The Speed of Dark

I posted last week about our son’s first “solo” day at community college–during which he coped with bus rides, transfers, a broken-down bus, classes, more bus rides, etc.

What I didn’t know ahead of time was that he would have a paper-and-pen quiz in his pre-algebra class.   On which…wait for it…he made 100.    Right after the bus trip on which one bus broke down.

We’d planned to have a parent ride the buses with M- and be available nearby on campus for the first month…but a combination of things (including M- commenting on the way home one night in the second week that he thought it would be more fun when he could go alone)  led to this morning…we dropped him off at the bus station 20 miles closer to the city, where the express bus runs to downtown.  From there he would transfer to a local headed back north and end up at the campus.   He was supposed to call us from campus when he arrived, which should’ve been about 8 am.

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M-‘s second week of college was complicated by other medical problems in the family, but he is still happy to be going and engaged in his classes.   He is taking notes in class, and can usually give a moderately coherent report of the class.   He is working diligently on his homework.  He survived his first in-class quiz (pre-algebra) and made a passing grade (78/100.)   That’s higher than I made on my first calculus quiz and higher than he made on his assessment test before entry, so we’re very pleased.   Read the rest of this entry »

One of the things many parents wonder about–and worry about–is whether their kid with disabilities will be able to go to college.   It’s pretty easy, sometimes, to come up with a firm “No, sorry, this child will simply never be able to attend college” and at that point concern can shift to other ways to prepare the child for adult life.  And sometimes it’s pretty easy to see that a given child will be able to–colleges now accommodate students in wheelchairs, for instance, much better than they did fifty years ago, when simply being unable to walk unaided barred wheel-chair bound students who could not reach classrooms or labs or rooms in the dorms.

It’s the borderline ones–the “maybe” cases–that cause parents the most angst.  I know, because I have one of those.    And yet…in time, with enough hard work from everyone involved…sometimes “maybe” turns to “yes.”   Yesterday we had a taste of “yes.” Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks, as our son, with his dad’s help, has figured out a way to use public transportation part of the way to community college, and has continued to try to improve his reading skills in preparation for his first classes.   They’ve walked around on the campus; they got his student ID and his bus card and so on and so forth.  Read the rest of this entry »

Our son’s been increasingly interested in getting more education, for the very practical reason of earning more money…having the part-time job has taught him that he’s unlikely to ever make enough to live on from it, even if it were full-time.

So we took him to the nearest city’s community college to find out what was available.  Very sensibly, they insist on all incoming students (not just ones who have special ed and resource courses in their high school transcript) taking their assessment test.    I had been encouraging him to read and write something every day, and he had been, but what with my own work I hadn’t been teaching him.   We had hopes he would do well, at least on the math part of the test.

He didn’t.

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