#3 One significant Person or Significant Event freewrites and expand it

I am going to write about me being a therapist for kids with autism. This past summer was the most challenging yet, and made me realize that I could do this for a living. I was put one on one with a 5 year old whose parents only spoke Spanish. This made it difficult for me, because I could not tell if the child was not listening to me because he didn’t want to, or because he didn’t understand me. At the beginning of the summer, the child could barely sit in his seat for ten seconds. He would fight me if I told him he had to sit, and ended up in holding him in his chair to get him to count to ten as he was sitting. Everyday I would get scratched, pinched, kicked, bit, and hair pulled out of my head. But everyday, I requested to have this child. Some days happened to be more difficult than the others. One time, I had to make him throw away all the paper he ripped up and it took over an hour. I even got a playdough container thrown at my face (a couple of times). Sometimes, I thought I needed to have a break with him, because the day would be so much easier if I could just have a child who would sit in his chair. But when I saw someone else working with him, it made me more determined to get this child to listen to me. By the end of the summer, he was sitting in his chair for maybe ten minutes at a time, and he was fighting back less with demands placed on him. At the end of the year presentation and slide show for the family’s of the children, I got the child to sit for pretty much the whole thing. If he wasn’t sitting, he wasn’t making a ruckus either, so I would take that any day. When I realized that, it made me so happy to see the progress this child had. It made me feel like a job like that would be so rewarding. If I would go into special education, I would want to work with the children with behaviors, since I think it’s a challenge, and I like it.