Live and learn

Lesson learned.

I am (was) way too emotionally attached to my job.

I am transferring out of my current position due to some classroom issues. If you caught my probably ill-advised posting on said situation, since deleted, you have a good idea for the reasons that I am transferring. Overall, I'm happy to be leaving my current placement, but there's just one thing that's really tearing me up inside.

I have to leave my little guy.

This, I have learned, is the possible double-edged sword to working in special education. You have to do so much for these kids who are delayed in so many areas. You can't help but grow very attached. Heck, I basically taught my kid to communicate. I was in charge of most of his education. I was very, very invested.

And then, something happens, good or not so good, and you have to move on.

Don't get me wrong, I'm very glad that I worked in that classroom for several months. I'm glad that I was the catalyst for the little guy's communication breakthrough and subsequent decrease in maladaptive behaviors (and trust me, by the time I go to him at the end of third grade, he had very minimal communication skills from his four or five years in the special education system, so I'm not trying to make myself out to be the Autism Whisperer or anything). I'm glad that I learned quite a bit. But I'm not so glad that this job morphed from a duty for a job to a duty to a particular child.

Being the structure-loving workaholic that I am, I've historically had issues detaching myself from my job, but now I'm supposed to detach myself from a child. I'm supposed to detach myself from a 35-hour-a-week segment of my life that held a lot of meaning for me. Not only do I need to detach, but I also need to trust that whoever is hired to take over this position will be an advocate for him. I'm sure whoever it will be is very competent and will bring lots of ideas and experience to the job, but this is my student we're talking about. That's tough. That sucks.

I've always known that I put a little too much emotion into my job (and honestly, that's one of the reasons that I think I'm good at my job), but this experience has really put it into perspective. And the flip side of too much emotional attachment to a job is too little emotional attachment to the life I have outside of a job. Jobs will come and go. The children in the job will come and go (and my position, since I was hired to work with a particular student, will end if the student exits the program, so it's much more precarious than some other jobs). As I tell Dan all the frickin' time, just because I intellectually understand that yes, too much personal investment in a job is bad, I can't necessarily grasp the concept emotionally until it hits me upside the head and stabs me in the back. This time it did.

And now, beaten down and thoroughly subdued, I resolve to try my best to leave the job at the job. This resolve will be sorely tested on Tuesday, when I begin my new position in a new classroom with new kids. Let's see how I do.

But the damage's already been done this time around.

Goodbye my little guy, my student, the most awesome fourth grader I know. I will miss you very much.