Reboot Gather-Information Mode

I'm almost to my second month anniversary as a Special Ed Assistant with autistic high school students, and it's almost two more months from the end of the school year.

After a bit of reflection, I am resetting my intentions:
I am going to back off from Problem Solving Mode
and go into Wait & Watch Mode for a little while. (Maybe even until the end of the school year.)

On the whole, things are going well. But I feel myself getting frustrated with coworkers and systems that seem... inefficient or "under-performing".
Recently I found out that a couple coworkers have lost a parent in the past year and are themselves parents raising children. That explains some low energy.

Also, a couple other coworkers who'd seemed rather inexplicably hostile toward me are themselves autistic---what I read as coldness is simply their normal social behavior.
I wish I'd known this sooner.
I read my coworkers not-greeting me, for instance, as unwelcoming, but I now know that's not their intended message.
It's hard to switch out my initial interpretation, but I will set my intention.

It's a whole new set of social codes--very different than the thrift store!
My coworkers there were often  neurotypically socially skilled, emotive story tellers, who placed high value on humor. Mr Furniture once said, "The good thing about work is we're always laughing."
They were often older and Black, with Southern roots, coming from generational poverty...

I see a ton of humor at the high school, but my coworkers aren't the joshing type--even the neurotypicals.
That teacher I am most baffled by/complain most about would have an easier time (or, I’d have an easier time with her) if she enjoyed how funny the students are--sometimes unintentionally.

A student offered the interpretation, for instance, that Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi" (paved paradise, put up a parking lot) was a protest against paying for parking!
OMG, I thought this was hilarious---and could have led to a good conversation--but the teacher let it pass and commented to me after class about how "wrong" the student was.

Another immediate difference is my white middle-class coworkers take a lot of sick days off.
NOBODY took sick days at the thrift store unless they were immobilized:
if you didn't show up for work, you didn't get paid.
In fact, people would judge others who took time off as weak, and not pulling their weight.
After six years of that, to me my new coworkers seemed like slackers!

So--I can see I am importing old interpretations into my new situation.
I intend to STOP judging and problem solving (mostly in my mind, but not only) and go back to Gather Information Mode.

A thing I've been doing that works nicely for me is to keep introducing myself to teachers on the floor where I mostly work--and throughout the school too.

I'd lent Foyle's War to the US History teacher, and on Friday I borrowed a book from an English teacher down the hall. He's teaching memoir, and he recommended to me The Pact, by three Black doctors who grew up in the ghetto of Newark and made a pact in high school to become doctors.
It's not interesting as literature, but it's very pertinent to high school students---get yourself up and out into an adult life.

Kids--all of them--face a lot of dangers---looking at them I think of baby sea turtles racing to get into the sea before they're picked off by sea gulls.
The most evident sea gulls are drugs--also depression and anxiety and other internal hazards, also external economics and politics....

ANYWAY, I will feel better if I stay in the hunt-and-gather, open minded "what am I seeing here?" mode, and drop some of the creeping "This is not best practice" interpretation.
Even if it's not--(and I'm sure some of it is not)--I need more information if I'm to be an effective counter-balance.

So. That's me launching myself this week.

Which reminds me--the Marzipan leaves today! in her very own little car, which she bought around her 33rd birthday earlier this month--a 2012 Toyota Yaris.
A coworker of hers drew her picture (based on a photo--those are trees reflected on her car surface) and made it into the cover of a notebook a going-away gift.

Go, go little turtle, already in the sea—again launching yourself beyond the breakers!