For my interview project, I pick a very unique family that isn’t normal these days. In this family, they have two set of twins that both have a disability. That means, the parents have a total of four children with disabilities in their family. The first set of twins is a two girls that just have mild learning disabilities and the second set is boys that are non-verbal with severe autism. When deciding who to interview, I choose to interview on of the adult sibling Meghan. She is part of the first set of twins with mild learning disbailities. I choose her because I wanted to know her perspective on her family and her brothers with severe special needs. During this interview, I asked Meghan many different kinds of questions relating to her family, Meghan’s family consist of her Mom (Beth Anne), Dad (Doug), Twin sister (Jessica), Brothers (Jack and Michael. The only people that are currently living in there house is her Mom, Dad and two brothers. Her sister and her are currently away at college. A few of the main questions I wanted to ask her before asking about her brothers was questions about her family. I wanted her opinion of her family. These questions consisted of what are the family strengths and weakneese, who has more parental roles in the family, and what is a typical day like in her family. Meghan stated that her family strengths are staying positive in any situation no matter what the situation is and their weaknesses are admitting if they need help early on, They like to fix thing internally and then it comes to a point that they can’t manage it there selves. For the parents roles, Meghan said that her Mom makes most of the decisions for the family. Her dad is the breadwinner of the family but is still involved. Her moms makes and plans the decisions for transportation, education, medical, and other services. Both parents share The first thing I wanted to know was what she thinks her brothers strengths and weaknesses. For these specific questions, I only asked about one brother instead of both of them to limit the time of the interview. I asked about Jack’s strengths and weaknesses in school. Meghan said that his strength is his elective classes like P.E, art, reading, and writing. His weaknesses are math, history, and science. The next question I asked was what does she expect for Michael in the future. She told me that it will be interesting for how far he will come because he is very dependent on his mother right now. She believe that it will be a huge issue for him. She wants to see his communication skills to get better but overall he is a very smart, funny person with a great future she says. The last question I asked Meghan was about what helps Michael and Jack in school. For being a future special educator I thought I could reflect a lot on this question by getting helpful tips. She told me that Michael does very well with his classroom aide and in smaller classes. He also loves when he get rewarded for his work. He enjoys sensory breaks with either his ipad or just relaxing on the carpet. Finally, Michael doesn’t like transitions to classes and this is difficult for him. Jack on the other hand, he loves school and is always on top of his game. He loves going from class to class. He
My assignment is a combination of two interviews. I interviewed an Assistant Principal, Ms. Katis Romig, as well as, our Curriculum Director, Mrs. Maria Petkanas. They are both responsible for the curriculum development and instruction for the school where I work, P.S. 811Q. I also learned a fair amount from Ms. Romig and Mrs. Petkanas including that District 75 Citiwide Special Education’s Deputy Superintendent, Ms. Barbara Joseph, had given the school feedback and suggested writing curriculum and textbooks. This was the only feedback she gave our principal during her observation last week.
According to smith and Hamon (2012), Families are considered as a whole in society. However, they believed that couples have many components in which makes up the family, if one component is missing, the family as a whole can get unbalance (Smith & Hamon, 2012). In the Brice’s family, communication was the component that was missing. The couple was not able to communicate their differences, which was what caused Carolyn and David to verbally insult each other. Smith and Hamon (2012), also explain that a person who expresses his or her feeling is considered as someone who is breaking the functions of their family system; especially if the person is focusing on the individual who is causing the problem, rather than the problem itself. In the Brice family, Carolyn could be considered the one that cause the dysfunction in the family structure because she was focusing on David as the problem of their marriage, rather than focusing of the elements that are causing their problems. Smith and Hamon (2012) explain that individuals should focus on how to solve a problem, rather than trying to find who is causing the
As a future educator, I have reflected on how my own personal experiences have formed me into the person that I am today, and how I can use my experiences to help my future students. I have also reflected on how I can information about family systems as well as risk and resiliency to better understand families that I will work with in the future, as well as how children with special needs impact a family’s structure. I believe all of these components are essential for teacher, student, and family collaboration and success.
I decided to interview my older brother’s friend, Cory Ringlein. I have known him most of my life and he has suffered from lymphedema as long as I have known him, this is important because his mom was a social worker before she stopped working to focus on Cory’s illness. I know this was pretty influential on Cory; he watched his mom work as a social worker and helped him make the decision to be a social worker.
Kaakinen, Gedaly-Duff, Coehlo & Hanson, (2010) report family is the biggest resource for managing care of individuals with chronic illness; family members are the main caregivers and provide necessary continuity of care. Therefore, it is important for health care providers to develop models of care based on an understanding what families are going through (Eggenberger, Meiers, Krumwiede, Bliesmer, & Earle, 2011). The family I chose to interview is in the middle of a transition in family dynamics. I used the family as a system approach as well as a structure-function theoretical framework to the effects of the changes in dynamic function. Additionally, the combinations of genogram, ecomap, adaptations of the Friedman Family Assessment model as well as Wright & Leahey’s 15 minute family interview were utilized.
For that, I interviewed my boss, Karen. I see her almost every work day but there were still many things I wanted to ask her about. I knew that she had been married to a man before she met her wife, and that she still had his last name even after separating and remarrying. I also knew that her father was a Methodist minister and performed her marriage ceremony back when he could’ve gotten in a lot of hot water for doing so. I knew that she was adopted, too. But the rest of her life, the in-between moments, were still a mystery to me. So, I really enjoyed that interview. As you can tell from the transcription, we laughed a lot and got along well. I think she felt comfortable and she told me later that she had enjoyed talking with me. I also came more prepared and with more questions. It was hard to do my initial research on my student interviewee because there wasn’t a lot of prior information that I could find about her. With Karen, I not only had my own prior information, but she is also easily found on the internet. A lot of that has to do with her age and the businesses she has been involved
The third child looked at was Sarah who has a learning disability that wasn 't diagnosed until she was in fifth grade due to her ability to compensate for her disability in the previous grades. It is found that she has an expressive language problem. Sarah understands everything well, but has trouble expressing what she knows. I was surprised that the solution was to just practice speaking in school. I expected it to be a lot more complicated to help
As I ponder whom I could possibly interview, my wife suggests, what do you think of interviewing my dad? This immediately appeals to me but there are challenges. He is living in a VA nursing home with early onset dementia. He also has a hard time hearing due to his injuries roughly forty years ago. This would make a phone interview extremely difficult. Instead, I start to formulate a similar idea, what if I interviewed my wife on her experiences as the child of a disabled veteran? I move forward with this idea with a dose of apprehension. I don’t want my wife to relive any pain. During the interview I find just the opposite to happen.
Siblings who have sisters or brothers with disabilities express a number of special concerns they have a...
Sara Palin said “sometimes even the greatest joys bring challenge, and children with special needs inspire a very, very special love.” When I was a child my mom had to open a home day care. The reason for this was my cousins have special needs and their mother could not find a day care that was willing to help them. Having my cousins with me as I grew up help me understand that people with special need are no different but just need more love. This is why scenario three seemed the best one for me to choose.
I instantly realized when I gave her odd numbers, or numbers that were over 100 that she was easily confused. This is where I as the interviewer definitely began to struggle. All I wanted to do was help her, and I knew that she thought that because I was her sister I would help her if she acted confused for long enough. For a lot of the questions she did not find the right answers. She DID find some great strategies though. I asked her a question about saving for a horse, and how much more money she needed to reach $100 if she already had $60. In the beginning she attempted to count by ones, but she soon realized that she could count by tens and she would find the answer a lot sooner. It was definitely interesting to see. She also answered a few of the questions by drawing pictures which showed me that she needed to physically see what was going on in order to be able to think clearly about the problem. One of the biggest things that I learned was when I decided to give her a few number sentences to see how well she did with them in comparison to the word problems. She had a MUCH easier time answering simple number sentences as opposed to the whole word
The parent discussed the fact that it was hard to decide on what aspect was most challenging since the “challenging aspect” had changed depending on the age of the child. This is an important aspect for all special needs educators to remember when establishing and fostering relationships with families of special needs students. As the textbook states, “Each family is a unique unit that changes as it goes through the stages and transitions of the family life cycle” (Martha E. Snell, 2011, p. 60). The textbook goes on to explain that special education professionals need to be aware of life cycle stages and transitions. “Two dimensions of the family life cycle that are important for educators to understand include (a) life-cycle stages and (b) life-cycle transitions” (Martha E. Snell, 2011, p.
To begin, I am going to write about my weaknesses and how they transitioned into strengths. First, I remember after each assignment in class was introduced I
I'm sure I would go through all stages of whatever someone goes through when they notice false comments of themselves or an immediate family member appear in the local newspaper. I would be shocked, since we are not famous like the Kardashians. So who would even care? Also, we have great friends, neighbors and family, so who would not say such things? On the other hand nobody is perfect and there might be one or two people who might think my family and I are not that great or might want to crush us. You never know.
Interviewer: You briefly mentioned your father in there, would you like to elaborate on what your parents were like?