Today Jack started the day off in a great mood but asked to stay in my room for the day. I found this odd, since he is usually begging to stay in the regular class all day. He worked very hard.. completed all his work before 10:00. As soon as he was finished with math he refused to complete anymore work and somewhat shut down. He began using negative comments towards me because I had told him that it was time to complete our writing assignment for the day. Jack made it very clear that he felt the assignment was a dumb assignment and he did not need to waste his time completing it. After lunch bunch, 11:45-12:30, he seemed ok when he left for speech but came back after 20 minutes yelling about how much he did not like another student. I spoke with him and the other student and found out it was because the other student touched the pencil sharpener that Jack was using. He ran to my room but not before knocking on a primary classroom door and running away before they answered the door. This afternoon Jack was definitely able to settle down but completed very little work compared to normal.This week has been harder for Jack to refrain from using negative comments towards me, other teachers, and even peers which is typically a rare occurrence. I am not sure if this is due to the medicine changes or not because as we’ve talked about in the past, typically when Jack has a great few days or week, like he has since February 10th, it is followed by a rough few days.
On a positive note, I have not seen any physical aggression since February 3rd which is the longest he has gone. I have also not noticed him being tired at all, in fact he seems a lot more alert than in the past.
I have to say that while I'm extremely disappointed that we're again on a down-turn, I guess the behavior doesn't surprise me. I did reply with the fact that he's amping up this behavior while not being physically aggressive (at least in terms of touching others), to which the IS (intervention specialist) replied that she believes it's because he knows we're not going to put up with the physical behaviors. It's very hard to see how him coming off of the Intuniv is helping him. Not that I want him on any medication, but this is twice now that we have seen him coming off of the stuff. So instead of the Dr's dosage advice doing something good, we're not seeing anything positive. That said, he does seem to follow a sort of roller coaster pattern. Which does make me wonder about the episodic mood disorder angle.
Point is, for some kids, and most likely for Jack, there is no cure-all medication. If he's hyper, I guess at least his metabolism will go up and he'll potentially lose some weight. (He's practically outgrown all but his sweat pants, and has what I liken to a beer gut. He's 10!) We are seeing an increase in him moving his head around like you may often see kids with Autism do. I dunno.. do I really care about that? I guess not.. that's not our main priority.
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