Oh, the joys of working with students with IEPs!

These Individualized Education Program (IEP) allow students to receive special education services once they’ve gone through a battery of tests indicating they face learning challenges and difficulties. Normally, the modifications and accommodations are easy for me to handle: Encouraging a student to sit near the point of instruction, checking in with him/her more frequently to ensure retention and mastery of material, and providing extra time for quizzes, homework assignments, projects and tests.

But one day, I received notification about changes in a tenth grader’s IEP that made me question whether Melissa was expected to work at all in French. I had read her original IEP, a legal document, that indicated she was a poor reader who was easily distracted in class and showed signs of difficulty processing written and spoken language.

In early November, her psychologist added other modifications for her. The document said how all her general education teachers should modify how much homework Melissa was expected to complete. I gathered that meant she should not have much homework–if any. I couldn’t understand why not, but for years, the district had devalued the importance of homework, and I had followed their guidance. Besides, it was better to have students finish work in class where I was there to help them and they couldn’t use Google Translate to do the work for them.

Melissa’s revised IEP also stated that for world language, the teacher should provide multiple-choice options for assessments and word banks and conjugations (perfect tense, past participle, imperfect, etc..) to fill-in-the-blank assessments.

What the heck! I was giving her class a quiz on the past tense of reflexive verbs that week. Did that mean I needed to rewrite a quiz for her? I looked over the quiz. No, I thought I would be okay since the first section of the quiz listed the past participles of the verbs that Melissa could use to answer the second part. Also, days before the quiz, I reminded students on Google Classroom to review certain reflexive verbs and how to conjugate them using reflexive pronouns and the verb etre in the present tense. Easy, peasy. Very helpful and considerate of me, I thought to myself.

Of course, I needed to discuss this development with my colleague, a veteran world language teacher. “Should I just give her the answers to the quiz,” I said. “That way she’d be guaranteed an A. And that seems to be what the parent wants.”

My friend nodded. “It’s terrible what’s happening. No wonder people are lazy when they’re in the workforce. They’re picking up in high school that they don’t have to do any work, and can still pass.”

I agreed with her. How could teachers expect to instill a strong work ethic in all teenagers when expectations were watered down? We were creating a group of people who got used to special treatment, but later on in college and the workforce wouldn’t have it. Was this healthy for our society, one that one day would be ruled by our youth?