First full week of school

Daniel's first full week of school is over.  A lot has happened!  Here is where we stand now.

Friends:  Daniel has some!  At first when he told me how his friends were instructing him to say things that they thought were funny (like calling girls "boys" and boys "girls") I wondered whether they were real friends or just kids in search of entertainment.  But in fact there have been many kids who have done genuinely friendly things, like making sure he sits in the right place to wait for his school bus, writing information down in choir, and greeting him when they see him.  (I am mildly nonplussed at the number of cute girls who greet him enthusiastically!)  I picked him up in front of the school for a doctor's appointment on Friday, and when we left several kids said "Bye Daniel" and one even said good-bye in Chinese!  He also came home that day with the phone number of a boy who he is friendly with in choir class.  Apparently Daniel's extroverted personality is serving him well at school.  And I think some credit also needs to go to teachers who made an effort to help his classmates understand what a big deal it is for him to be learning to navigate a completely new language and culture.

School bus:  I was really worried about the fact that Daniel's assigned bus does not pick kids up until 20 minutes after the school day ends.  The kids who take "second bus" have to spend those minutes sitting in the gym under the watchful eye of a teacher, and I really didn't think that Daniel could handle 20 minutes of enforced inactivity in the company of peers.  But he was determined he was going to ride the bus as soon as possible, so I let him try it out in both directions on the second day, and it went great!!  He tells me that he has lots of friends on the bus.  I get the impression that he is rather rowdy with said friends.  But that is the bus driver's problem, not mine, and so far I haven't heard anything about it from her.  (It helps, I'm sure, that he's only on the bus for about three minutes.)

Behavior:  We have been working with Daniel on some boundary issues at home.  He just doesn't seem to get that if I ask him to stop doing something (like pulling on my arm hair) that it is my body and my choice and he needs to respect that.  We gave him a lecture the night before school started about Americans and personal space (very different than in China!), and translated for him all of the school rules about "no horseplay" and "no holding hands or hugging other students."  We were concerned about what would happen if he seriously overstepped fellow students' boundaries, especially if he did so repeatedly.  Well, he has had his moments.  Some of them (like picking up another student at recess, or whacking a classmate playfully on the head with a notebook) I have found out about from him; others (like grabbing a girl student by the head and trying to kiss her!) I have found out about from someone else.  But the good news is, I think he is learning!  He talked on the phone with an adult friend/mentor in China last night, and I overheard him saying soberly, "School here is different from China.  There are all kinds of things that you can't do here."  I feel bad for him--he is brimful of enthusiasm, and I think he is used to having fun roughhousing with pals, being really loud, and other "all boy" things that aren't allowed in school and aren't really encouraged in our house.  We may have to think about some appropriate activities that will give him some of what he is missing.  We have been avoiding taking him to the kinds of events where it's okay to be a little wild because we have tried it once or twice where he has gotten...more than a little wild!  But perhaps it's time to try again.  For now, we are just happy that he is aware of the situation that he is in.  We are also happy that he seems to be well-liked by his teachers and fellow students, despite some odd or disruptive behavior.  And I will leave you with a funny vignette.  The very day after I stopped accompanying Daniel to school, he decided to run in the cafeteria (which he knows very well is against the rules).  The new vice-principle, who was on lunch duty, threw up his hand in the universal(?) "stop" sign...and Daniel gave him a high five and kept on going!!

Accommodations: We do not have an official LEP (Limited English Proficiency) plan yet, but Daniel is getting pull-out ESL tutoring for about half-an-hour a day.  The rest of the time he is in regular classes.  His teachers are all really motivated to help him learn, but some of them are feeling really stressed about not being able to communicate class content to him without completely focusing on him to the detriment of other students.  I even got an anonymous phone call from one of his teachers telling me who I should contact at the State level to request an interpreter to accompany him to his classes.  I was led to believe by the county's ESL person that he is actually forbidden to provide an interpreter for classes, so now I am confused.  I'm also not convinced that an interpreter would be in his best interest.  I for sure don't want him spending hours of every day sitting in class understanding nothing, but one of the reasons we sent him to school in the first place is that he is learning so painfully little English at home with me as his interpreter.  Right now I think he is doing fine.  Yes, he has no idea what is being studied, but he seems to be getting a good bit of mental stimulation observing other students, learning academic routines (like writing name and date on papers), and generally soaking up classroom culture.  He has come home using new English words and telling me what he was able to figure out from context about classroom events (a teacher yelling at students because most of them didn't do the homework, a teacher being called out of class to pick up a sick baby), so his brain is not on idle.  A month from now?  Who knows.  It doesn't help that Daniel can't see the blackboard, even from the front row, so he's not getting the visual input that would help a lot of language learners.  We don't have his official vision assessment yet, but our district's vision teacher did an informal assessment on him, and his distance and near vision both came out to somewhere between 20/200 and 20/400.  If he's allowed to look at something at his "preferred distance" (in his case, with his nose about an inch from the paper) he can discern some pretty small print, at an acuity of 20/40.  But that would be fatiguing to his eyes to do for a long period of time.  They have already lent him some adaptive devices to try out.  He didn't think much of the magnifying glasses or the slanted clipboard (which lets him put nose to paper without bending his upper body so far down), but he did like the monocular (like a short telescope).  He loved a device they let him try out in the vision classroom, called a Flipper.  It is a little camera hooked up to a monitor.  You can turn the camera down to focus on a paper you want to read, or out towards the blackboard, or wherever else you want.  Whatever you want to look at shows up magnified on the monitor in front of you.  It would be a bit clunky to cart from class to class, and the school will have to arrange for extra-large desks to be moved into each of his classrooms, but I think he will use it.

Academics:  Daniel is not getting academic content from any of his classes besides ESL.  I think he would have learned more in this week if he had been with me at home.  BUT, my priorities for this year are language, social skills, academic culture, and developing good feelings about learning, and I think he is making progress in all of these areas.  So overall, I'm pleased.