Teachers, Special Education
As we go through the various different types of teaching job that you can have we’re seeing some variation in the skills likely to be required. Special education teachers are those who deal with the children who have special needs, obviously enough, but these can range from those students with autism or other severe disabilities all the way through to those who have a problem in only one relatively minor area: like dyslexia or even just bad eyesight, meaning that a certain amount of extra help is required.
Such teaching goes on in all of the different levels of the school system as well, meaning that you can specialize in both an area and an age group. Such teaching jobs require in every state a license for this specific type of teaching. To get that you’ll need at least one college degree: most insist upon a second college degree as well, a Master’s.
As for our EQSQ personality tests, you’ll find that the more severe the disability and the lower the age group the more empathic you’ll need to be to deal with the job. Teaching the classically autistic is akin to nursing while at the other end of the spectrum, with the more minor problems, it’s more of a systemizing task. So whether male or female brained by the personality tests, there’s somewhere on this job spectrum for you.
The money is quite good, in the $40-$45,000 a year range but the real rewards come from seeing the pupils develop, as is so often true of any kind of teaching.
May 1st, 2007 at 5:59 pm
Special education teachers have to deal with more than just students. It’s a sensitive topic for everyone involved, including parents, administrators and teachers.
As a former regular education teacher at an elementary school, I had to attend meetings with the school psychologist, the special education teacher and the mother of my student. She had been attending these meetings for over a year in order to get her son categorized as special needs. And trust me, the answer was obvious.
Now in my role as a reporter, I see that board of education members are very sensitive about spending more money. More than once, the school board has gone into private session to discuss a particular child, and this is when lawyers get involved.
Very often, a child needs a special education teacher with a particular expertise, but that teacher works at a school a few towns away. So, the town must pay tuition and bussing the student out there. Parents are by no means happy about this situation.
All of this translates into a special education teacher who must have the emotional intelligence to deal with difficult children, stressed out parents and touchy school administrators.
May 6th, 2007 at 9:31 pm
Yes, I know the feeling, how anyone with intelligence manages to keep their cool at that nexus of lawyers, the bureaucracy and tax money is something that never ceases to amaze me. As you say, it can be entirely obvious, right from the word go, what the eventual answer will and should be but motions must be gone through, t’s crossed and i’s dotted: presumably some think that enough will give up along the way and thus they’ll save enough money to have paid for the bureaucracy.
In my role as an economist (a part time and amateur one) the thing that I often find is that the process of sorting through applicants like this costs more than simply offering the extra tuition to everyone that applies. But as the paper clippers and the tuition come from two different budgets no one ever really sees this.
So the end result is as you say, that those in this role need to have exceptional reserves of emotional intelligence, not so much for the children, but for those who would deny them what they need.