blogger profile

Charlene Ross

Special Education Instructional Assistant and aspiring writer

I'm a 40ish happily married mom living in the suburbs of Southern California and trying my hardest to have a life more fun and interesting than that sounds! After college I went to work in the music industry which sounds exciting, but actually I was an overworked, underpaid, stressed out assistant ...

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The Best Job I've Ever Had

by Charlene Ross

OMG.  There was this kid at school yesterday who…oh wait.  I can’t tell you that story.  Too bad too, because it was M-F-ing funny.  But I respect these kids too much to use them as material for this blog.  Well that and I’d really like to keep my job.  Which I must say as difficult as it is, is the best job I’ve ever had.  (And I once had a job where I got to talk to Bob Dylan and Tom Petty on the phone.  That was actually the worst job I ever had.  Nothing to do with Bob or Tom, it was the woman I worked for.  Crazy bitch.  There are definitely some stories there.  For another time.  Back to the present…)

It’s kind of ironic that I have this job in the first place.  I mean I don’t really like kids.  Okay that’s not true – I do like kids.  I’m just not one of those people who loves, loves, loves kids.  They’re okay, and I like mine an awful lot (most days) but it never really occurred to me to work with children.  And I’m certainly not that fun mom – you know the one that swims with all the kids in the pool or plays ball with all the kids at the park while all the other moms sit on their ass and chit chat.  I’m a chit chatter.  On my ass.  I’m lazy like that.

But this lazy mom had to start pulling her weight in the income department and I wanted a job where I could be home when my kids got home from school to help them with their homework.  And summers off would sure be nice.  So I started subbing.  And the best way to get sub jobs is to work in Special Ed.  I didn’t think I’d last a day in Special Ed because God knows I don’t have the patience for that.  I start to scream at my kids at the drop of the hat so there was just no way I’d be able to put up with the frustration of working with a special needs child.  But oddly enough it turns out I could.  For some strange reason these kids don’t frustrate me – at least not in the way my own do, you know to the point of yelling or crying or sending myself to my room.

After a while I found a job at a school in our district with an amazing staff and amazingly wonderful kids – kids who would provide me with excellent blogging material if only I could tell their story (I mean once I saw a kid lick the bottom of his shoe!)  I will say this:  I’ve been bit, kicked, slapped, pinched, permanently scarred and spit on but I don’t really care.  (Okay the spitting did kind of make me mad.)  These behaviors are just releases from kids who don’t know what else to do to let go of their frustrations because they can’t find the words.  (Except maybe the spitting – that was just a defiant form of disrespect, but I got over it, really.)  And when you see all that these kids can do, all the things they’re capable of, and the growth they experience by the end of the school year – it makes it all worth it, maybe even the spitting.