Who are you teaching?

A classmate brought up a question this week that got me to thinking... who are we teaching?

About 10% of our class is special needs students. That is 2-3 students in every class of 25-30 kids who need a lot of redirecting and one-to-one time.

About 15-30% of our students are learning English as a second language. That is 4-8 students with a communication barrier that will need additional assistance from the teacher. In some areas it could be as high as 50%!

About 10% of the kids in our classroom are labeled as gifted and talented. Another 2-3 students who will need to be challenged each step of the way or boredom will result in behavioral issues. These children already know the material but they are still there.

That leaves us with our "normal" students. The highs, lows, and middles of the average student.

So if you were keeping track at least 1/3 of the students in our class need the majority of our time while the remaining students get whatever piece of us is left over.

So what was the question? 

"You work so well with special needs children, why are you not specializing in special education?"

 This question bothers me a lot for a variety of reasons.

It takes 3-5 months minimum to get a child eligible and placed to receive special services. Even when we place them, they must continual to focus on grade level materials rather than remedial skills. They have to do the remedial stuff to, it is just not the focus. (This irritates me to no end but I will leave that one alone. For now.)

Once they are placed, they will spend up to 40% of their time pulled out of the classroom for these special services but for 60% of their day... the majority of it... they are with a general education teacher. The general education teacher NOT the special education teacher is responsible for their academic progress.

SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO..... 

If we take all of the teachers who are good at working with specialized students out of the regular classrooms to provide these specialty services who is left in the classroom supporting these children where they spend the majority of their time?

 Now it could be that I am more sensitive to this as I do have special needs children but does anyone else ever wonder about who we are teaching and why? And how can we meet everyone's needs when there are so many and we are not trained to handle them all?