canceled forever

Here’s what I believe is the weirdest outworking of a culture defined by mass media. I’ve read plenty of writers saying our relationships, self-image, and all the other things that constitute being human are being shaped by TV, the internet, radio, etc. Some people more than others. But I literally cannot imagine many of the students I’ve encountered without the culture they’ve consumed. I guess this is true for everyone; who are we without the stories we’ve heard (regardless of the source)? But in this case television and film and music form the backbone of their interactions. For that matter, a very narrow range of media. Off the top of my head, here’s an incomplete list of stuff that has influenced the students I’ve met: Spongebob Squarepants, the entirety of Disney Channel programming (like the whirlwind of mega-hit tween sugar like Hannah Montana, but also the lesser known shows like Drake and Josh, The Suite Life of Zack and Cody, The Wizards of Waverley Place, blah blah blah. Haven’t heard of them? You don’t spend time around kids with access to cable because you have been blessed by the gods), Kid Songs, every paycheck-cutting family movie that comes out, every thumping R&B club hit clean enough to make it onto mainstream radio and TV, Wicked, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, Alice in Wonderland, and so on forever and ever. Basically anything that makes people hate the idea of media for kids. (I wonder what percentage of its profits Disney and its ilk can attribute to special education.) (The kids I work with are all 14 years old and up. By all rights they should be old enough to shed interest in things included in that list. They do not. I have met a single kid with age-appropriate interests [and a fantastic knowledge of what movies are coming out and what actors are in them], but the rest of them are content watching media targeted at children, and even a bunch of stuff meant for preschool ages. It’s a weird balance and a nearly impossible battle–you can’t force them to care about things, but you also want them to move past things like the Wiggles or Sesame Street, since they’re in high school.)

All that to say a lot of my students learned how to interact through Disney and its army of subsidiaries. You could blame their parents, I suppose, but raising a kid is exhausting enough without disability. I’m sure most of them thank God every day for glowing rectangles. I would. I would teach them to call the TV “mommy and daddy” too. But it’s not that the fairy tale endings or comedy has made them think of the world in those terms. Rather, they’ll recite whole blocks of dialogue, or mimic the actions and reactions of the actors. Most of them are capable of original thought, of course, but often its easier to initiate a conversation with something familiar they’ve heard before, rather than come up with something new. “Something new is boring.”

Understanding this factor has helped me understand my students. The real reason behind this is that they are more comfortable reciting something familiar than something new. It takes a lot more effort for them to come up with new things to say. Why expend the effort, when its easier to draw on the library of interactions they’ve already had? If it wasn’t TV, it would be stuff they’ve overheard from other conversations.

ANYWAY, here are two personalities I’ve gotten to meet and/or work with in the past year and a half, with more to come:

Noah: If some kind of Gaimanesque personification of the Jewish Lounge Entertainer attended my high school, he would be Noah. If the personality of every scummy Hollywood producer in the world were beamed  into the brain one well-meaning and bright young kid, it would be Noah. Pass him in the hall, ask him how he’s doing: “Feelin’ lucky!” Every day is a party, complete with his rendition of a well-known party anthem, like “Let’s Get it Started” by the Black Eyed Peas (!!!). He has hit on or asked out every girl in his class, and a few teachers. He’s a good example of someone who learned how to interact from TV. Specifically comedies where the Scuzzball will sidle up to some girl, put his arm around her, drop what he thinks is a foolproof line, and get shot down. He’ll even enact the Scuzzball’s shocked reaction to the shutdown, freezing with an exaggerated expression of shock, and then hastily backpedal to say that the pickup line meant something else. My reconstruction of a common response to the question “what did you do over the weekend?”:

“Well, I’ll tell ya! It started with a PAAAAR-TAY!” [dancing, general carefree hooting and hollering] “Then on Saturday I went to the action-packed movie that had adventure, romance,” [sly wink at some poor girl], “and great acting–” and then get interrupted by a teacher that desperately wants him to get to the point. Throw in some show tunes and ubiquitous pop songs from the last 30 years, and Noah’s story is complete.

Technically he’s not in my class. He’s in a class for higher-functioning students at the school I work at, but I see him every day when I take different students to inclusion classes. He’s remarkably bright and hardworking, and basically unflappable. He’ll get a little long-faced when he’s scolded, but he visibly pulls himself out of it with a deep breath and puts on a toothy smile, as if he had flubbed a line and was getting back into the show. He also can’t stand my students, which makes it all the funnier when they antagonize him. “Hey, back off, kid!” “I’ve had enough of you today!” “All right, that’s it!” His best friend is a kid named Bob, and during their free time they enact these scenes where one of them (usually Noah) is some Dennis the Menace-like antagonist and the other is a puffed up authority figure.

Allen: I won’t pretend he wasn’t my favorite. It was one of his oft-repeated phrases that named this blog. On my very first day, he and I had writing together. He had to pick a topic to write about and four or five details about that topic, plus an introduction and conclusion. After goading him into picking a topic for god knows how long, I gave him some options, and he chose to write about what he did over the summer. I had decided I would be the fun, playful teacher (a fantasy I quickly abandoned), and in that persona I corrected his spelling of “great”, which came out as “geart”, pronounced like it looks, like “gear” with a t. “Geart!?” I said. “What’s ‘geart’?” Ha ha! He thought this was utterly hysterical, and I thought I was in. We were both elated. I learned this would be my greatest mistake. Every day after that he brought it up. “W-w-wemembew Geawt?” Every single day we were both at school, he would ask me. I wasn’t alone, either. He had a few scripts for everyone around him that he never stopped thinking were the pinnacle of comedy. To a gym teacher whose script was generated two or three years previous: “Mr. Harris, door’s locked!” and would repeat it a few times until Mr. Harris said it. And then he would say “that was two years ago,” just like Mr. Harris had started to say after two years had in fact elapsed. To another student: “Derek, I hate dogs.” No response from Derek. “Derek: I hate dogs.” “Allen Smith,” Derek would reply, with a weary tone instead of the reprimanding one Allen was looking for. At one point the two of them had that conversation legitimately, where Allen announced his distaste for dogs and Derek expressed his shock over such a deviant opinion. Derek would then be cursed to repeat it until the end of time.

A lot of kids with autism have very similar speech impediments. I never got tired of Allen’s. We would try to help him pronounce words correctly, of course, but there was something about his in particular that endeared me to him. It might have been this conversation. He and I were reading a book about animals that asked the reader to identify an animal based on its eye.

“Okay Allen, what animal is this?”

“A wizard.”

“…what?”

Nothing.

“Allen, what animal is this?”

“Its a wizard.”

“What? …a wizard? Really?”

“A LLLLizard.”

Working with Allen was sometimes like trying to herd burning cats in traffic because of his Planck time attention span, but of all the kids at the school I used to work at, I probably think about him the most.

(You may have noticed I changed the name of this post. It was a dumb title. This one is good and better!)