Junior Theme #3

After about another week of research, I have found my topic to be even more interesting than I though it would be. I have chosen to interview a special education teacher at a Transition School (18-22 year olds), but I have not been able to contact her as of yet.
I finshed my book last night. The only usuable part for my paper was the first half, or when the narrator was in primary and secondary school, but it was still interesting to read about the full like of an undiagnosed woman with autism. She went through her whole life, or at least until she was 26, before knowing what exactly she had, with people for the first 26 years of her life just calling her "disturbed" or "slow." It is really interesting to see the world through the lens of someone with autism, especially because I spend 2 periods of every school day with students who have the disease. Now, I can actually understand where they are coming from, and exactly why they do not feel emotions or even have that much communication with "our world" versus "their own world."
For my paper, I have only written an introduction, but I am very satisfied with it. I plan to write about a paragraph each night, and the next section of our paper is due Monday.

Illinois and Developmental Disabilities

During advisory today, I was at an ELS (Enriching Lives through Service) meeting. For those who do not know, ELS is a club at our school that allows regular-ed students to interact with special-ed student in a classroom environment. I participate in ELS during all of my free periods, which is about 8 periods each week. At the meeting, the sponsor brought up an article that was sent to him. I just read the article and was very surprised by what it said. It was about how out of the 50 states in the US, Illinois is 51st (when District of Columbia included) out of all of the states to have general funding for people with Developmental Disabilities. Think about it: the 10th most wealthiest state in the nation funds people with disabilities the least? That does not make any sense at all to me. The article said that in order for Illinois to reach average spending would take about $250 million. I think that something needs to be done so that students with disabilities all over Illinois can be taught at the exact level that they need to be taught at. I plan to use this article as evidence in my Junior Theme.

Junior Theme #2

So I have not blogged in a while, but this is just to tell you where I am going with Junior Theme. It took me a while, but I finally got a question. It started out as Why are there so many laws about the rights of and the responsibilities to people with special needs? I discovered that this is not exactly what I was looking for, so it changed to Why should society pay for autism therapy? Finally, my real question that I am most likely going to stick with is Why is there such an increase in the demand for special education?

Since there is such a wide range of disabilities, I plan to focus mainly on autism. I have looked on CQ Researcher, and I found a report that I will use. I have looked at a couple different books on autism, such as The Curious Incident of the dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, Thinking in Pictures by Temple Grandin, and I have finally landed on Without Reason by Charles Hart. This book is about a man who copes with having both an older brother and a son diagnosed with autism. It is a little long, but I feel that it will be a very interesting book to read. One other thing that I am looking forward to doing is finding a movie that I can watch relating to this subject. So far I think I will watch Rain Man or Forrest Gump.