in a small setting. Each student in this classroom may be working on different things at the same time due to their different levels of achievement. Finally, in an out-of-district placement is a school that addresses all types of disabilities. They students gets a very structured routine to follow each day. It all depends on how server and what the parent wants for there child on where the best place is for the student with special needs.

Making Inclusion Work

In the late 1970s there was approximately 1 million kids with special needs that did not attend school. If the students did attend they were either in a special class or a special school. Special Education changed with the passing of the 1975 Individuals with disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and the amendments in 1997. This act move special needs students from segregated classrooms into regular classrooms. When students are in a segregated classroom they do not learn how to live in a non - disabled world. Since the act in 1975 there has been confusion on how to educate special and general education students. The parents and advocators were scared that they would lose there services and the teachers did not think it would work.
Some of the advantages of Inclusion is that it improves the learning for both disabled and non-disabled students. The children learn that everyone is different, they develop new friendships, parent participation improves and it is the disables right to be in the least restricted environment possible.
The downside to inclusion is that more research should be done to discover how to teach the disabled with the general education students. The teachers are not trained as well as they should be to teach children with special needs. They also need to figure out how to teach all the students at once without all of the disturbances. Once all of these things can be meet then Inclusion should work.

How IDEA changed Special Education

Before the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA), it was known as Education for All Handicapped Children Act also known as Public Law 94 - 142, but even before that children with special needs were unable to go to school. In the 1970s schools were only allowed to teach one out of every five children with disabilities. Even then they did not educate the deaf, blind, emotionally disturbed or mentally retarded. Ever since IDEA came along though early intervention has been provided for more than 200,000 infants, toddlers and their families. There have also been 6.5 million children and youth that receive special education or related services in order to learn. Students with disabilities are also allowed to attend schools in their own neighborhoods and learn beside their peers. With this act it also states that goals are to be set that students are to achieve. Special education is no longer unimportant it is the center of the success of any school. Because of IDEA and the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001(NCLB) students with special needs have completed high school rather than dropping out by 17 percent between 1987 and 2003. During the same time, postsecondary education participation went up to 32 percent. Students with special needs were able to get jobs easier and employment and independence is part of the dream for children with disabilities. We are getting to that dream slowly, but with these laws we are closer then we ever have been.

Scholarly Journal

While I was doing research for my paper I found a scholarly article about teachers had to say about inclusion. It gives some pros and cons. People who support inclusion say that there are many benefits. If the child’s disability is mild the education impact for them in a regular classroom is substantially greater than being placed in a special education room. Inclusion classrooms give students a diverse learning environment. By having a diverse learning environment it helps prepare the students for a diverse community. By being with their peers it also helps them to realize that not everyone has a disability. Even though the pros help the students in the future, the negative aspects of now discourage a lot of people from supporting inclusion. The general education teachers are not trained to work with children with special needs. The teacher can not provide enough attention to every student. The students get less education because the teacher has to teach slower to make sure every student understands. The teachers have to deal with more students acting out because the typically developing students are board and the child with special needs is also board because they may not understand what is going on.
It also talks about some of the challenges that educators may face. It gives the results of the survey that the teachers took and then it discusses what they found. At the end of the article it informs you of what the limitations were. That way you know exactly how they received the results that they did.

Expository Paper

The research paper that I am writing is going to be an expository paper. I am writing about the history of Special Education. I am basically doing a timeline from the beginning of special education till now. Throughout the paper I am going to discuss how and why things are the way they are. I will not be trying to persuade the reader into anything so that is why my paper will be an expository paper. In this paper I will talk about inclusion and segregation so that the reader will have both sides of the information. This way the reader can make their own decision on which way they like better. I will be informing people on things that they may not have known about before, but I will not be persuading people. I will be taking the facts and summarizing them. If there are two sides of any facts that I put in my paper I will try to put both sides because I do not want to lean toward one side or another. My goal for this paper is to give people a lot of information about special education so they will be informed about what special education is and then they can make there own conclusion on weather it is a good idea or not. The reason I want to inform people about special education is because everyone has to deal with it weather or not there child is in special ed or not.

Inclustion

What is Inclusion? Well according to Webster, it is the act or state of including(425). Inclusion happens not only in school but in the community as well. It can occur in churches, work and playgrounds. Inclusion in schools is not only suppose to be a placement in a regular classroom but also a desired state. It can only occur with long and proper planning, preparation and lots of support. The desired outcome of inclusion is obtained only when a child is able to participate in classroom activities with the supports and services they need. Even though the child is in a regular classroom it does not mean that they do not receive services or have an Individualized Education Plan (IEP). An IEP is a plan for children with special needs that sets goals that they are to achieve throughout the year. There are two different ways that inclusion can work. One way is where the student is in the regular room for part of the day and then is with the special education teacher for the rest of the day. The other way is called full inclusion. In full inclusion the students are in the general room for the whole day. A lot of factors are involved when deciding weather or not to put a student in full inclusion or just part of the day. Inclusion is an important part in the life of a child with a disability so even if the child is not educated in a regular classroom they still live in a community with many different people.

Major Figures that also had a disability

Nationwide compulsory school attendance in the early 1900s, flooded schools with thousands of new students, and policymakers had to find ways to deal with children who did not fit the mold. A lot of the students stayed in school until they could withdraw. There were many jobs available to someone who dropped out of school so there were not many consequences.

After the 1960s, there was a flood of people developing or inventing things concerning special education. There has also been a lot more people coming out and showing off their disability and being proud of it. There have been many famous people who have achieved a lot even though they had a disability. Some of the people are Thomas Edison, was unable to learn in schools; Woodrow Wilson, suffered from dyslexia; George S. Patton, had a server learning disability; F. Scott Fitzgerald, had a hard time learning in school also; and Nelson A. Rockefeller, he had dyslexia too.

These people are just a few of the people that have help special education get to where it is today. There are many more people that have an influence on helping special education get to where it is today. Parents of the disabled for example are major figures in helping to get special education to where it is today in the 21st century.

Helpful Tips

In Thursdays class we looked over each others papers and made some suggestions on how to make it better. I think the peer review was very helpful. It was nice having some different opinions on how to write an introduction or a conclusion. It was good to see that people have different writing habits so I was able to tell them what I had trouble with and I got a lot of information back. I was glad that we didn’t have the same problems because if we would of I think it would have been very boring to correct four papers and looking for the same mistakes. Since we all wrote on a different topic reading the papers were interesting because some of the information I did not know about.

Overall, letting someone else read my paper and give there feedback on what they think I should change or where I should put a coma is very helpful. I also like helping other people see things that they may not see when they are writing their paper. For example when they are writing there paper they may not realize that the wording of a sentence sounds funny unless they re-read it and even then they may not catch it. So I think it was very helpful to get a fresh pair of eyes looking at my paper and getting suggestions on how to word some sentences or where to put a coma.

Two laws in the History of Special Education

My third source talks about the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA). It talks about how people with disabilities before this act did not get much of an education. IDEA helps thousands of people and their families. If this act was not created many students would still be learning in institutions, instead of in regular school. Which is helping not only the people with the disability but there peers also because it is allowing them to see that even though a child with a disability may need more help in certain areas they are still like there peers in other ways as well.

In 2004 President Bush reauthorized the act and made it so each state had to set goals for each person with a disability in school and they had to report there progress each year. The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001 made sure that the schools had to set high standards for the children. That way they were having to make an effort. Due to the No Child Left Behind Act and IDEA schools are putting students with disabilities first instead of forgetting about them.

With both acts they have increased the role of the parents in their child’s education. IDEA looks at the needs of the child with the disability and the NCLB looks at how the school deals with the children who have the disability. Both laws are to improve the education that a child with special needs receives.

Overall, this source looks at two of the laws that have impacted the way children with special needs are educated. Without these laws disabled children would probably be in the same situation that they were in during the 19th century.

The picture is from http://www.specialedmoms.com/

Progress on the research

I am writing my research paper on the History of Special Education and so far I have found two sources that are very good. They have dates of things that have happened and people who have made a difference in the lives of children with special needs. Some of the information that is in them over laps both sources but I think it is a good thing because those are some major points that I can use in my paper.
I have also found three other sources that I am going to go get from the library today. One of them has information on the way special education was in the 19th century and another has information on the 21st century. I think these sources may be helpful in seeing how much of a difference there has been in the education of children with special needs.
So far finding information on this topic has been very easy but problem I may end up with is that everything may repeat its self. I am not to worried about that though because I think there is enough stuff out there that I should be able to find enough for an eight page paper.
Overall, my research is coming along great. I am finding a lot of information and so far the information is not repeating to much. I am hoping I can find more sources other than from the internet and books. I am not really sure though if you can get this kind of information in a magazine or not but we will see.

The Development of Special Education

For my second source I found an e-book in the electronic reference collection and the book is a reference handbook on special education. In the part of the book that I am using as my source it talks about how before the 1800s people were treated poorly do to the lack of knowledge of how to deal with people with special needs. There were many horrible ways children with a disability were treated and there were not may people who knew or were willing to work with someone with a disability. Some of the people who did work with disabled children were Ponce de Leon, Juan Pablo Bonet, Jacob Rodriguez Pereire, and John Locke. These are just a few people who worked with the disabled before the 1800s, there are many more.
Between 1800 to 1900 the first institutions were developed in the United States and Europe. While they were forming them they had two goals that were hard to achieve: (1) provide human treatment; and (2) remove the disabled from society. Different schools where built for people with special needs. Some of them are schools for the blind and deaf, mental institutions, and schools for the handicapped.
In this article it also talks about famous people who had a disability of some kind but yet were still able to achieve big things in life. Some of these people are Buehler and Dugas, Hans Christian Andersen, Woodrow Wilson, and Nelson A. Rockefeller. These are just some major figures in developing special education.

Image of Ponce de Leon taken from Boricua Kids.

Major Figures

Some of the major people in special education are the children’s parents, teachers and family members. If you do not have the cooperation of the parents then any work that is done to help the child with the disability doesn’t work because they help the child in school and then the information is reversed at home. So a lot of work is done between the teacher and the parents to set goals. The Family members help by being supportive if the child is having difficulty they can give them advise.
There are many medical professionals that are involved in helping a educate a child with special needs. Some of them are doctors, guidance counselors, therapists and nurses. The doctors are involved to oversee the medical condition that the child may have and the guidance counselors are there to help make the child feel as normal as possible while in school. They are also someone to talk to if the child needs someone to talk to about a problem or if they just need someone to listen. The therapists are there to evaluate how well there speech is and there physical abilities. If they find out that they need therapy then the therapy is provided at school for them in order to help their education better. By getting therapy at school it helps give children therapy that they may not get other wise. So these are some of the major figures in the field of special education. There are many other figures these are just the major ones that are in the child’s life everyday.

History of Special Education

The Education for All Handicapped Children Act was passed in 1975. It is also known as the Public Law 94-142. Even though there have been education laws in effect since 1918, many children with disabilities were banned from public schools. The children were either institutionalized or stayed at home. If children with mild or moderate disabilities did go to school it was very rare that they would graduate.
The Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the Civil Rights Movement extended equal protection under the law for minorities and paved the way for people with disabilities to receive the same treatment. In 1933 parents started forming special education advocacy groups and ultimately were the main people in improving education opportunities for their children.
The Public Law 94-142 required schools to provide students with a any range of disability with a “free appropriate public education.” It also requires school districts to offer education in the “least restrictive environment” possible.
In 1990 and 1997 the law was renamed as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This law provided students with access to education and services that they were previously denied. Some of the services were smaller classes, interpreters for the deaf and computer- assisted technology. Students with disabilities started spending time in a regular classroom setting.
Approximately 6 million children receive special education services. To educate children with disabilities was expected to cost around $51 billion. In 1975 The federal government promised to cover 40 percent of the additional costs incurred by students with disabilities. Even though the federal government spends more on special education every year they have never paid more than 15 percent of the total cost.

Special Reasons For picking my major

I am going to write my research paper on special education because that is my major and it interests me. I decided I wanted to become a special education teacher when I was in sixth grade for two reasons: my mom is a special education teacher and I have seizures so I can in a way relate to people with special needs. I knew since I was a little girl that I wanted to be a teacher because I like to teach people new things, I just never knew what type of teacher I wanted to be. I didn’t actually decide that I wanted to teach children with special needs until I started having seizures in the sixth grade. I decided that I would teach special education when I realized that children with special needs were treated differently by teachers and students and that they also needed someone that would be a good advocate for them. To teach students with special education takes a lot of work because you need to be caring, understanding, tough, and helpful. When you help a special needs student you can tell when you have made an impact on there lives because there faces light up. I think students with special needs appreciate things more than people without a disability but yet they get a worse education because they need more equipment and need to be taught slower in order to understand things. This is why I have chosen to teach special education and write a research paper on this topic as well.