Today was my wife's first day back at school after her long summer break. It's as good a time as any to answer a question I get asked a lot pertaining to her employment...What does your wife do?
Setting aside for a moment my often suggested alternative question, (What doesn't she do?), she works at an elementary school here in the west end of Henrico County as an Interventionist. Whenever I use that descriptor I get puzzled looks. Actually, whenever I hear the term "interventionist" I think it should be a new Cabinet level post in the Trump White House.(but that's another story). In Pam's case it describes someone who takes small groups of K thru 5th grade students who are struggling in math and reading for specialized extra instruction in short, thirty minute sessions. I probably just made a hash of the proper description, but it's the best I can do, having not been schooled in the esoteric language of the modern education bureaucracy. However you describe the job, she is unbelievably good at it...so good, in fact, that when her students learn that they have improved so much in their reading and math skills that they no longer need to be in Mrs. Dunnevant's class, many of them burst into tears!
Generally speaking, here's how it works:
Four second graders who are all horrible at math are marched down to her class for a thirty minute session with Mrs. Dunnevant. They walk into the most colorful, crazy, fun looking class in the entire school. They meet this energetic, beautiful blonde woman who makes them all feel like they are the coolest kids in the history of elementary education and she is the luckiest teacher in America for getting to teach them! What a coincidence, right?! Then she introduces them all to the thousand ways that they can earn a stunning variety of stickers, gadgets and gizmos that she has picked out just for them! Some kids warm up to her immediately, others take longer, but eventually they all eventually fall in love with Mrs. Dunnevant.
What makes this all the more remarkable is the fact that many of her students can barely speak English. See, along with her regular, garden variety west end kids, Pam has had kids from Russia, Pakistan, India, Jordan, Ethiopia, the Sudan, and Vietnam. Occasionally, I'll surprise her with an iced coffee from Starbucks, and when I walk into her class it looks like a summer camp meeting at the United Nations.
But, no matter where these kids come from, by the time they finish a year with my wife a couple of things are true: #1 they are measurably better at math and reading and #2 they know that Mrs. Dunnevant loves them.
It's a part time job. She has no benefits and she gets paid by the hour, which is officially 4 and a half per day, although her actually time spent working is closer to 6 or 7. It's at times overwhelming, at other times frustrating. But, when she reports for work at the beginning of a year and hardly any of last year's students are back, she gets the incredible thrill of knowing she has made a difference.
So yeah, that's what my wife does.
Setting aside for a moment my often suggested alternative question, (What doesn't she do?), she works at an elementary school here in the west end of Henrico County as an Interventionist. Whenever I use that descriptor I get puzzled looks. Actually, whenever I hear the term "interventionist" I think it should be a new Cabinet level post in the Trump White House.(but that's another story). In Pam's case it describes someone who takes small groups of K thru 5th grade students who are struggling in math and reading for specialized extra instruction in short, thirty minute sessions. I probably just made a hash of the proper description, but it's the best I can do, having not been schooled in the esoteric language of the modern education bureaucracy. However you describe the job, she is unbelievably good at it...so good, in fact, that when her students learn that they have improved so much in their reading and math skills that they no longer need to be in Mrs. Dunnevant's class, many of them burst into tears!
Generally speaking, here's how it works:
Four second graders who are all horrible at math are marched down to her class for a thirty minute session with Mrs. Dunnevant. They walk into the most colorful, crazy, fun looking class in the entire school. They meet this energetic, beautiful blonde woman who makes them all feel like they are the coolest kids in the history of elementary education and she is the luckiest teacher in America for getting to teach them! What a coincidence, right?! Then she introduces them all to the thousand ways that they can earn a stunning variety of stickers, gadgets and gizmos that she has picked out just for them! Some kids warm up to her immediately, others take longer, but eventually they all eventually fall in love with Mrs. Dunnevant.
What makes this all the more remarkable is the fact that many of her students can barely speak English. See, along with her regular, garden variety west end kids, Pam has had kids from Russia, Pakistan, India, Jordan, Ethiopia, the Sudan, and Vietnam. Occasionally, I'll surprise her with an iced coffee from Starbucks, and when I walk into her class it looks like a summer camp meeting at the United Nations.
But, no matter where these kids come from, by the time they finish a year with my wife a couple of things are true: #1 they are measurably better at math and reading and #2 they know that Mrs. Dunnevant loves them.
It's a part time job. She has no benefits and she gets paid by the hour, which is officially 4 and a half per day, although her actually time spent working is closer to 6 or 7. It's at times overwhelming, at other times frustrating. But, when she reports for work at the beginning of a year and hardly any of last year's students are back, she gets the incredible thrill of knowing she has made a difference.
So yeah, that's what my wife does.
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