A special educator
Special Education teacher Chau Ly, the Teacher of the Year at Pacific Elementary in Manhattan Beach. Photo
Pacific Elementary’s Chau Ly is among the first special education teachers to be recognized as a Teacher of the Year by the Manhattan Beach Unified District
First of two parts
It’s 8:30 a.m. on a Thursday and special education teacher Chau Ly isn’t scheduled to have students for another 20 minutes, but kids are trickling in. She’s been at her desk in Room 27 at Pacific Elementary in Manhattan Beach since 7:15 a.m., as is her daily habit. Often she begins before dawn, at home, answering emails from parents, keeping up with the extensive paperwork special education legally requires, and organizing her plan for every student she’s going to see that day.
A round-faced, ruddy-cheeked 1st grader sits down at a small table and begins reading by himself. He’s silently paging through “Come In Boo Bear” with a little smile on his face when Ms. Ly (pronounced “Lee”) walks over to check in with him.
“I am so proud of you for doing a walk through of the book right now,” she says to the boy.
More students arrive in two and threes. Ms. Ly greets each one of them. Most of the kids today are coming from “general education” classrooms, in the parlance of modern public education. All have been diagnosed with one of 13 categories that qualify them for special education. These range from physical challenges like visual, speech, and hearing impairment to emotional disturbances, autism, intellectual or specific learning disabilities. They come to Ms. Ly’s room, called the Learning Resource Center, for extra help.
The students find their workstations in different parts of the room. Four fourth graders sit together. Four others, all different grades, studying different subjects, work individually. Special education teachers must be able to teach any subject. Ms. Ly teaches kindergarten through fifth grade curriculums, sometimes all at the same time.
“My love, where is your task list?” Ms. Ly asks a little brown-haired boy wearing a neon Pacific Panther’s T-shirt.
The task list is something specifically developed by Ms. Ly for her students. Each child’s first job is to make what Ly calls “an academic to-do list” for the work at hand. Every desk has a half-sheet of paper with a grid for the date, time, the student’s initials, and three lines for “teacher’s expectations.” Ms. Ly or her teaching support assistant, Shelley Johnson, work with each student to determine what is expected of every class.
“It helps them focus their attention, and strategize,” Ms. Ly says later. “It makes them accountable for their own learning. And it helps to visually organize the work.”
The four fourth graders, two girls and two boys, have all been assigned the same book in English class, “The Tale of Despereaux,” about a mouse in love with music and a princess named Pea; a good-hearted rat named Roscuro; and Miggery, a peasant girl with an impossible dream to be a princess. The four students have come to Ms. Ly’s class to receive help with reading comprehension and fluency — the former being the ability to understand the book, the latter the ability to decode its meanings and read with the same quickness and accuracy with which one speaks.
Ms. Ly has instructed them to go over the book together.
“It would benefit you all to work on the same thing,” she says.
Meanwhile another little girl, a fifth grader, has arrived at Ms. Ly’s desk to work on a math assignment. She’s having trouble with the concept of rounding.
“I want you to round up to the nearest 100,” Ms. Ly tells her, pointing at her work. “That is your initial strategy.”
The little girl writes down the number “400” and hesitantly looks at her teacher.
“You got it!” Ms Ly erupts. “You are awesome! I am so proud of you!”
In the middle of the room, a Harry Potter-esque second grade boy is working happily alone on an art project. He’s doing an illustration for a story he’s just read. He’s drawing Godzilla. He’s also walking back and forth to the fourth graders’ table, grabbing a crayon at a time from a box and returning to his desk. Ms. Ly looks up from her math instruction and asks him if there might be a more efficient way for him to work. He grabs the whole box of crayons and takes it to his desk.
“You are so smart,” Ms. Ly says. “That is a logical choice.”
The fact that this boy has begun his day with such quiet diligence is a victory in itself. He has impulse control issues and has been diagnosed with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). He used to arrive in the classroom and basically give a speech — not on any particular topic, but a rather jumbled and very loud discourse on whatever was coursing through his mind. Invariably, these speeches would further hype the boy and distract his classmates.
Ms. Ly has helped him recognize the roots of why he does this. His boundless energy and ability to express himself are also gifts, but of the kind that need to be modulated. Part of every student’s task includes “bank time” — for fulfilling their tasks, they store up reward minutes. The reward Ms. Ly has devised for this little boy is that, once he’s banked enough reward time, he is allowed to do a comedy routine for the classroom. She helps him find jokes and work them out.
“Because that is his strength,” she says. “He has a great sense of humor. And jokes are pretty sophisticated, knowing all the cues and everything. It’s helped him learn how to better communicate.”
At the next table over, the little boy reading Boo Bear has got some work to do — a reading comprehension worksheet from another teacher to fill out — and he’s just about completed it.
“You are going to read it to Ms. Ly, just in case,” she tells him, joining him at his table. He starts reading but can’t make out what he’s written.
“Two things,” she says. “If you can’t read your own handwriting, Ms. Ly can’t. And grammar.” She points at one of his sentence. “You are missing a ‘the’ …Come in ‘the’ water, right? You must have just gotten distracted.”
He’s nodding but he looks a perplexed about how to proceed. “You can erase it. It’s called editing,” she tells him. “I do it all the time. On a computer it’s called delete.”
The boy erases and rewrites the sentence clearly and grammatically. He and Ms. Ly exchange a high five. “I’m so proud of you,” she tells him.
Ms. Ly working with a student at Pacific Elementary. Photo
One of the fourth graders, a little boy wearing a Star Wars X-wing fighter T-shirt, is particularly animated by the “Tale of Despereaux” discussion. He’s quick-minded and hyperactive; he rarely stops moving, fidgeting with his hands or tapping his foot, and is very verbal. He struggles a bit with reading fluency.
But he’s really into this book. The four kids have a reading comprehension worksheet they have been assigned to fill out — analyzing “text to text” (this book compared to other books they’ve read), “text to self” (themes from the book connected to their own life experiences) and “text to world” (larger connections to the world beyond the student’s experience but within his or her knowledge).
The kids are having a disagreement. The Star Wars boy thinks one of the characters got killed. A dark-haired, soft-spoken little girl politely but firmly disputes this.
“I’ll show you pictures!” the little boy says.
Ms. Ly intercedes. She suggests they look in the book for evidence, and gently chides three of the kids for not bringing the book to class while praising a blonde, pony-tailed little girl who proudly has her book open. A consensus is reached: nobody got killed.
“Killing and threatening are really different,” Ms. Ly says.
The little boy admits he was wrong. “I saw it going through him,” he says.
Ms. Ly, who has calmed the boy throughout the discussion, has a quick one-on-one talk with him in which she praises the respectful way he handled himself.
“I can tell part of you is always excited, but you didn’t interrupt,” she tells him. “That means you have self control. That’s a really good thing.”
The boy listens intently. The way she speaks to him is slightly slowed — she calls it “pacing” and it has, over time, subtly influenced him to rein in his own tendency to race through sentences. During her one-on-one interactions with students, it’s almost as if some magical veil descends upon both student and teacher. Ms. Ly, who has dark hair streaked with blond and the easy physical grace of an athlete, possesses a wise fairy godmother quality, a reliable kindness and calm that students gravitate to.
Her dialogue with this boy has been going on for five years. Special education teachers often know students in a different way than general education teachers. This little boy, for example — Ms. Ly has worked with him since kindergarten. She also taught his older brother, and she knows the family very well. She’s had dozens of conversations with his parents. She knows that he’s the youngest in a large family. His father had another family, then divorced, married his mother, and divorced again. She’s also aware that he’s small for his age and feels a bit powerless. He likewise has been diagnosed with ADHD. One of the ways his anxiety expresses itself is in arguing — often very aggressively and forcefully with other kids because, Ms. Ly says, “he is kind of advocating for his size, and because he’s the youngest.”
And so the way he handled his disagreement regarding Despereaux is another triumph for the boy’s evolving sense of self-control. He spoke quietly, he stopped to listen to others, and he calmly reasoned his way to realizing his error. After Ms. Ly praised him, he smiled. A lot of years of work, by both teacher and student, had gone into that one little success. She’s taught him hundreds of academic lessons, but perhaps nothing that will serve him more in life than this ongoing lesson he’s begun integrating into his behavior — the ability to tone himself down.
“Every single day he comes into class, I am so proud of him,” she says after class. “This is a kid I’ve known since he was in kindergarten. You are talking about a kid who has so many issues, with anxiety and with attention, but he’s so bright and so special and I see that. And I know when he walks away from this school and goes into sixth grade, he’ll be one of the kids who comes back to me and says, ‘Ms. Ly, you taught me so much.’ Because this is the first year I’ve seen him accept help in such a positive way. In second and third grades, he was so self-conscious.”
Just last year, this boy had an emotional breakdown in class.
“Ms. Ly,” he told her. “I don’t understand why I’m here. What’s wrong with me?”
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” she told him. “You just learn differently. And so do I.”
His story is not unusual. Special education students everywhere tend to feel stigmatized, but perhaps nowhere more so than in a high-achieving community, and school district, such as Manhattan Beach.
“Here are these children, so sensitive, so smart, and they are feeling different in a way you don’t want them to feel,” Ms. Ly said. “And it just breaks your heart. And this is the first year where he knows, ‘I am just as smart as everybody else. I am just learning in a different environment.”
It was a realization five years in the making and it could only have happened with an enormous amount of trust — both his trust in Ms. Ly, and her trust in him.
“I am very much about relationship-building,” she said. “That’s key with any of my kids. That’s what matters most; we start from there.”
Ms. Ly has a special gift for making these connections.
“She takes that time to build that relationship with a student,” said Megan Atkins, the assistant superintendent who oversees special education for the Manhattan Beach Unified School District. “For a student, to have that one caring adult means everything. She believes in them. She knows they are going to succeed. It’s not an act, and it’s not a job for her. It’s clearly her calling in life.”
Elementary school can be a fearful time. In addition to the natural stress of attempting to achieve academically, students must navigate socially and undergo the structuring of their days for the first time in their young lives. For special ed students, these challenges are often amplified. Atkins has witnessed countless students transformed within the safe zone of Ms. Ly’s classroom. Just knowing kids are under her truly careful tutelage daily, Atkins said, is inspiring.
“I am grateful,” Atkins said.
Ms. Ly helps a fourth grade student dissect the meaning of “The Tale of Despereaux” at the Learning Resource Center at Pacific Elementary. Photo
Oftentimes, when there is a behavioral issue with a student on campus, Ly is brought in to help — regardless of whether the child acting out is classified as a special education student. She is a child whisperer of a sort; a kid may have had what Ms. Ly calls a “behavior meltdown” and erupted in screaming or run from the classroom or even from campus. Yet somehow, when she appears, calm is restored.
Last June, Ms. Ly, who has taught within MBUSD for 10 years, was named Pacific Elementary’s Teacher of the Year. It is a rare honor for a special education teacher, whose work is valued immensely by colleagues but tends to be lower profile within the larger educational community.
“She is — I don’t want to say an unsung hero, because I appreciate her every day, but she is one of our real heroes,” said Steinberg. “If not for her, our teachers and our students would have to deal with so much more stress on a day-to-day basis. She is just a star among stars.”
Next week: a short history of special education, an educator’s education, and the sweetness of special students.