I have been incredibly busy and believe me that’s no excuse for not writing more about an incident sooner. This week though really brought it all home all so much more clearly about the urgency for me to write this.
As many here know, I am a Business Teacher (vocational teacher). I teach “regular” students. Now really what does that mean? Regular? Oh yeah, “Normal” er ah gee what does that mean oh I remember “AVERAGE” students. What exactly is average anyway? If you are a mother would you say your child is AVERAGE? If you have more than one child are they average inasmuch as they are relatively the same? Are they normal? I guess normal being defined as falling between some prescribed medical definition of that? So if they are normal then they aren’t genius because genius is not NORMAL it is not something you find in every student which is why it is considered unique and not NORMAL. HMMMMM maybe normal’s not always so great. Because I teach vocational students I have teachers who teach in the academic areas who feel “sorry” for me. They feel I am not tested and challenged by my students. OMG if they only knew how much I am tested and challenged by my students. My students often include many with special needs. I could go through an alphabet soup of them with you but I will be the first to admit that there is NO WAY that college or life prepared me adequately to meet the challenge of teaching these kids on a daily basis. I have had to learn what I know from something other than a textbook and that is life. Still at times I feel overwhelmed by magnitude of it all.
I could never, ever imagine what it must be like to raise a child with a disability. There is no way any of us could unless we ourselves were “walking that mile in their shoes”. When we longed to have children we all wished for rosy cheeked children who smiled when they heard our voice, seldom cried, were creative, bright, well-behaved, attentive and the list goes on. How many of us when we traced our fingers over our swollen bellies said, “Gosh I hope this one is a challenge. I hope my precious infant has physical and mental challenges.” God blessed me with two beautiful and healthy sons. I don’t even begin to believe I deserved to be so fully blessed by the wonderful sons he gave me. They are my joy and they are my life. I know only of silly boy things like bringing home bugs, snakes, and tadpoles, of flying kites, tracking mud across my carpet, refusing to clean a bedroom, pushing vegetables around a plate because they are yucky, and the list goes on. I do not know from personal experience how it would be to raise a child who faces the challenge of Autism.
This week I had to attend a parent/teacher IEP meeting for a boy who was in my class last year. His new teachers don’t know him well enough so they asked me to attend as his regular ed teacher. I will call him “Roger” (not his name). Clinically, if you looked at his parents you would say he won the genetic lottery. His mother is a cute, petite, bright woman who teaches math at one of our local colleges. His father is a surgeon. His older brothers are in college now. Roger, however, has Autism. I was never trained how to help an autistic kid and so I had to learn from scratch. At least I had trained professionals right down the hall that I could ask if I had a problem. If you have never been around an autistic person they are not cookie cutter versions of each other and NO they are not ALL Rainman. Roger is tall and I’m certain if he wore contacts and cut his hair like the other kids, under different circumstances he would have to beat the girls off with a stick. As it is he has that “computer geek” look about him which is not altogether unattractive. It’s his behaviors that you will find distracting. I’m not saying he’s acting out or doing bad things. He does this thing with his hands when he’s nervous and they begin to flutter like butterflies as he speaks. Sometimes he ignores personal space and get right up next to you to tell you about last nights Simpson show. He will then begin to tell you from the first credit until the last exactly what happened and what actors played what character. He loves superheroes and he’s VERY Afraid of robots and the “FUTURE”. When he thinks about those things his hands flutter about and sometimes he will run up to me grab my hand and say “You gotta help me.”
This can be very distracting when you are teaching. I have 25 students in my class. In almost every class I have two special needs students and then I have a number of students who qualify for other interventions to assist their learning and then we have little miss “average” student. As much as I would love to spend my time with one student and be there solely for them I just can’t. I owe all my students help. When I had Roger in class last year it was relatively easy to calm him down or distract him from his diatribe and then move on. This year he’s especially agitated. The second day of school he RAN up to me in the cafeteria and said “You gotta help me. Robots are killing everyone. I just want to be normal.” Wow what do you say? I took his hand and asked him if he was OK tried to find out what was wrong but he kept repeating it over and over more frightened each time. I took him by the hand, got his lunch and took him to his special teacher. Gosh if I was his parent what would I do? I have the luxury of saying “wow this is too much for me and then taking him to someone smarter than me.”
The meeting was held because his outbursts at school had gotten out of control and they wanted to see if maybe some of the meds he was on were causing a reaction or what. Mom sat there and tears were welling up in her eyes. I sat next to her grabbed a tissue and then grabbed her other hand. I looked at her and imagined I saw my friend. I just wanted to cry. Then she told me that she appreciated how much I love Roger and that she just wished people understood. People blame her because her son is Autistic. OMG blame? What in the world for? Now I’m really thinking of the girl from my other site. I couldn’t imagine being in this position. The special ed teachers were suggesting he get re-tested and asking when he was going to see the doctor etc. Then Roger’s mom told us about an incident that happened when Roger was in middle school. Some kids threw Roger to the ground, beat him, stomped on his glasses, and called him retard. Now those kids are up at our high school and Roger is afraid to take off his glasses even when he showers. The viciousness of the attack was such that I could hardly breathe as I listened. I thought for a second, what kind of kid could be so evil as to attack a child who already faces so many challenges? Then I thought gee what kind of adult could be so uncaring, and EVIL as to attack the mother of a challenged child and make fun of her most precious possession? That’s how kids like that are formed because they have such parents. Roger was kept out of school for several days and they are trying new meds. I saw him in the hall yesterday and he came up and told me that I shouldn’t be afraid of robots but then his hands began to dance and he said “you need to help me. I just want to be normal.”
|
