Beautiful Child (12 page)

I opened the box. There was only a handful of notes inside. Nine, to be exact. The five I had written on Gwennie’s behalf for Shane, who was her person. Jesse’s two notes for Zane, and two entirely blank pieces of paper.

“Ah,” I said. “Not much in here.”

I read out the ones I’d done on Gwennie’s behalf for Shane.

“I got the most! I got the most!” Shane cried. “Where’s my treat?”

“That’s not actually the way it works,” I said. “We get the treats for having
done
the good deeds. But there haven’t been very many done.”

“But I got the most!” Shane yelled. “I want my treat.”

“Hold on a minute. You didn’t
write
any, Shane.”

Shane burst into tears. “But I
won
.”

“I didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand what we were doing,” Zane piped up.

“What about me?” Jesse cried. “I done the most good deeds. I get a treat. I should get all of them. And the badge too. That’s mine. I won it fair and square.”

“You did
two
. And what’s this blank piece of paper? Billy? Why did you put that in here?”

“Teacher!” Billy shrieked in response and pointed. “Look what she’s doing!”

I whirled around to see Gwennie, standing by my desk where I had set the gingerbread men. She was biting the legs off each one, fast as she could.

“
Teacher
!!!!!” Billy screamed, and before I could stop him, he was out of his seat, shooting toward Gwennie.

I intercepted him but could not catch all the boys. Julie bolted into the fray too, but it was too late.

Jesse picked up the single whole cookie that remained, which happened to say Zane on it.

“That’s mine!” Zane shrieked and ran toward him.

“I won. And I’m not eating anything with that girl’s cooties on it,” Jesse replied and crammed the whole cookie into his mouth with a massive shoving motion.

Within seconds everyone was in one big writhing, fighting, crying tangle on the floor.

I pulled them apart. At least I tried to. Jesse was choking over his cookie, because he’d been knocked to the floor before he’d had time to swallow. Gwennie was shrieking in the usual high-pitched banshee wail she gave out when she went on overload. Billy was fighting so hard that he was literally foaming at the mouth. The twins just screamed and lashed out at everyone. About half of what was left of the gingerbread men had been ground underfoot.

Between Julie and me, we managed to get them apart, to their feet, and into their chairs.

“Sit!” I said, using my most ferocious teacher’s voice.

Begrudgingly, everyone stayed in their chairs.

“Now cross your arms and put your heads down on your
desks. The bell rings in just under five minutes, so you stay that way until then.”

Everyone, even Gwennie, followed those instructions. Except, of course, Billy.

“You too,” I said, giving him the evil eye.

“Can’t,” he replied with just the faintest hint of defiance.

“And why’s that, might I ask?”

“Because you said put your head down on your desk and I don’t have a desk.” He spread his hands wide, palms upward, like he was the most innocent kid in the world. “Just got this table.”

“
Now
, Billy.”

There was a long look between us. Finally, Billy crossed his arms on the tabletop and lay his head on them. “Fucking school,” he muttered as he did so.

Thus ended the Chipmunk Spy Club.

T
here was no denying that my usual techniques for getting control of a class and making a cohesive group from it were not working with this bunch. All the boys had hyperactivity and attention problems; all were impulsive and aggressive. Gwennie, with her intolerance of sudden noise or movement, added her own brand of chaos to the afternoons.

Initially I’d looked forward to Gwennie, because I’d been told her autism had only involved social issues, that she was otherwise capable of working successfully in a classroom situation. And, of course, I’d foreseen pairing her with Venus. But in practice I found Gwennie operated much further down the autistic continuum than I’d expected. She was easily overstimulated, easily frustrated, and had very, very little tolerance of disruption to routine. This made her
a rather bad fit with Billy, Jesse, Zane, and Shane, who regularly made mincemeat out of any routine and were totally incapable of conducting anything at a noise level much below that of a jackhammer.

Zane and Shane presented their own special problems. Although they came from a warm, supportive home, their parents, who had adopted the boys when they were less than a year old, were already in their midforties when the boys had arrived. They were lovely people and they clearly adored these two boys, but they were not well equipped to deal with Zane and Shane’s serious problems. Neither parent was well educated nor energetic nor particularly young at heart, so I frequently had the mother on the phone. Often she was in tears of despair over something or another they had done before school. Many of the disasters were of the sort any pair of young boys could have gotten up to – irritating and usually very messy, but not really dysfunctional behavior – but she found it very hard to cope, usually because the boys did not remember the consequences of their actions. The same things happened over and over and over again, in spite of all her efforts.

And goodness knows, when Shane and Zane
did
behave in a difficult manner, they could be very difficult indeed. The primary effect of FAS is mental retardation, and in that respect the boys had gotten off relatively lightly with a borderline IQ. However, FAS also often causes several behavior problems, among them the triplet bugbears of all special education classrooms – impulsivity, hyperactivity, and poor
concentration – as well as some specialized problems. The biggest one with Shane and Zane, which is typical of many FAS children, was an inability to learn from experience. Indeed, memory in all forms was very poor for the boys. They had to be taught things again and again and again, and each time it was like starting over. This meant it was hard for them to “learn the rules” of behavior in the classroom. Moreover, there seemed to be a connector missing between remembering things and understanding how to make use of them. Even if they
knew
the rules, i.e., could recite them, they still could not apply them. Consequently, I was coming to realize that a lot of the behavior problems I was having with Shane and Zane were a result of their inability to understand the consequences of their actions.

Another big problem area for us was that neither of them had any real concept of ownership. If they saw something in the classroom or on the playground they liked, they’d just take it. This wasn’t stealing to them. They simply did not understand it belonged to someone else and to use it, you had to ask. This, of course, made them very unpopular, both inside our class and out. Indeed, friendship was a concept quite beyond either of the boys.

Jesse was the only student in the group who had anything approaching a normal level of activity or concentration, but his tics interfered badly with his learning ability. Stress caused the tics to become more frequent or pronounced, and he had a wide variety – grimacing, jerking his head, sniffing. When he was upset, he often tended to make a fist and repetitively
hit the side of his head at just above the temple area. And when concentrating, he was inclined to repeat words over and over. These were usually harmless phrases such as “Oh man. Oh man. Oh man.” Or “Gotta concentrate. Gotta concentrate.” This did get wearing, and the other boys, distractible as they all were, found it hard to attend to their own matters when Jesse was muttering. But his very worst, more intrusive tic was the barking – sudden, loud, almost explosive – and Gwennie, in particular, couldn’t cope at all when he was doing that.

In addition to the tics, Jesse also had fairly serious learning disabilities. I think until Ben had come to do the testing, we had not appreciated how much of his academic difficulty was due to this, but in the time since Ben had assessed him, I had spent a lot of time trying to discern where his learning problems lay. They revolved mainly around reading and spelling. He had difficulty decoding words and also difficulty comprehending them, once he had ascertained what they were. As with Gwennie, I found that Jesse had a hard time learning in a noisy classroom. He couldn’t discriminate sounds well when there was background noise, so that words like
there
and
chair
often sounded alike for him. This made learning in our environment more of a challenge.

And then, of course, there was Billy. Since the clear indication on the assessment that Billy was gifted, I had made a real effort to engage him productively in class, despite his poor academics and appalling behavior. Not an easy
task! Billy did not want to sit. Billy did not want to work. Billy did not want to do reading or math or anything else he was
supposed
to do. All Billy really wanted to do was talk! And fight.

I tried to channel this within the confines of our classroom setup. I thought perhaps if I
arranged
for Billy to do some talking, maybe he wouldn’t want to do so much off-task talking. So I gave him small study projects with the idea that he could “report” to the class the things he learned. This might have worked if I could have gotten Billy to sit still long enough to read anything or write down any notes, or if the others could have been tied to their chairs to listen.

The sad truth with Billy was that no one had told
him
that he was a gifted child and thereby should be interested in doing all the clever, creative little things I was arranging for him. No, Billy persisted in being Billy, no matter what I came up with: loud, rambunctious, overenthusiastic, and with the attention span of a gnat.

Into this mix came my ongoing problems with Julie. If there was such a thing as “taking a hard line on permissiveness,” Julie was a proponent. She felt children should be loved, encouraged, and rewarded and everything else they did ignored. Period. No other discipline. And as the weeks passed, it became clear that she took an increasingly serious stand on this belief. It was rather like sharing the room with a militant pacifist. Common sense told you that it was an oxymoron, fighting for peace, but it was also
very difficult being forced to justify the opposite: let’s fight for violence.

The practical outcome of this was that we had very different ways of responding to situations in the classroom. If one of the children misbehaved, Julie’s reaction was “Let’s talk about
why
you threw that book down.” My reaction was, “Pick it up.” If one of the children got out of his seat and tore around the room, Julie’s inclination was to say nothing and praise the ones who were still in their seats. This might have worked, had the one up out of his seat not gotten up in order to beat the other ones over their heads. Or had there
been
any other ones in their seats. Most of the time, if one got up, they were all up, careering around the classroom in attack mode.

Given that most days my boys were intent on either killing one another or reenacting some version of
Lord of the Flies
, Julie became easily overcome in situations where fighting broke out. It wasn’t very practical to ignore fighting or, in the heat of the moment, ask them why they were doing it. But she wasn’t happy raising her voice or ordering people off to the quiet chairs, my two usual reactions. And she was even less happy throwing herself into the fray to pry the boys apart. The best she managed was to try and grab one and hug him, speaking softly over and over about how important it was that we not hurt one another. Meanwhile, his opponents were off locating weapons of mass destruction.

I had two big problems with all of this. First, I genuinely
liked Julie as a person. I liked her sense of humor, her industriousness, her personality. And I
wanted
her to like me. So it was hard to have to take on the role of the bad guy, always pointing out the drawbacks to her approach, forever saying how it was
much
more helpful if we presented a united front. Moreover, I didn’t like the position I was having to defend. In previous schools, I’d always been the liberal one, the open-minded one, the least restrictive. I hated suddenly being cast as the conservative. It jarred my self-image. Second, our differences made me feel self-conscious in the classroom. As the weeks went on, I knew I was going to have to structure the environment more strictly to get on top of my little guys’ behavior, but I put it off and put it off, largely because I hated having to tell Julie she was going to have to do it too.

But, in the end, it came…

After twelve weeks of struggling with this class without any noticeable improvement in behavior, without any secure sense that I was in control, I decided that I needed to go with a more well-defined approach. I wasn’t a great proponent of behavior modification, but it has its uses and here seemed to be one of them. So, I set out to design a program to bring order out of chaos.

At home I took four separate pieces of white poster board and, using construction paper, I made a traffic light out of each one. I wrote the boys’ names on them and inserted small brads at the three points on the traffic light where the
red, yellow, and green lights should be to let me hang things there. Then I made up a bunch of circles from index cards with one color on each one of them: red, yellow, or green. And finally, I made up a big grid chart with the days of the week labeled across the top.

The next morning in the classroom, I explained what was going to happen. Everybody started out with their traffic light on green. If I had to give a warning to someone about their behavior, I would take off the green circle and stick on a yellow. If I had to send someone to the quiet chair or in any other way discipline their behavior, the yellow circle went to red for the length of the time-out. I stuck the grid chart up on the bulletin board, then I held up a packet of sticker stars. I assigned each boy a particular color of star. If someone could go a given work period on green – through math period, for instance, or reading period – he got a star to put on the grid chart. Five stars together – an entire day on green – and he got
this
. I held up a Hershey bar. When we had a total of fifty stars of any color, we’d have a class party.

The boys cheered at the sight of the candy. Billy thought it was all a Very Good Idea. Jesse looked a little confused. It went right over Shane’s and Zane’s heads, I could tell, but they knew their colors, so I hoped they’d catch on soon enough once the program was under way. And as I feared, Julie hated it.

“Behavior
modification
?” she asked, picking up one of the Hershey bars as if it were a cattle prod. “They were doing
this with Casey when I first came, but I got him off it. I hate behavior mod.”

“I’m not a big fan myself,” I said.

“It’s dehumanizing. It’s treating the kids like animals.”

I hesitated to point out that at the moment mine were behaving like animals.

“Bribing them to behave. With
candy
. I mean, couldn’t we at least use raisins or something? Something vaguely healthy?”

“I’m not sure raisins would cut it,” I said. “I want control first. Then health.”

“Yeah,” she said. And her tone reflected that she thought I’d pretty much said it all with that statement.

The first week of the program was hell. No two ways about that. Mostly it was administrative hell, because I had to carry the damned little colored circles around with me and dash to the traffic lights to stick them up unerringly whenever behavior changed. And I was forever forgetting to dole out sticker stars – and discovering quickly that I had to be
very
alert to who actually
had
managed to go a whole period on green behavior, as Shane and Zane often forgot what was going on, so missed their stars, while Billy was forever trying to fudge the system.

It was not perfect. There was no sudden change in behavior. There was no class party that Friday, as I’d hoped. Indeed, I’d only managed to pass out two Hershey bars in five days, both to Jesse. But slowly, slowly the boys did seem
to be paying just a little attention to their behavior and to the behavior of the class as a whole. Troublesome as the whole plan was to administrate, having such concrete, visual reminders of the need to behave did seem to make a difference. So, we took a few mouse steps toward becoming a group.

The other thing I decided to actively do was teach “values” to the class. I didn’t normally do this sort of thing. In most of my previous classes, we had had “morning discussion,” where I brought the children together in a circle before lessons began and we discussed various topics. It was usually a combination show-and-tell and troubleshooting session, where kids could voice things that were important to them, air worries, complain and discuss predetermined “topics,” such as appropriate behavior in a given situation. This had always worked well and been a mainstay of my teaching technique. But not this year. In part this happened because we had the other resource students coming and going through the day, including first thing in the morning, and so there was not a good time for discussion without interruption. However, the main reason was that they were a very small group, so one difficult member easily disrupted everyone, and even without disruption it was hard to keep this group sitting down that long and paying attention. They were not bonded, not interested, and not willing. The times I’d tried morning discussion, it had always ended in a
shambles, usually with a fistfight or my sending most of them off to quiet chairs. So, I’d dropped the activity initially. However, as time passed, I felt more and more of a need to have some space during the school day to help the boys understand more appropriate behavior and to explore and practice it through conversation, role-playing, and art.