Back in my home town in Montana I have had the pleasure of working as an aid alongside some of the staff in my old school’s special education department. Over the past three year’s I have helped as an aid with these children after I had gotten done with classes for the semester and the majority of these children I worked with had autism. I had never worked with special needs kids before, so at the beginning of this experience I was definitely nervous.
I have been doing this because I enjoy the challenge of working with these children. I feel as if I am truly a part of helping people’s education as I work with and have watched these children progress over the past few years.
Now, the way you have to work with these children really varies from child to child, and as such every child needs to be cared for differently. Most of these children are very set in their ways and behaviors though. They have strict schedules that they all follow and any deviation from that schedule usually results in increased difficult behaviors.
It can be very strange for the outside observer watching in. For example, one of the children the first year I aided had a lot of peculiar qualities. The first time I saw him walk around and meow like a cat I asked one of the special ed. teachers if I should intervene. They told me right away that while I might feel like kids should have to act a certain way, sometimes intervening with these children just wouldn’t work. This is just their normal behavior and sometimes it needed to be accepted. The children in the classroom I were in were generally cased as the more moderate to severe children on the spectrum, and the high functioning ones that can follow normal rules are normally integrated into the regular classrooms.
Obviously this outward behavior was not always tolerate, and sometimes if he refused to transition to the next activity planned for him we would have to take away one of his “fun” activities for the day, which was never very fun because he didn’t always agree with doing that. Some of the children sometimes even had “meltdown” experiences with inconsolable crying and tantruming. The major problem with these were that we weren’t always sure what caused them and it made it hard to prevent the situations from happening again in the future.
There were a many other difficulties I experienced with working with these children. Many of the children I worked with had underdeveloped language skills that is a common problem among autistic children, preferred to be alone instead of interacting with the other children and had other difficulties in expressing needs and emotions. This made it particularly harder to interpret the individual needs of these children, but all the more rewarding when the hard work you put into these individuals in reflected in better behaviors.
Overall my experiences as a special education aid have been very beneficial for my own growth as a person. I have learned to work with kids, and especially special needs kids, at a much more helpful level than I ever thought I would be able to. If you ever find yourself in the situation where you can work with children’s in the special need’s department, I suggest you try it even if you think you might not enjoy it, it is truly a rewarding experience.
My Experience as a Special Education Aid – Dealing With Autism in Kids
