It's largely a defense mechanism. Whenever anything goes wrong at our school, somehow it always gets pinned on one or more of the special ed staff. We're considered "less capable" than our regular education peers. Nevertheless, we're the ones who become the "stars" whenever the boss wants to impress someone.
I was able to talk semi-coherently about the rationale behind our little tanks, and the visiting teacher was pleased -- mostly because, and gawd teachers are so f9cking lame, her own daughter has been working on a similar project in school. You'd think she'd have been interested because she's a science teacher, but no, she liked it because he own kid is working on a similar project.
Anyway, it makes my boss happy when people she brings around appear to be impressed with our projects. I made a point of mentioning that we have students from grades 3 through 6 participating in our project, and both general ed and resource room kids. Quite frankly, student involvement has been minimal, because most of the kids don't care, and the pace is not fast enough. Plants take weeks to grow. They're not like video games.
I took the opportunity to
The pretty school librarian has been impressed enough with our project that she brought in some petunia seeds earlier in the week to plant in the little hydroponics box (a plastic container with an aquarium light bar sitting on top). So there ya go -- can't complain about results like that!
