Interview Blog

The second person I interviewed for my challenge project was Shara Bumgarner. She has been in education for a long time, and for the last 23 she has been at the Joy School. The Joy School is a school that provides an education to students who weren’t able to succeed in a traditional school. Almost all the students would be classified as special education by the public system. In the interview she talked a lot about how she has learned from her experiences both at joy and before that as a public school teacher. A lot of my project focused on the problem of misunderstanding, as that was the area I was most interested in. She did conforme a lot of concussions I had come to after doing my research, however her way of looking at the cause and the solution of the problem was new. I myself was in Special Education when in elementary school a part of the reason I was drawn to research misunderstanding was that I experienced it. Many past teachers didn’t seem to understand how to teach me or even how to just understand me. So I thought that training was the real solution. If teachers just knew how to recognize and deal with special education students it would be fine, but this interview helped me look at the problem a new way. Now I am not saying that more training won’t do any good, Mrs. Bumgarner did agree with me that teachers are under trained. She meets teachers who can’t even say dyselixca much less understand what it means, however as much good as more training can do it won’t prepare you for every child. Mrs. Bumgarner talked a lot about how we should be focusing more on helping children as individuals. Her idea was to try and help kids based on what you see their struggling with inside of letting formal testing tell you what they should be struggling with. A problem in Special Education is that many children don’t get the right kind of help and many of the reachsearch journals I read blamed that on bad testing and legislation. I have to say Mrs. Bumgarner's way of looking at the problem made more sense to me. Disabilities look different in each person because they don’t cause you to gain or lose anything they cause you to change. People who are blind may have worse seeing sense, but they tend to have better other senses. People who are dyselxic tend to struggle with school because they have a weaker left brain, however they tend to do better creativity because they have a stronger right brain. So expecting every student with the same disability to be helped by the same things is not reasonable. This idea of focusing on the iduival wouldn’t only help special education but all students, if teachers had smaller classes and more materials they would be able to get to know and help each student so that they could all succeed. While I do still think that tranning is important I think I put too much value on it and that I needed to widen my horizons for what the true answer is here.