I feel like I have had a lot of good luck finding people to be mostly pretty reasonable. I can not look back and say I ran into this or that person who just WOULD not budge on a particular thing - except DH
.
I am pretty early on in my dealing with schools, however.
My mother always said she thought I had that gift of blarney - she definitely did. One thing I do try to avoid is making people feel like they are idiots. Even if they are.
For instance at work, if I am trying to guage how much a tester knows about a particular area, I might ask 'are you familiar with this' rather than 'do you know how to do this?' to avoid implying I am questioning their overall ability to do the work.
If there is a difference in thinking on something I try to id how they could be seeing this thing so differently and discuss things in that light - so we can all agree that anybody could see things that way, given such-and-such factors. Then we can all agree to see things my way when I have pointed out those factors are moot, incorrect, etc.
When I was presenting all these projects, drawings and constructions from my ds to the gt teacher, I brought in a lot of stuff and just sort of said, let's go through these so you can tell me what makes sense to add to his assessment folder and what does not...she mostly picked things I that I figured were his most interesting pieces, to be sure. And really, what else could I do? She was/is the expert!
I know a lot of folks just turn in a big bundle of work examples- but I took the opportunity to actually talk through most items with the teacher; I had also put post-it notes on all these various items, including age made and any interesting background or discussions with ds that ensued. It was really neat to see her face light up when she saw something especially cool. If nothing else it was a fun discussion.
