I sighed and cursed as I turned another plastic storage box over with one hand, training a flashlight on my task with the other.
What did I think I was doing? It was seven pm on Friday, December 18, and I was just starting my Christmas decorating.
Jake and I had already been to Lowe's. We found the perfect tree almost immediately - a Charlie Brown tree, I christened it immediately. A foot-long spike top like a tuft of hair wrapped around a knitting needle, and underneath a fat ball of impenetrable branches that, despite the late day, still retained some green. On sale for half price! Such a deal! On the way out, I remembered that I needed a stand too, and the store was out. Oh well - I used to have a stand before my recent years with a plastic tree -it's gotta be somewhere..
So now I was out in the storage building in my back yard, hoping that if a Black Widow had taken up residence, it was too sleepy for my search to wake it. I'd told Jake that I had a ton of plans for our 11 days together - this wasn't one of them. So far I'd found the box of ornaments, and the one filled with lights, including the half-broken bulbs from twenty years ago that I really ought to just trash. But no stand.
Well, we had a tree, and it had to go into water tonight if it wasn't to turn into brown needles before Christmas Eve. We'd have to buy one.
King Soopers didn't have one, nor did Ace. We finally found a stand at Walgreens, paid twice as much for it as for the tree, and headed home.
I hacked at the bottom of the tree for some 15 minutes before I uncovered a fresh surface to expose to water. Jake heard none of it, busy on the computer, till, furious, I struggled the tree through the front door, yelling at him about his lack of help. He held the tree while I turned the screws on the stand, then ran to get water, and I realized I'd been patently unfair. I'd given him no direction - why did I expect him to be helpful?
At this point the comic part of the evening began. Once the tree was situated in the spot I'd planned for it, there was no way for Jake to get past it to his room. Perhaps it would fit in the bed-dining room? Nope, the stand fell right off the low shelf I set it on. I carried the ficus plant, stem drooping, to another window, and moved its stand further away from its window. There. It's a squeeze, but the tree fits. I set the trunk to something close to vertical, watered it, tightened the screws as far as they would go. It'll have to do.
The house, though, wouldn't. It was amazing how much of a mess we'd made in just two hours. Jake's bag, his trumpet, my quilting, my lunchbag and bookbag, the books and toys I'd moved to make room for the tree, the outerwear we'd both discarded randomly - and over it all a thin film of potting soil from the displaced ficus. I have a house whose downstairs covers fewer than 600 square feet. My mother once said, accurately, that it's so small that one pair of shoes out of place makes it look messy. Right now, it looked hopeless.
Jake got into his bath and I started picking up. I wondered, why did I wait with decorating? Yes, there'd been that very cold week when moving away from the heat source seemed too much effort for any purpose. And daily workouts and frequent school-related training sessions don't leave much time for stringing lights and buying trees - or tree stands.
I'd rationalized, made myself think that it was because I wanted Jake to have the pleasure of preparation for Christmas, not just the big event. There will only be the two of us, and gift-giving will be limited - so if the holiday is to mean anything, the decorating will have to be part of it, I told myself. And there's some merit to that - except that Jake has never shown much interest or joy in that whole light - stringing thing. He likes the finished product, but if it happened magically while he slept, that would be fine with him.
No, the reason why I didn't decorate ahead of time is the same as the reason why I don't go up to his room when Jake's not here. I built that room from scratch, and it's not a masterpiece, but an enormous effort and some considerable part of my credit-card balance went into that space, and you'd think I'd take pride in it and want to spend time there. Instead, I perform the bare minimum maintenance and otherwise seem to pretend it's not there.
No, I'm not some monstrous Susan Smith type who wants to pretend that her children don't exist. My boys are my greatest pride I'm their biggest fan, just as they are mine. My Seattle marathon medal didn't mean a tenth as much to me as the letter Jake wrote me while I was running it. But somehow I've dealt with the fact that sometimes I'm his mom, and sometimes I'm a single woman with nothing more important to do, of an evening, than running 5 miles, by dividing my life into neat portions. There's the life with Jake and the life without Jake, and the two rarely, if ever, involve the same activities, same friends, or even the same spaces.
So after Jake took his bath and ate his grapefruit as I read Tolkien, and brushed his teeth and got tucked in, I started sorting through the mess. And gradually, the irritation of the chaos ceded to some level of contentment. After all, what did I have to do that was more important, or interesting, or meaningful, than making a nest, even if a temporary nest, for my boy and me, at Christmas?
Friday, December 18, 2009
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
An Extraordinary, Everyday Victory
I went into Special Education, I once told my old friend Jim, because it's a field that is morally unimpeachable.
To fully understand this, you have to know that my first job out of college was working in the West Texas oil fields. I made amazing money for someone with a fresh bachelor of science in geology; but I was acutely aware, every day on those plains, that we raped the land in a way I've never been a part of before or since. Enormous pools of salty water or oily acid, thickened with guar gum no better for the environment because it was a tree product, littered the ground that we'd spent just a few hours on, all to the benefit of the royalty owner and producer, who thereby made a few more barrels a day of hydrocarbon. And that was all before any awareness of climate change. I owed the earth - something.
But even after I began teaching, there was enough left in me of the higher-education-besotted Central European to always question how I spent my work life. Would it not create greater value, the part of me that still related to that mitteleuropa asked, if I used my brains to teach kids that are gifted, that can contribute great discoveries to the world, if I can't win the Nobel myself? So I quested after the "double-identified" kids - the ones with disabilities, but also academic gifts or talents. And I shied away from the situations that involved working with kids with more cognitive disabilities, even when the jobs offered were ideal in every other way.
In districts I'd taught in before D-11, this was relatively easy - the kids with severe needs had whole separate rooms where they spent most of their day with their teachers and educational assistants. We might get together with them for a party sometimes, or walk through the room on our way to somewhere else, and comment enviously about their cooking facilities, all the while thinking, somewhere deep inside, yeah, but they have to work with those kids..
"Sean," my first student with moderate mental retardation, had Down's syndrome, and he had all of the gifts and deficits typical of it. He loved to be sociable - in fact, had a serious talent in that area. But he also hated to work independently, and generally would show his displeasure with loud vocalization - which made teaching pre-algebra to kids who mostly had some combination of learning disability and ADHD more of a challenge than I was pleased to take on.
Until I got used to it, it bothered me badly - as did Sean's blithe assumption that everything he did was universally loved. Worse, most of the other people in the school played along - they glad-handed Sean, high-fived and low-fived and hugged him, and all I could think of was, the kid is 13, come on, let's teach him some grown-up behaviors here! And then one day it was the last day of 8th grade and I gave him the longest hug I ever gave any kid in my whole life. I don't think I wanted to let him go - ever.
I'm at a different school now, and this year I have not one, but three, kids with significant disabilities! And yes, I'm still the grown-up in the room. I look askance at the sing-song the educational assistants employ to speak to the kids. I could barely swallow my anger when one of them gave one of the girls a Barbie for a 12th birthday present. I give the kids intermittent lectures and advice about being almost grown - and sometimes, perhaps, I make enough sense for them understand. Perhaps because I once worked at helping people with severe, sometimes multiple, disabilities work productively at regular jobs, most of my effort with these kids is directed at where I want them to be when they turn 21, and age out of the school system. They won't be taking up floor space in front of mom's TV if I have anything to do with it..
And sometimes they pay me back. Today's victory belonged to "Leo Dvorak." Leo came to our school afraid of anything new. A kid with high-functioning autism, he likes things to be exactly the way he's used to. If he put his backpack down on a table yesterday, he'll put it there today - even if it's on top of a pile of carefully sorted legal paperwork I'd just spend 15 minutes arranging. If I forget to punch holes so he can put his math paper in his binder, he'll interrupt a fraction demonstration to remind me.
But most of all, when he showed up, Leo worried about unexpected noises, and stairs. He needed an hand to hold going down stairs, and someone to carry his books so he could hold the railing with the other. During the first fire drill, I held him under my arm the whole time to keep him from bursting into tears.
But now it's December. At the end of third period, Leo goes to art, in the downstairs studio. This involves negotiating a staircase full of rushing, loud, mostly bigger seventh graders on their way to the cafeteria next door. But Leo and I have been working on it: gradually, I've increased the distance between him and me, by yesterday stopping at the landing as he made it down the lower set of steps. Today I had to answer the phone right at the end of class. I put the phone down and looked around; no Leo.
Yep, he made it to art. All by himself. I walked down to make sure; he was making his way to his desk like he'd accomplished nothing in particular.
But then.. almost at the end of the day, the fire alarm rang. It was an unannounced fire drill, and Leo was with a substitute educational assistant in a classroom across the building from me. As I walked out, it occurred to me that I should have found him before I exited, but I knew they wouldn't let me back in.
And there he was. "I don't know who was leading who," the educational assistant said. "He knew where to go.."
After the all clear sounded, I walked straight to the phone and called Leo's mom. It was a day of everyday, but extraordinary, victories. It was time to celebrate.
To fully understand this, you have to know that my first job out of college was working in the West Texas oil fields. I made amazing money for someone with a fresh bachelor of science in geology; but I was acutely aware, every day on those plains, that we raped the land in a way I've never been a part of before or since. Enormous pools of salty water or oily acid, thickened with guar gum no better for the environment because it was a tree product, littered the ground that we'd spent just a few hours on, all to the benefit of the royalty owner and producer, who thereby made a few more barrels a day of hydrocarbon. And that was all before any awareness of climate change. I owed the earth - something.
But even after I began teaching, there was enough left in me of the higher-education-besotted Central European to always question how I spent my work life. Would it not create greater value, the part of me that still related to that mitteleuropa asked, if I used my brains to teach kids that are gifted, that can contribute great discoveries to the world, if I can't win the Nobel myself? So I quested after the "double-identified" kids - the ones with disabilities, but also academic gifts or talents. And I shied away from the situations that involved working with kids with more cognitive disabilities, even when the jobs offered were ideal in every other way.
In districts I'd taught in before D-11, this was relatively easy - the kids with severe needs had whole separate rooms where they spent most of their day with their teachers and educational assistants. We might get together with them for a party sometimes, or walk through the room on our way to somewhere else, and comment enviously about their cooking facilities, all the while thinking, somewhere deep inside, yeah, but they have to work with those kids..
"Sean," my first student with moderate mental retardation, had Down's syndrome, and he had all of the gifts and deficits typical of it. He loved to be sociable - in fact, had a serious talent in that area. But he also hated to work independently, and generally would show his displeasure with loud vocalization - which made teaching pre-algebra to kids who mostly had some combination of learning disability and ADHD more of a challenge than I was pleased to take on.
Until I got used to it, it bothered me badly - as did Sean's blithe assumption that everything he did was universally loved. Worse, most of the other people in the school played along - they glad-handed Sean, high-fived and low-fived and hugged him, and all I could think of was, the kid is 13, come on, let's teach him some grown-up behaviors here! And then one day it was the last day of 8th grade and I gave him the longest hug I ever gave any kid in my whole life. I don't think I wanted to let him go - ever.
I'm at a different school now, and this year I have not one, but three, kids with significant disabilities! And yes, I'm still the grown-up in the room. I look askance at the sing-song the educational assistants employ to speak to the kids. I could barely swallow my anger when one of them gave one of the girls a Barbie for a 12th birthday present. I give the kids intermittent lectures and advice about being almost grown - and sometimes, perhaps, I make enough sense for them understand. Perhaps because I once worked at helping people with severe, sometimes multiple, disabilities work productively at regular jobs, most of my effort with these kids is directed at where I want them to be when they turn 21, and age out of the school system. They won't be taking up floor space in front of mom's TV if I have anything to do with it..
And sometimes they pay me back. Today's victory belonged to "Leo Dvorak." Leo came to our school afraid of anything new. A kid with high-functioning autism, he likes things to be exactly the way he's used to. If he put his backpack down on a table yesterday, he'll put it there today - even if it's on top of a pile of carefully sorted legal paperwork I'd just spend 15 minutes arranging. If I forget to punch holes so he can put his math paper in his binder, he'll interrupt a fraction demonstration to remind me.
But most of all, when he showed up, Leo worried about unexpected noises, and stairs. He needed an hand to hold going down stairs, and someone to carry his books so he could hold the railing with the other. During the first fire drill, I held him under my arm the whole time to keep him from bursting into tears.
But now it's December. At the end of third period, Leo goes to art, in the downstairs studio. This involves negotiating a staircase full of rushing, loud, mostly bigger seventh graders on their way to the cafeteria next door. But Leo and I have been working on it: gradually, I've increased the distance between him and me, by yesterday stopping at the landing as he made it down the lower set of steps. Today I had to answer the phone right at the end of class. I put the phone down and looked around; no Leo.
Yep, he made it to art. All by himself. I walked down to make sure; he was making his way to his desk like he'd accomplished nothing in particular.
But then.. almost at the end of the day, the fire alarm rang. It was an unannounced fire drill, and Leo was with a substitute educational assistant in a classroom across the building from me. As I walked out, it occurred to me that I should have found him before I exited, but I knew they wouldn't let me back in.
And there he was. "I don't know who was leading who," the educational assistant said. "He knew where to go.."
After the all clear sounded, I walked straight to the phone and called Leo's mom. It was a day of everyday, but extraordinary, victories. It was time to celebrate.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Conversation 12/1/2009
Glass has no crystals.
Its broken surfaces
Amorphous and jagged
Grate, like transverse faults
Building pressure
For the next big break.
The tumble from top shelves
Smashes vessels proved brittle.
With time we’ll gather the shards
And glue. Till they contain us again.
Its broken surfaces
Amorphous and jagged
Grate, like transverse faults
Building pressure
For the next big break.
The tumble from top shelves
Smashes vessels proved brittle.
With time we’ll gather the shards
And glue. Till they contain us again.
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Tech Surprises
My first attempt at bringing tech to my classroom was, well, a flop. I’d been teaching the kids how to automatically decode the short /i/ sound – fluent reading is a key cornerstone of reading comprehension. To make it more entertaining, I’d acted out Monty Python and the "Knights of Nik!". Then someone had posted another MP skit on Facebook, and I – finally – realized that Youtube is a treasure trove of material I can bring into my classroom. I cued up the skit to project on my Interwrite screen, pushed play.
I expected the kids to break into laughter, the way my son did over the weekend as I played skit after skit of Brit humor to him on our home computer. But they remained stone-faced. Clearly I still had a lot to learn.
I’ve been at Galileo since August. To say it’s an amazing place is a cliché – but like most cliches, has some basis in truth. The people who thought this place up had an astounding vision – take a school that had demonstrated, in its history, failure significant enough to be featured on national television as an example of educational hopelessness. Close it. Reopen it, a year later. Fill it with enough sturdy laptops for each kid to have continuous access, and document cameras, electronic boards, scanners, I touches. Hire people who are passionate about teaching middle schoolers, and make them spend at least a week in the summer learning how to use all the toys – enough to orient them and wow them – and make sure they keep learning. Establish strong, heavy structure for both behavior and academic support, and encourage staff to use it.
See if you can change some lives.
For me, it’s been a ride. I’m not afraid of technology – I don’t think, anyway – but the learning curve for an Interwrite board is steeper than that for a whiteboard and dry-erase markers. I stumbled around a lot. It didn’t help that the new Special Education laws had their own learning curve, and I spent the first few weeks of school gasping for breath trying to learn those. It didn’t help, either, that I sustained a head injury at the beginning of the school year.
But I figured it out. By the time of my first evaluation, I could at least project a worksheet on the board and write on it. My kids, the lowest readers in the school, had learned what they could and couldn’t get away with in my class, and we played the rhythm that is so integral to successful learning in a classroom. Not that there weren’t stumbles. For these kids, school is only a worthwhile enterprise in its margins – before and after school, and at lunch. They’ve learned that they will only understand and remember bits and pieces of what is taught in an academic class, and mostly they’ve stopped trying.
Then it was the Monday before Thanksgiving. I had to figure out what to do on Tuesday. The policy is, of course, "bell to bell teaching." Remember how your teachers showed movies the day before a holiday? No longer allowed – if you can’t demonstrate how the lesson will enhance progress toward the state standards, you don’t do it. And that makes sense; but I couldn’t just proceed with the standard lesson, either.
In the classrooms of younger, more with-it teachers, I’d seen them use a Jeopardy game to review for tests – and someone mentioned that there was a structure available on line that you could feed your questions and answers into. I found it, and took 15 minutes to set up a game based on the stuff I’d taught so far. That still left time – we have 70-minute periods at Galileo. Enough time for a writing project.
I’ve spent most of my Thanksgiving breaks constructing my annual holiday letter. Maybe the kids could to that to learn letter-writing skills… but I already knew what they would say, faced with the open ended task. "I can’t think of anything to write!"
Youtube came to the rescue, this time. My older son played me some clips of Jonathan Coulton a couple of years ago – wasn’t there a snarky holiday-letter song? Sure enough – a quick search revealed "Merry Christmas from Chiron Alpha Prime." If the Andersons could come up with something positive to say about working in asteroid mines whilst abused by Santa-robots, the kids could write something good too! I found a version that was clean enough for middle school and played it for the kids as an intro. Then I handed out notebook paper.
"Couldn’t we use the laptops to write our letters, Ms. Syrovy?"
And yes. Of course they could. And suddenly I found myself walking around, useless, because each kid was, assiduously and independently, constructing a paragraph about their year. The Tuesday before Thanksgiving.
I think this tech thing will work for me.
I expected the kids to break into laughter, the way my son did over the weekend as I played skit after skit of Brit humor to him on our home computer. But they remained stone-faced. Clearly I still had a lot to learn.
I’ve been at Galileo since August. To say it’s an amazing place is a cliché – but like most cliches, has some basis in truth. The people who thought this place up had an astounding vision – take a school that had demonstrated, in its history, failure significant enough to be featured on national television as an example of educational hopelessness. Close it. Reopen it, a year later. Fill it with enough sturdy laptops for each kid to have continuous access, and document cameras, electronic boards, scanners, I touches. Hire people who are passionate about teaching middle schoolers, and make them spend at least a week in the summer learning how to use all the toys – enough to orient them and wow them – and make sure they keep learning. Establish strong, heavy structure for both behavior and academic support, and encourage staff to use it.
See if you can change some lives.
For me, it’s been a ride. I’m not afraid of technology – I don’t think, anyway – but the learning curve for an Interwrite board is steeper than that for a whiteboard and dry-erase markers. I stumbled around a lot. It didn’t help that the new Special Education laws had their own learning curve, and I spent the first few weeks of school gasping for breath trying to learn those. It didn’t help, either, that I sustained a head injury at the beginning of the school year.
But I figured it out. By the time of my first evaluation, I could at least project a worksheet on the board and write on it. My kids, the lowest readers in the school, had learned what they could and couldn’t get away with in my class, and we played the rhythm that is so integral to successful learning in a classroom. Not that there weren’t stumbles. For these kids, school is only a worthwhile enterprise in its margins – before and after school, and at lunch. They’ve learned that they will only understand and remember bits and pieces of what is taught in an academic class, and mostly they’ve stopped trying.
Then it was the Monday before Thanksgiving. I had to figure out what to do on Tuesday. The policy is, of course, "bell to bell teaching." Remember how your teachers showed movies the day before a holiday? No longer allowed – if you can’t demonstrate how the lesson will enhance progress toward the state standards, you don’t do it. And that makes sense; but I couldn’t just proceed with the standard lesson, either.
In the classrooms of younger, more with-it teachers, I’d seen them use a Jeopardy game to review for tests – and someone mentioned that there was a structure available on line that you could feed your questions and answers into. I found it, and took 15 minutes to set up a game based on the stuff I’d taught so far. That still left time – we have 70-minute periods at Galileo. Enough time for a writing project.
I’ve spent most of my Thanksgiving breaks constructing my annual holiday letter. Maybe the kids could to that to learn letter-writing skills… but I already knew what they would say, faced with the open ended task. "I can’t think of anything to write!"
Youtube came to the rescue, this time. My older son played me some clips of Jonathan Coulton a couple of years ago – wasn’t there a snarky holiday-letter song? Sure enough – a quick search revealed "Merry Christmas from Chiron Alpha Prime." If the Andersons could come up with something positive to say about working in asteroid mines whilst abused by Santa-robots, the kids could write something good too! I found a version that was clean enough for middle school and played it for the kids as an intro. Then I handed out notebook paper.
"Couldn’t we use the laptops to write our letters, Ms. Syrovy?"
And yes. Of course they could. And suddenly I found myself walking around, useless, because each kid was, assiduously and independently, constructing a paragraph about their year. The Tuesday before Thanksgiving.
I think this tech thing will work for me.
The Docent
Eyebrows groomed but bristling
He spoke with soft, precise inflection
Like an aged pastor.
"How do you push the rudder?"
Hands backed with rapt faces
"Soft and easy!"
I put on lipstick.
He had them.
He spoke with soft, precise inflection
Like an aged pastor.
"How do you push the rudder?"
Hands backed with rapt faces
"Soft and easy!"
I put on lipstick.
He had them.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
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?
"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?
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