Introduction
I currently teach high school Special Education students, with mild to severe and Autistic disabilities, in a small classroom setting. All my students use a variety of learning styles. These include kinesthetic, visual and auditory learning. Every new lesson must be taught repeatedly but also in a varied way, such as color coding, creating visual posters or doing a make and take activity. I teach functional reading, writing, math, science and soon will teach social studies. Despite my students being in high school, their academic levels are anywhere from Kindergarten to Third grade. Two of my students are non-verbal, one student is minimally verbal with limited mobility, and the rest are able to communicate. Good attendance is a strength for my class; each student attends 95% of the time during a school year. A few of the things I work on continuously on are: Writing and Grammar. They progress academically in reading and math throughout the school year. However, writing two sentences or an introductory paragraph has been a challenge with my students. They have access to a laptop and iPad in the classroom. We have text to speech, but they easily get frustrated trying to correct the errors verbally or their speech is not clear enough. Half of the students attend Speech services weekly. Two of my students are unable to grasp a writing tool. Despite their communication concerns, they appear to understand our directions by how they react when it is time to work. They stay engaged about 60% of the time and mini breaks help.
The high school I teach at is located on the Navajo reservation. In the United States, there is 326 federal recognized Indian reservations. The Navajo Nation is the largest reservation that covers 27,000 square miles in the Southwest region. There are close to 400,000 enrolled members; enrollment includes a CIB, Certificate of Indian Blood. We are near the middle of the reservation, so we do not have access to the cities surrounding our area. There is only one grocery store, we normally drive 2-3 hours away to enjoy a Walmart shopping spree or other grocery stores. There are roughly around 7,000 community members living in my community. We still have families living in hogans without electricity, running water or plumbing. Our school buses travel close to 55 miles one way to pick students up. Despite being in such a rural area, our school building is quite big and attractive. Sports are widely participated and publicized, so a majority of the high schools on this reservation have an enormous gymnasium. We host close to 650 students from grades nineth to twelfth. Close to 85 students are identified with disabilities. Our high school recently received the letter A grade. I teach nineth to twelfth graders for six out of seven periods daily. I usually have around 9-12 students in my classroom and one student being taught home bound. I teach all core subjects in addition to Career Exploration and Life Skills. One of the Life Skills lessons is cooking. I am excited to add in science standards. My students will gain a deeper understanding of science as well. This will make science fun and exciting while enjoying a good dish.
Our district celebrates one full week of Native American Heritage. Each school day involves one activity that students may participate in; an example is making Clan T-shirts. The Navajo clan system is a matrilineal structure that guides our social interactions and relationships, especially with dating and marriage. There are 140 clans in the Navajo system. The primary and most important clan is your mothers’; it is our identifier, our bloodline. An individual has four clans: mother, father, maternal grandfather and paternal grandfather.
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