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The GF Diet November 30, 2008

Posted by Daniel Dage in Autism/Asperger's, Parent Support.
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Anyone reading me for any amount of time on the subject of autism knows that I am the last person to capriciously recommend any sort of dietary intervention with the intention of curing autism.  Special diets can be time consuming and expensive and represent one more additional hardship on a family already challenged by the behaviors posed by children with significant developmental delays.  The evidence supporting dietary intervention for autism is anecdotal, at best.  The entire concept of “autism recovery” is suspect.  When we tried the diet several years ago, it failed in many ways with no discernible results.  Rather than look at it as a failure, we simply moved on.  Or at least I and the kids did, more or less.

A couple months ago, the dietary bit came up again as Jane* tested Thomas* for allergies.  The result was a bit shocking.  For the past 8 years we’ve been giving him soy milk for a suspected dairy allergy.  The tests came back and showed him totally off the chart for SOY allergies while showing very little reaction to dairy foods.  So that began changing things as soy is in everything that is processed.  Anything with vegetable fat contains soy and everything looking to boost protein which is most things.  So we have been reading labels quite a lot.  He also has a bit of an allergy to eggs as does our youngest son.  I could be, but I’m not suffering from any illness or discomfort so have never bothered to test.

Then we recently got tests back for Jane.  She is also allergic to soy (and has been drinking soy milk for years) in addition to wheat (and anything wheat-like), eggs and cane sugar.  Highly allergic.  So now we are going to have to be dieting.  Funnily enough, I have already been on a diet to lose weight last year that totally avoided all of those foods.  I also don’t mind eating the same thing everyday, which the boys are fine with but it drives Jane nuts.  She likes a lot of variety in her diet and has always been the most challenging person in the family to cook for because she easily tires of foods, even several served in a rotation.  Notable exceptions include things with lots of wheat and sugar.

The difference between our efforts now and years ago is that we have a definite medical diagnosis that is easily arrived at with a blood test.  This is different that trying to use diet to work on something like autism.  Certainly, allergies (and autism) are ubiquitous enough to overlap. Relieving allergic symptoms and reactions can certainly improve the symptoms and disposition of any person, autistic or not.  The proscribed treatment is eliminating the offending foods for 6 weeks or so and then reintroducing those foods to see what happens.  It is a classic A-B single subject experimental design and a body could do endless reversals in order to establish a functional relationship between the symptoms and the food.  This is jusy good science.  Assuming we can control the diet completely, it isn’t that hard to see if anything happens physically.

Anyway, the key to working this type of diet is to focus more on the things you can have, rather than trying to always substitute for things you can’t have.  I think this is where so many people and families get into trouble and it was our downfall.  Gluten-free bread is massively expensive on the order of $6-9 a pound.  The flours are also 4-6x more expensive than what a person typically pulls off the shelf.  But not every diet in the world revolves around wheat.  In fact, before Columbus, the indigenous Americans lived very well on things that did not contain wheat, soy, eggs, milk or cane sugar.  The primary meso American diet was based on corn and different bean proteins.  Tomatoes, potatoes and squash were all native foods.  So it is there where I have done some research and drawn some inspiration

The Asian diet was based on rice, but soy was a more major source of protein.

Here is a recipe for some tasty cookies that satisfy the dietary requirements listed above. Feel free to adapt and substitute as you see fit.

Dry ingredients:
- 1 c masa harina (corn flour)
- 1/2 cup potato flakes
- 1/2 cup oatmeal (There’s some controversy about the gluten free-ness of oats but Jane’s tests showed she was good for oats)
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1 1/2 c dried fruit and/or nuts (I have a bag that I mix up that contain raisins, craisins, walnuts, pecans, almonds and a few other things)
- 2-3 Tbsp milled flax seed

Wet Ingrediants
- 2 eggs (Their equivalent in our case, Ener-G)
- 1/4-1/2 cup of oil
- 1 c light corn syrup
- 1 tsp vanilla

Mix each up separately and then all together.  Add more potato flakes if it is too runny. Spoon on to a cookie sheet and bake at 350 degrees for 9-10 minutes.  It makes about 1 1/2 to 2 dozen. Here’s a video of me and the whole process:

I made this thing out of my head from scratch and it came out pretty good the first time!  So the video was shot making a second batch.  The oil was a bit excessive so I ended up adding potato flakes off camera to thicken the batter.  It’s basically like an oatmeal raisin cookie and is supper delish.  The corn flour and flax seeds added a real novel depth to the taste, but that could be just me.

I made up a dry mix for pancakes which we tried tonight and they turned out really well.  In fact they went too well and the batch is almost gone already!

*Jane and Thomas are blognames that I used in my anonymous blogging days and just continue to use today.

Thank You Questar! November 18, 2008

Posted by Daniel Dage in Alternate Assessment, NCLB, Special Education.
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Today, one of the assistant principals came in and handed me an envelope that contained a survey from Questar . For anyone who doesn’t know, Questar is the company responsible for scoring the Georgia Alternate Assessment (GAA). He wanted to know when I could have it done, and I told him maybe Friday. He said he needed it by tomorrow. Thing is, our GAA’s are also due tomorrow! This looked like just one more piece of worthless paperwork associated with the GAA, which already has dubious value.
I opened it up and looked at it, and suddenly it became a bit more of a cathartic exercise that I thought. I was able to fully vent my spleen upon those vile people who were intimately connected to this process that has so vexed me these past few years. Much of it was a Likert-type scale asking how I felt my students had benefitted from the GAA process, with 1 being the least and 4 being the most. That whole section was pretty much a ‘1′. Another section asked about administrative support. That scored about a ‘2′. They did give us leave time the first year, but we’re getting no extra time this year to do this stuff. We’re on our own and the schedule is tighter than ever with shorter deadlines. Administrative support amounts to 1/2 day of training, some ink cartridges, some card stock and a few meetings and deadlines. No regular education teachers are collecting the data at our school, which was one item scored on the survey.
Somewhere they got the idea that the GAA was supposed to revolutionize our teaching and the acheivement of our students. Actually, it has made some changes. The daily living skills and vocational skills are pretty much crowded out because they do not support any academic standards at the 11th grade level. Those goals are no longer a significant part of the IEP. In fact, there seems to be a full scale charge away from any vocational skills in the high school curriculum at all. While some of the content of my teaching has been more diversified, the relevance has mostly disappeared. Eleventh grade college prep standards mean very little to students who have IQ’s in the single digits. They asked how the GAA contributed towards greater student acheivement and learning. I was able to express to them that the GAA has NOTHING to do with student acheivement, learning or comprehension. There are many ways to fail the GAA by making it uinscorable. None of those ways have anything to do with student acheivement. Actual student acheivement is the LEAST prominent metric in the scoring of this “assessment.” It is all about meeting NCLB’s mandates without having to have any actual substance. It’s more of a test of a teacher’s endurance and gamesmanship than actual teaching.
One section did ask what benefits, if any, I had realized from participating in the GAA:
It has made me more politically aware and active in working toward the repeal of NCLB. It has also motivated me to research and consider other career options.
So instead of taking a day or two to complete the survey, it took me about 20 minutes to pound it out. It felt pretty good to get some of that out to those people. It would be nice to know any meaningful results from this survey. Since we’re right in the midst of the first collection period, I can imagine lots of Georgia teachers taking this opportunity to express their displeasure. I’m not sure if every teacher doing a GAA had to do a survey (I don’t think so) but rest assured, I was very candid and sharp in my remarks and comments.
I don’t blame Questar for their abominable assessment. They are simply providing a service that states need in order to comply with an abominable federal law. My students happen to be nonstandard students and there is no reasonable way to standardize them. Therefore, this unreasonable insult will have to do until control of education can be rescued from the federal lunatics and returned to the state asylum where it belongs.
You can also see a rant about the GAA I filmed and posted last night on my TeacherTube channel (link to video).

Talking about next year’s calendar November 15, 2008

Posted by Daniel Dage in Parents and parenting, Special Education, Teachers.
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Our local school system is presently considering a new calendar for the 2009-2010 school year. The school system is the largest employer in our county and that calendar can affect a lot of things for good or ill. Many other activities and events within the community revolve around the school activities. Every parent and teacher has a stake in this decision and it may turn out to be a point of major contention. These decisions will also have a significant impact on students with disabilities and their families. Here’s a run down of our choices and the issues around them including pros and cons (at least as I see it).

Calendar #1 – The current balanced calendar: This is called a balanced calendar because the summer break is much shorter that what other school systems have. It is not “year-round” school by any stretch, but it does balance the year out a bit better. We start in late July (and are among the earliest schools to start in the country) and end around memorial day. In addition to the normal holiday and spring breaks, we also get a week-long break in October and another week-long break in February. We also get a full week for Thanksgiving and the semester ends at the Christmas break that lasts two weeks. The advantage of this system is having those breaks throughout the year. The fall break is especially nice as most schools do not have this week off. That means one can get great travel deals and travel in general is less of a hassle. The shorter summer also means that regression is less of an issue. It is still an issue, but it is less than if we were off for an extra month. For me, this is my choice because after a few weeks I feel the itch to get back to teaching. I like my breaks more often and shorter. That is my own personal bias.

For students with disabilities, a shorter break is actually better. Extended school year is still offered, but it is less of an issue with a 6 week summer. There are more frequent disruptions, though, throughout the year. This is a mixed bag depending on your point of view. For my son, he really enjoys his breaks but if they are too long we can get more behavior problems. He also get a certain amount of fatigue after being in school several weeks straight without a break which also results in behavior problems. In general, the shorter, more frequent breaks work for us. When we first did this calendar, a lot of parents complained about finding childcare. However, they did manage to make the adjustment and I think most employees ans students like this calendar. The state does not, though. The state of Georgia feels rushed with our early start to score tests. Students who did not pass their standardized tests (CRCT) can take a make-up test during the summer, but there is a real rush to score them in time for the start of the new year. Many of these students will be relying on those scores to advance to middle or high school. Many businesses also do not like the short summer as they believe it shortens the tourist season and decreases spending and hurts the economy. That argument, to me, is totally weak as the spending/traveling economy is balanced out over the year instead of all crammed in the summer. Shorter breaks might even help the Georgia economy as families may choose to travel within Georgia since longer breaks afford more time to travel out of state than shorter ones.

Option # 2 – Mid-August Start Date: This calendar starts a week after the calendar above and eliminates the October and February breaks. It also provides a few more 3-day weekends. The advantage to this calendar is that the summer is a week longer and there is less disruption caused by week-long breaks. Scattering more 3-day weekends helps make up for the loss of the longer breaks. For students with disabilities, this might not be a bad calendar as it is does minimize disruptions to the routine while providing frequent breaks. It does stretch the summer out an extra week, which may seem like an eternity to many parents of these youngsters! This would probably be my second choice among the four choices. I do really like the fall break and I like the shorter summer, which this calendar works against, but it is the least radical departure of what we’re doing now. The state like this one better than my first choice for the reasons listed above.

Calendar #3 – Start after labor Day: Out of all the calendars, this is the one I would hate the most, and yet this is the model most school systems in the country use. The idea is to have a longer, more traditional summer. School would not start until the Tuesday after Labor Day. The week-long breaks would be gone and there would be fewer 3-day weekends. Thanksgiving would be a 3 days instead of all week. Second semester would not start until the end of January and school would not end until mid-June! That means no breaks for 3 entire months at the end of the year, when we need them the most! For students with disabilities, the regression factor and fatigue factor become more major issues with this calendar. Extended school year would have to be offered more and for a longer period of time. On the plus side, students attending summer school might get more of a break and teachers might be able to take summer classes. For me, I prefer a “start early, end early” school year. I have done the “end in mid-June” school year before, and was totally spent and exhausted at the end of it. While I’m tired at the end of May now, I couldn’t imagine dragging along for weeks after Memorial Day. And that’s if you don’t have any snow days to make up! Thanks but no thanks.

Option #4 – 4 Day Week: Out of all the option proposed, this one is the most radical, innovative and intriguing. Basically, it would involve attending school Tuesday-Friday for a minimum of one hour longer than the current school day. The school year would be 160 days instead of 180 days but students would actually have more “seat time.”

“Seat time.” That terminology is a huge red flag for me.

The advantages are numerous. First, there is the cost savings just from running buses less often and the cafeteria serving lunches less often. Teacher inservices and workdays would be done on Mondays and involve less schedule disruptions. Students and teachers could do their shopping, banking and other personal business on those days. And I’ve even thought to myself that a 4 day work week might be pretty nice. However, the reality is not the same as the idea. If kids are in school until 4:30, many will be getting on and off the buses in the dark much of the year. By 4:00, many of these kids will be feeling some serious hunger pains from the ever-more-meager lunch portions. And that means most of use teachers will not be leaving until way, way later as we need more daily planning for a longer day.

For students with disabilities, the longer day would be devastating. Fatigue is a constant factor anyway, and that last hour is not going to amount to a full hour’s worth of added learning. Learning is not like factory work, and neither is teaching, The law of diminishing returns will set in and it will amount to a net loss in the long run. For my kids with sever disabilities, we’d be seriously looking at having nap time or something. We’d also be looking at more feeding and changing requirements due to the extra time. If this were a factory or another type of work setting, I’d do it in a second. But not for teaching that requires so much out-of-teaching time in order to prepare. Class time with the students makes up a fraction of the time required to do the job correctly. So those Mondays would hardly be time off. They would be mostly unpaid work days. Nice idea and nice concept, the 4 day work week. But I don’t see it working for me or my kids.

So what we have now looks the best for me and my students. There is a lot of economic and political pressure being brought to bear to get our school district to change.  I can see change eventually coming, but not until the concept of “seat time” changes.

Backlash November 9, 2008

Posted by Daniel Dage in political activism.
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Following the election, I had some mixed feelings.   I’ve made no secret of my conservative beliefs and background when it comes to politics.  But my brand of conservatism does not exactly match up with either that espoused by George Bush or John McCain.  I’m somewhat libertarian in much of my thinking which is far removed from Republican  policies for the past 8 years.  So I never felt like I had that much of a dog in the race.  I did vote but it was all about where I live: in a world of exceptionalities.  In the end, I knew Sarah Palin would be the most tireless advocate for children with disabilities ever.  I’ve witnessed the power of such a determined parent more than once first hand.  But when Obama won, I was not heart broken or crestfallen.   I actually felt like I had witnessed something historic and perhaps far reaching in a positive way.  I really hope he can unify the country.  His speech was first rate in rhetoric as he talked about bringing people together.  He really is a good orator and one couldn’t help but be hopeful.

However, many of Obama’s followers have built up over eight years of vindictiveness and resentment.  Some of those resentments go back decades or even centuries.  This was one thing I was totally unprepared for.  I was not prepared to have such an outpouring of hostility towards conservatives after the election, where the victors are not looking ahead towards rebuilding the country so much as settling some old scores.

In 1968, a teacher named Jane Elliott began an experiment/exercise in the community of Riceville, Iowa.  She took white 3rd grade children and taught them about discrimination using a technique that is not without controversy.  You can see it here.  It was the famous blue eye- brown eye lesson, where each group gets a taste of being either the oppressed minority or the oppressor for the day.  I actually grew up just an hour or so away from Riceville, and that section of the country was pretty racist back then and many remnants still remain to this day.  Discrimination happens everywhere in many forms, as I’ve learned in my life and again lately.  Within minutes, the kids fell into their respective role of either the dominant culture or the one being dominated.  And the next day when the roles were switched, some kids were anxious to settle some scores from the day before.

So now I feel like it’s my turn to wear the collar because a different group finds themselves in power.  I think we are going to have a lot on our plate, as a nation. Too much to worry about petty differences.  I’m willing to give the new guy a chance to prove he’s not a divider.  But now it comes to me that the last guy our country elected said exactly the  same thing.   Forgive me for being too skeptical to believe all the hype.

We Need a Better Transition Program November 7, 2008

Posted by Daniel Dage in Uncategorized.
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The way NCLB is currently structured and the way schools are really pushing and driving, now is the time to straighten out the transition-to-work emphasis, especially for those students who are older than 18.  I currently have 2 that should have/could have graduated at 18, but they are being served in the public school system in my classroom.  Is the focus on academics the best thing for them at this age?  Certainly not for my students or those with more moderate intellectual disabilities.  The unemployment rate for students with disabilities runs 80-90%, and this is because school systems are ill-equipped for this task.  Public high schools are being pushed and pressured to offered a curriculum that prepares all students for college.  The large vocational programs that were in place in the 1970’s and ’80’s are now long gone and are largely replaced by more academic space or by computer labs. 
 
So on top of the demands for offering the regular education curriculum for all of my students, I am also having to try to offer some sort of meaningful job/employment services and skills.  These skills are not aligned with the basic core academic standards that I am supposed to be using in order to teach.  The daily living skills are also not aligned to core standards.  And yet, when I submit lesson plans, they must include the state academic standards and must somehow align.  This is the basic problem that NCLB brings to the local school system.  We are not doing that good of a job in the core mission of academics and we are also tasked with teaching some sort of meaningful vocational skills. 
 
The problem is that the least restrictive environment for a 16 year-old is not the same as it is for a 20 year-old.  And yet, that is exactly how it works in our school system.  Regular students are either working or going to further their education while students with severe disabilities have no other choice but to remain in the same building, in the same classrooms with the same teachers until they age out at 21+ years of age.  Other students have moved on while those with severe disabilities are stuck.  And for all of my training and background I simply do not have the resources to offer everything to everyone all the time.  When NCLB first started impacting those of us who taught this population, there was a lot of talk about aligning our goals with the standards.  We were to just take what we were already doing and find some way to make it fit into the regular curriculum.  Some things work more natural than others.  For instance, speaking and communicating are part of almost every task we do and that easily aligns.  We can count things that approach an algebra standard.  However, when we get into the real meat and guts of a high school academic curriculum, very little fits into what a student with severe disabilities does in the real world and in real life.  Geometry, American literature, physical science and world cultures are not very relevant to them.  That doesn’t mean they can’t learn it or that we can not teach them.  But when a skill has to be taught 500-1500 times in order to be mastered, is that the best use of our time?  To be sure, teaching the core content takes alot of creativity and is sometimes even fun.  It does, in fact, reflect just what their peers are doing, only at a more basic level.
 
However, at the age of 18, that is no longer true.  Their peers or not still in high school.  They have moved on, and so it is that the students with severe disabilities should also move on.  The present academically focused atmosphere of NCLB arguably serves its purpose but there gets to be a point where is becomes an even more serious impediment and liability.  Students need to be preparing for work outside of school.  They need to get outside of the bell schedule, outside of class changes and out of their desks.  They need to be in a seperate place where the focus is solely on transitioning to work.  The regular high school is not trhe least restrictive environment for students who are 19-21+.  They need to be in a place better suited to train them towards goals that will better serve them outside of the constraints of NCLB.  A student could opt to continue to work towards the regular credentials, of course, but there should also be another option besides spending the entire 7-8 years after middle school in one building, in one room.  This simply turns high school SID/PID rooms into yet another version of institutionalization.  No other population of student gets handled and treated this way.
 
To that end, we do need to do a better job of including our students in the regular education setting, even if it is for a modified period of time.  At the present time, the opportunity for discimination is entirely too rampant.  I have voiced concern about mainstreaming and inclusion before.  But after waking up to some issues with being discriminated against, I realize that the only way to combat it is to always be around and in everyone’s face.  Plus, for my part, if they won’t let me get away from SID/PID than perhaps I can gain access to the regular education classroom by getting my students placed there.  Suddenly I become a more critical part of the landscape as teachers scramble trying to figure out what to do with these kids.
 
So two things need to happen: 1.) Make a final drive towards full inclusion 2.) Establish a place for those who graduate from high school to be served until they are aged out, where the emphasis is vocational skills rather than the core standards mandated by NCLB.
 
It’s really going to be up to parents to make demands toward this, though.  I’m speaking as both teacher and parent but know that as an employee of the school system my voice can more easily be squelched.  Plus this might not be something other parents want, so I’m curious about that.  Should we more fully include those with severe and profound disabilities? 
 
I will say to you parents that the regular school system is simply too poorly equipped to offer your student the vocational training that he/she really and truly needs.  The mission of the school system is to educate students according to the state curriculum standards.  That will always come first, and everything else is extra, regardless of what is put on the IEP.  We can write lovely goals and a lovely transition plan but that neither compels nor empowers us to carry out those plans.  The IEP is pretty much toothless in areas that do not align with NCLB.  If it does not address the state curriculum, I’m going to have a hard time carrying it out because the law clearly mandates what I’m required to do — teach to the standards.  And I do not have sufficient time to even do that very well.  So guess what happens to those goals, objectives and transition plans?  They are being sidelined.
 
Under IDEA, all students are entitled to a free and appropriate public education (FAPE)  However, NCLB has totally changed the definition of “appropriate.”  It is all about the state mandated curriculum and meeting standards of performance mandated by the federal government.  So you may want your child to learn some functional skills like tying his/her shoe, going to the bathroom, do some sorting, assembling or other vocational/life skill tasks.  However we at the school are under serious constraints of time and resources.  I’m going to do my best for the students that I have, and their parents but this is not the same business that it was when I started or even 2 years ago.  The shift has been focused and radical.