Interviewing Children With Learning Disabilities: Fill & Download for Free

And there it is: the real problem with unchecked illegal immigration. Most of the people that come here illegally will become wards of the state. Fully 60% of illegals end up on welfare and if they are in the country 10 years or longer that number jumps to 70%. In other words, as people without higher education or skills continue to come, we must all share in the burden of their care. This is wrong on so many levels.Now about free healthcare. I don’t get free healthcare. Do you?Why should someone who has violated our sovereign law be rewarded by free healthcare that our citizens don’t even get? Do we really want to expand on the already vast number of benefits given to illegals? Not if we want to discourage this type of behavior.I admit to being largely ignorant to the extent of this problem until I moved to the Rio Grande Valley in south Texas. Here I discovered how many access their welfare benefits. In the capacity of my job at the time, I had to prequalify couples for financing. While I was interviewing a young couple I learned that the man worked as a mechanic under the table so he paid no taxes. His wife (they were married in Mexico) did not work but received $710/month for each of her children through SSI. (The scam worked like this…get your kids jacked up on sugar, doctor diagnoses kids with learning disability, attention deficit disorder, etc…and some doctors down here…especially medicaid doctors are complicit)In addition she received child support of $1500/ month from a different baby daddy and food stamps and medicaid. (Because welfare had no knowledge of her husband living in the house. When I asked about savings, they were doing very well with over $40,000 saved (how many of us couldn’t save a lot of money if our groceries and healthcare were paid by the government, we didn’t have taxes deducted from our income, and received $2100/month to live on?) This woman was 25 years old and living better than most retirees. Also she had a social security number (he didn’t) so when tax time came around, she could file for earned income credit and probably get $3000-$5000 refund of money she never paid in. Now do we see why they are unwilling to wait and try to come here legally?If this makes you see red, you are not alone. And this has nothing to do with race …it is about what is right/ legal vs what is wrong/illegal. Why should US taxpayers foot the bill for citizens of other countries? Because these non-citizens are getting benefits, how many citizens are either not getting theirs or getting less than they should? These are the questions we should ask when we file taxes and get less that we expected or have to write a check!So no, it is not right to give free healthcare to illegals. That being said, we do have a responsibility to render aid to anyone whose life is in peril when they cross but that cost should be subtracted from any future payments given to their home country.

The short answer is yes. The reason why I wouldn’t have been just neglected and denied support that would have been needed for me to be able to use my Asperger syndrome. I wouldn’t have been to the schools I had been forced to attend which were not really for autistic children unless they had learning disabilities or borderline intellectual functioning and after denied neuroprivileged status. My parents would have none of it and thought 16 years ago my mum thought I was disappointed to be diagnosed but I wasn’t, she was. But then again there wouldn’t have been no support in the 1970s when I was still at school and was just expected to sink or swim and my family thought that was supposed to be good for me. It wasn’t the best situation for me didn’t happen as I was born 24 years too early when Asperger syndrome was only defined in a paper that was in German and the only autism diagnosed back then was what psychologists called early infantile autism. My mum and dad back then didn’t think that I was autistic because I was a very affectionate child and they thought autistic children showed no affection and thought it reflected badly on my mum. With the right support and the right kind of school attendance rather than being put in with children with learning disabilities and an allistic school with no support just put a year behind and then put with the lower ability ones to be bullied and harassed I could have ended up going to university and perhaps being a scientist or something like that and then going into autism activism rather than failing to get even entry level jobs which are difficult to concentrate on because of being to tedious or even the interviews since those later caused me to have seizures which led to an epilepsy diagnosis in 1987.

A2A.Oh man. This is the question, isn’t it? I could fill volumes on this topic, but I’ll try to keep it brief to give an overview of my thoughts on the subject.Overall, I believe that there is a place for objective, standardized assessment. Standardized tests can provide data to be used in a multitude of positive ways, but at the same time, too much of a good thing can kill you, and America is strangling its education system with standardized testing.First, the good:Georgia uses standardized testing in a couple of positive ways. We periodically use the Iowa and CogAt to assess students’ achievement potential and cognitive abilities in elementary and middle school. These tests are used primarily for identifying gifted students and for deciding class placement (remediation or acceleration). These tests can also help identify students who have learning disabilities and put them on a track to address their individual needs. They are not perfect by any measure, but they offer a starting point, which is helpful.Those are good reasons to test: so that all students—remedial, on-level, and accelerated—are identified to begin tailoring their individual education tracks appropriately. Obviously this is not the end of that tailoring. After the initial placement, the school and teachers should take over differentiating for individual students based on personal interactions and subjective assessment.The bad:The problem is that American education saw these initial benefits in standardized testing and is now attempting to calculate all student achievement with objective data, so we’re giving “standardized” tests for everything, regardless of whether or not it’s an appropriate measure.For example, we’re using standardized tests to compare students to a baseline rather than evaluating progress. Children who are not native English speakers, children who have certain learning disabilities, and children who just haven’t matured to a point to understand the gravity and purpose of these assessments traditionally do not perform to these baseline standards, even though they may make significant progress through the year. A student who begins the year comprehending 25% of the material and grows to understand 60% has improved immensely, but we’re still using the tests to tell him he’s a failure. How’s that for motivation?In addition, we’re using these assessments to evaluate teacher effectiveness, which is problematic. I’m a teacher, and I have control over a lot of things in my classroom. I control my lessons. I control my differentiation. I control my management strategies. I control the development of my assessments. I control how I remediate and accelerate instruction. For all the aspects of my classroom that I do control, I cannot control who ultimately learns the material.We should evaluate teachers, and we should hold teachers accountable for the factors they directly control and influence; however, standardized tests are a specious method for accomplishing this.This week, I started my two week review for my end-of-year assessment—the Georgia Milestones of Academic Progress (GMAP). Here are the projects that I put on hold in order to go over the test review:6th Grade: an exploration of the students’ identity and family heritage, conducted through a series of lessons and activities that had them exploring family ancestry, interviewing important people in their lives, and learning about the traditions and customs that make them individuals.8th Grade: The Causes Project—A group initiative in which students choose a real-world social, political, or environmental issue and create an awareness campaign to address the issue. They conduct research, contact representatives and field experts, and create an online presence to discuss the issue and present their solutions.I am holding off on these projects because I want to prep my students for the specific question types they’ll see on the Milestone. They deserve to do as well as possible on the test because they’re bright students, and I know how to give them an edge. But I’m still sacrificing time that I could be devoting to activities that have more real-world application, simply because the Milestones will not ask them to:show leadershipcollaborate with peersuse critical thoughtdevelop a sense of personal identity and purposecreate solutionspursue their interests and strengthsdevelop new skillsNo standardized test evaluates these skills reliably.Standardized testing should be used to identify initial conditions and provide objective, non-specific data which can be used to help certain students in general, broad terms.Instead, we’re using standardized tests to evaluate all achievement for all students, and we’re using the data to penalize students, schools, and teachers for not reaching (arguably) arbitrary standards.