The Teacher's Voice

Desiree trailed a harried educational assistant into my office.
"She wants to call her mom," Linda said. "I don’t know why, this time. Everything’s fine."
"Sweetie. You need to be in class. Go." I said. And Desiree went to class.
The assistant shot me a look of gratitude. "I wish I could do that!"
Somewhere along the way, in my teaching career, I learned the Teacher’s Voice. Not quite the Voice from the novel Dune, it nevertheless tells my students that what I’m saying is true, that I have their best interests at heart, and that not following through will have consequences.
A few years ago, when Red Rock Canyon first began as an official Open Space, I came across a jeepload of young men who were determined to drive up one of its trails. I was walking by myself, but it only took a couple of sentences to get them to turn around. That’s the power that a teacher’s voice has.
But lately, I’m finding that it doesn’t work on everyone.
Andre is in the sixth grade. Every day that he comes to school, late, we fight the same battles. I ask him to put on glasses; he says they’re at home, or they’re broken. But he can’t see without them. So he sits in the front row – but turns every chance he gets, and talks to the boys behind him. No wonder; written language, to Andre, is inscrutable. His spelling is completely invented. He reads only the shortest, most regularly spelled words, at a rate of roughly 15 words per minute. School is a daily challenge and a daily frustration.
When the year first started, he fobbed my encouragement and direction off with a shrug. "You don’t help me, you help him," he snarled, pointing at a more obviously disabled peer. Now he just tells me that he doesn’t like me.
For my part, I remember an early lesson of working with kids: deal with each behavior on its own merits. Forget the past. Don’t – ever – carry grudges. So when Andre does something right, I shower praise. I celebrate every word he gets on paper. I cheer when I see glasses on his face. I use his name, often, when I talk about positive student behavior.
And a couple of times a day, it works.
The rest of the time, Andre alternates doing nothing with active aggression. He slapped a girl hard enough to leave marks on her face yesterday. The assistant principal and counselor asked me to perform a behavioral study called a Functional Behavior Analysis. And maybe it’ll show us something.
But I think I already know what’s going on with Andre. His current behavior works for him. His mother is nursing a broken shoulder. She claimed yesterday, in a Percocet-altered voice, that it was from the ice on her sidewalk, but it’s just as likely the result of maltreatment by her son. I phoned her early in the year to find out if there was anything that’s worked for her, to make Andre cooperate with her wishes. Nothing, she said. He does what he wants. In elementary school he did nothing, and learned nothing.
I threw a party for the kids the other day, to celebrate that they successfully finished a major unit. They loved playing the Wii the school provided for the celebration.
"I have one in my room," Andre, who was absent that day, sniffed later, "I don’t need to play it at school!" He was probably lying, but he’d made his point.
You’d think Andre was a failure in every area.
My window looks over the school’s athletic field. On nice days, Andre’s been there, surrounded by friends, playing football, every morning and evening. When a play begins, he stands, stolid, in the center of the field, clearly a key player. In the classroom, the other boys don’t follow the leadership he offers – they don’t want the consequences of defying the teacher. But they crave his approval on the football field.
Andre is thoroughly successful in minimizing his weaknesses, and showcasing his strengths.
He makes me remember my own failures: having proved repeatedly in school my total ineptitude with any games involving balls, I now avoid them. Why would I expect a smart kid who can’t read and write to behave any differently, if he has any choice about it?
But I am frightened for him, and my fear has its basis in my own past. In the early nineties, I worked as part of a group teaching young people with disabilities, who were often relegated to spending their days in front of a parent’s TV, how to get jobs in the community. For the most part, we were successful. One failure was a young man who barely spoke. He tried his choice of food service out at a local Village Inn. I attempted to coach him; he ignored me. When I repeated that he was to wipe the tables, not refill the ice in glasses, he turned and screamed clearly, despite his articulation impairment, "Leave me alone, you stupid bitch!" He ripped off his apron, darted out of the restaurant, and never came back to the training.
He succeeded. I left him alone. And is his likely sad, hopeless destination Andre’s, too?