Today was my first day substitute teaching in the Ramona Unified Schools District. Ramona is about an hour's drive north of Chula Vista, in the mountains, whose boulders along a certain stretch approaching the 100,000 population town on 67 reminded me of old Old West films. My assignment was for a teacher labelled as "Resource Specialist," which I had no idea of pertaining to what besides, perhaps, taking care of teachers' resources, whatever they may be. However, I found myself with thirteen special education students "in transition," meaning they were to be trained for "life skills," one of which was counting change, though they would never be put into such a situation of even going through a cashier's line with the kind of skills they had, adding and subtracting single digit numbers which they worked on all morning on worksheets corrected by the two aides in the classroom.

One of the aides decided they would practice this skill. She gave each of them twenty-five dollars in play money notes that looked like American dollars. Some of them failed miserably in getting the correct change back and so spending more then the price of the items on the table, which consisted of mostly plastic figures such as one of Johnny Neutron, a horny toad, a car, a CD, a book, etc., which ranged in price from 25 cents to five dollars. One girl in particular struggled even with adding up the prices of the items she had chosen to purchase and making the connection with the play notes she had. She calculated three items at three dollars each as costing three dollars rather than nine. She was the exception though. I felt that the derision exhibited by the aide when a student gave more than the total price humiliating and defeatist. I could only consider her motive: by dastardly getting "tips" from the erring student it would teach the student a lesson; it's bad to give more money than the total price of the items, even though the aide was happy with the windfall. I thought it would have been better to put the student into the position of counting change after the aide purchased items from the student. That would have been practical, rather than resulting in the almost pained expressions of the students trying to do the mental arithmetic many of them could not do on their feet. I told one of the brighter ones that it was simply a matter of addition. He didn't have to do subtraction at all. He could merely keep two figures in mind, the amount of what the aide would give him and the total purchase price and then start counting out the change from the amount of the purchase price until he arrived at the amount the aid had given him. This is a little more complicated than that, for he would have to know, for example, how many quarters there are in a dollar. But if the two amounts were whole numbers it would be relatively easy compared to the mental arithmetic of subtraction.

I felt very sorry for these students, the youngest of whom was eighteen and the oldest twenty-two.