Somebody Somewhere (28 page)

I began to play my guitar rhythmically again as I spoke, raising and lowering my voice like the ocean tide. The lesson was an original composition for which I had choreographed actions. The children would learn through music, singing, movement, drama, and art. They would learn through their eyes and ears, and through touch.

As we learned about the life cycle of plants, the children in “sick bay” seemed to come to life. “I feel better now,” said one, rejoining the group. “I feel better now, too,” said another. I continued to play and sing and direct the bodies around me as I silently instructed the dissenters and casualties with the occasional pointing finger or directed stare.

Intuitively I knew what was going on in all peripheries and even behind me, and directed children by name who were out of sight. I was so calm and tuned out that I was totally tuned in. I felt I was not teaching but conducting and directing and learning along with the children.

My lesson went like clockwork as the children were moved through the lesson step by step. Holding on to the whole picture, approaching it again and again from every different angle, the children were given the chance to take the floor and demonstrate their learning.

My assessment was excellent. The lecturer was amazed, not because she hadn't expected it from me, but because of the way I taught, my hyperawareness of the moving parts of the classroom, the children, my focus on well-thought-through goals, and my good sense of pacing. My lesson had pattern and rhythm, it was visual and concrete, and everyone owned their own learning and could find their own level of strength while still exercising and building upon their weaknesses. The dancing and music, the logic and the flow, the structure and the consistency, gave me everything I needed to teach a lesson well.

Angie had passed well, too. This woman I had feared and I congratulated one another, our faces in a dialogue of genuine smiles.

Despite my excellent assessment, none of it gave me a sense of real achievement. Although I had taught without Willie and Carol's help, I was still using stored-up voices, stored facial expressions, and stored movements. I was still moving too fast to be aware of how I did what I did. Like some disembodied mind I was still on automatic pilot. I was the captain of the ship but I was still using controls to run the ship that I'd had little time to get to know or call mine. The assessment confirmed that I had the ability to teach, but it didn't make me feel like a teacher. I could sculpt, paint, compose, and speak foreign languages, too, but I couldn't keep up with these automatic abilities in action. I was a computer with slow monitoring, both internally and externally. I was good at things but that didn't mean I felt for them. Ironically I could personally get more out of sweeping the floor than I could from something “the world” would applaud.

T
here were just a few more classes to go to finish off the course. Caught up in the feeling that we had survived the final rounds, serious business was far from the minds of many, including mine. I was given a letter by the head of the department. I opened it up and felt I was going to be ill. It was an appointment to come and discuss
my course results. The letter said that I had been failed by the visiting lecturer who had seen me on my previous German teaching round. But at the time, the lecturer had told me that my lesson had been okay. I couldn't understand.

I knocked upon the lecturer's door. She opened it, looked at me briefly, and turned away to continue packing up her things for the day. “I'm in a hurry,” she said. “I don't have time to discuss it. I'll be away. My colleague will speak to you about it on my behalf and decide what action to take.” The appointment with the head of the department was set for the following week.

I spoke to some of the other students. They were surprised. I spoke to the lecturer who had assessed my final teaching round. She had found my teaching flawless and marked me as excellent. She was astounded. I spoke to Kerry, who suggested it might have had something to do with the visiting lecturer having seen my talk in Theo Marek's department.

I knocked on the lecturer's door again. I insisted on knowing upon what grounds she had decided to fail me. “Look, this is a teaching qualification,” she said. “It's not just a piece of paper that gives someone the right to go out there and be in a position of responsibility and teach. We don't want anyone killing anybody.”

I was shocked and confused. I had never hit the children. I had never even threatened to. My form of discipline with the children was much more to discuss their behavior with them after the class, try to understand how they saw it and whether they thought it was fair and what should be done about it.

I established discipline in the course of a class by setting out the rules at the beginning of each class, getting feedback that the rules were understood, warning dissenters, and then distancing them from the other students in order to keep the class going. I kept the class in control and my use of a strong, low, calm voice in the face of challenges was more effective than any raised voice or threat. I was always consistent—systematic but fair. Discipline, according to my assessments, had been one of my strongest, fairest points as a teacher and had won me respect from the students as well as supervisors. I
could not imagine that any teacher or student ever feared I would kill someone. Could my talk on autism at the Department of Child Behavior have conjured up such bizarre images?

A week later I had my meeting with the head of the department. The teaching round for which the visiting lecturer had assessed me had been taught in German. This was part of an additional teaching qualification I had taken on to be a teacher of languages other than English. There was no doubt that this was an area in which I was skilled. Nevertheless, explained the department head, if I would accept to pass merely as a generalist teacher and forfeit this additional qualification, they could use this as a loophole to disregard the failing assessment. I had little choice. I accepted and passed with qualifications to be a teacher in English alone. I never told the head of the department what this lecturer had said to me. There seemed no room for discussion and nobody asked me my side of things. The lecturer herself was away for the meeting.

The Mareks had arranged a goodbye dinner for me at their house. I was off to the United Kingdom to publicize my book. The Millers came to dinner, too, and I was free to wander about if it was all too much. My emotions overwhelmed me, my hearing became painfully acute, and the meaning fell out of everything everyone said and did.

I fell headlong into a silent movie where the meaning was turned off and the volume was up full blast. I began to shake from head to foot, and tears welled up as the muscles in my ears contracted with the amplified sound of rushing blood to add to the meaningless cacophony.

“Put cotton wool in your ears,” someone said, aware by now of the signs. No, I snapped silently to myself. I'm not a freak.

I was equal to everybody else here. And yet my body tended not to agree. I left for the living room before losing control. It was like my body attacked itself, making me a pin cushion into which pins were stuck ever harder until I gave in or suffered the consequences of shutdown. But I wanted to stay in the company of my friends and came back.

Then Theo Marek left the room, I put out my hand to his wife. I had come to trust her and feel secure in her familiarity. She looked rather surprised but pleased as I shook her hand, equally pleased with myself.

I had spent a long time making the transition from doing mirror hands with myself to shaking my own hand in order to comprehend the action and be fully aware of the sensation without cutting it off. I had spent my life disappearing from people's lives to avoid goodbyes and the associated feelings (or the frustrating lack of them in the face of expectations to have them). I had avoided the inevitable efforts at touch. Until now such touch had always negated closeness and left me feeling so very glad to be going. It seemed so freeing now to finally have a shared way of saying goodbye with feelings.

Theo Marek reentered the room. I looked at him like a lion I was about to reach out to. His ability to understand me and affect me were his claws and teeth.

I put my hand out toward him. He couldn't help but smile. I shook his hand without treating him like he had leprosy. The look in my eyes was genuine. The shy smile fighting with my face was far from plastic. I had come to mean a great deal to the Mareks, and Theo Marek knew that this handshake was given with forethought and meaning and trust and friendship.

I
t was approaching Christmastime. I had only ten days between the end of the teaching course and getting on a plane to meet my literary agent and United Kingdom publisher for the first time. I tidied away the year's teaching materials, boxed up one-third, gave away another third, and threw away another third.

I had spent most of my life trying to fulfill expectations and fit in. I had gone into teaching to pass the time but also to challenge my defenses by facing my difficulties head on. The fact that I made a good teacher was both relevant and irrelevant. It meant nothing to the choice to continue but it created something too easy to play to
and hide within and behind: expectation. Teaching had served its purpose but to take it on as “Donna's goal in life” would in time become stored, mechanized, and automatic. It had been a good bridge but there were bigger challenges. Somewhere, sometime, I would find not a cause but a place, not a group, but a special someone whose expectations and needs I would not fulfill but who would find, admit, come to terms with, and fulfill needs within me. Classrooms were not so far removed from audiences. I didn't need to be idolized, needed, or wanted. I needed to love to need and to want. It is hard to find your own wants standing before a room of puppy eyes and outstretched hands. I had spent my life denying them. I wasn't going to find them here. Autistic children generally wouldn't reach out with these puppy eyes and outstretched hands but my compulsion to meet their needs would surely overshadow my own and that was just what my defenses wanted. My defenses could go to hell. This was my life.