The Post With No Title

I'm sitting with my stepfather. We're at the University of Washington Medical Center. If you're going to die of cancer, it's a good enough place.

Last summer he was tired, extremely tired, all the time. Went in for a blood test. Was rushed into the hospital the day the results came back because his white blood cell counts were negligible. Leukemia, at the age of 58.

So we've been through medications and chemotherapy and every treatment, and last week they looked at where he's at and found that the last round of chemo didn't even make a dent in his condition. The conversation has shifted from "This is how we're going to help you get better" to "Here's a brochure about hospice programs in your area."

Hospice. Fuck.

He asked if I wanted any of his things. You know, after. I didn't have an answser. Who would?

My parents are old. My stepfather probably won't see September. My daughter is turning 4. These things are all equally baffling to me, but it's just the passage of time going on as it always has. I can curse the calendar, but the pages will turn as they always do, uninterested in what I think about the matter.

The only constant is change.

Read more here, if any.

Why Does This Child Need a Grade?

This year one of my students is a brain cancer survivor. She's had plenty of surgeries, she's got a shunt in her head that you can feel through her hair, and there's a real potential that the cancer could come back at any time. She's been through hell, and she's only six.

The neat thing is that she's also about the happiest little girl that you could ever hope to meet. Her parents are also the salt of the earth, folks who are just happy that their little girl is alive. Academically she's a mess--her kindergarten year was a long series of surgeries and treatments--but her spirit has come through unscathed, and that's a beautiful thing to see.

(Aside: One day she asks me to walk her to the bathroom. "K," I say, "you've been to the bathroom plenty of times. You can get there by yourself." "Mr. Grant," she replies, "my memory's not very good--the doctors had to cut my brain during the surgery!")

A problem I'm running into, though, is that she doesn't have either an IEP or a 504 plan, which means that I'm going to have to grade her against the "normal" first grade standards. Given that she missed a ton of kindergarten and came to me in first grade with a significant skills deficit, that means that she'll be at the very bottom of our scale in every area:

4--Exceeds Standards
3--Meets Standards
2--Working Towards Standards
1--Well Below Standard

....and that doesn't seem very fair. I can work towards getting her IEP'd as an "Other Health Impairment", and she should have no problem getting the label, but as the special ed teacher pointed out, is specially designed instruction really going to do a whole lot for her? My understanding of her situation is that the brain may eventually heal to a point that she can be a competent learned, but it'll be a process to be able to get there.

I'm just kind of feeling like the Grinch when I ponder filling out her first trimester report card next month, and that's not a happy feeling.

Read more here, if any.

Lisa's Story, College Edition

From the October 12th Chronicle of Higher Education:

Randy Pausch didn't want his last lecture to be about dying. He is dying of pancreatic cancer, and he knows it is a painful way to go. But when he walked up to the podium last month to address more than 450 colleagues, students, and friends at Carnegie Mellon University, he intended to demonstrate that his focus is on living. So he did a couple of one-handed push-ups, sprinkled his remarks with jokes, donned props including a Mad Hatter hat, and generally showed that one way to cheat death is to laugh in its face.

Mr. Pausch, a 46-year-old professor of computer science and co-founder of the university's Entertainment Technology Center, agreed to give the talk in part so that his three young children, ages 5, 2, and 1, could one day hear his message on "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams."

Sure, he could have delivered the advice in front of a video camera at home — and he thought about taking that route — but he felt that an audience would lend his message greater weight.

"A couple of hundred people in a room, looking and listening and laughing and applauding — hopefully at the appropriate times — that gives a lot of validation to my kids that a lot of people believe in this, and a lot of people who knew me believe that I did my best to try to live this way," he said in an interview last week.

You can listen to the last lecture by going to Dr. Pausch's university website, where you can see the streaming video or get one giant download.

I just watched it, and it's worth the time. Alternately moving and funny, it's a great gift for him to leave his kids. God bless and good luck, Dr. Pausch.

Read more here, if any.