THE BEGINNING
Here are the three experiences I had with people with special needs before I started working in special education:
1.) My aunt Georgia was born with a cocktail of genetic disorders that left her bedridden and mute for most of her life. She had to be fed intravenously and could only make moaning sounds that to kid me sounded like unhappiness. (They weren’t. They were, in fact, quite expressive.) My grandmother loved her as much as any mother could love a child. I knew that there was nothing to be uncomfortable about, but whenever I was in her room, I was never at ease. What was I afraid of? That she would get mad at me? That something would go wrong and I wouldn’t know what to do? That she was suffering and couldn’t express it? That she had latent psychic powers? My problem was that her room had the Sega Genesis, so whenever we visited, I had no choice but to sit next to her bed and cautiously play Sonic the Hedgehog or Golden Axe and hope that whatever I was vaguely afraid of wouldn’t come to pass. My grandmother said that Georgia would smile whenever she talked about Jesus, and was certain beyond a doubt that she was saved. She passed in her early twenties.
2.) When I was in elementary school and playing on the jungle gym, a large (to me in first grade) dark haired girl with Down’s Syndrome almost pushed me off. I’m sure now that I was in her way, and she didn’t know the appropriate way to express that (par for the course for six and seven year olds, really). At the time I didn’t know she was different, I just thought she was a bitch.
3.) In college, a high school graduate with Down’s worked in our cafeteria. He was a very friendly dude. So friendly, in fact, that he would put strangers in headlocks so he could give them noogies. Eventually he learned a host of dirty gestures from other students and staff.
4.) In my youth group at the church I grew up in, I casually called something “retarded”. One of the leaders sternly told me not to use that word. As justification, he asked me what was wrong with being retarded. I didn’t say anything, but I thought the answer was obvious.
The lessons I had gleaned from these experiences were that these students’ medically uncertain lives are in my bumbling and surprisingly feminine hands, I have to be careful about what I say because they’ll memorize all of it and repeat the worst of it, they can go bat-shit at any time, and I had to totally sterilize my vocabulary around anyone remotely connected to the field.
The few days of training I had further confused and frightened me. It was a flurry of special ed lingo (which is a whole essay in itself), cautionary tales, tearful and sickeningly sentimental reflections, teeming crowds of middle-aged women, and endless ways to mess up. I think slipping on a banana peel is funny, play video games too much, and am mildly obsessed with Joan of Arc. I was convinced that I would need to become an entirely different person, as though I was entering into a religion with a whole new code of ethics. “Be patient!” I heard from a few mothers who were asked to speak at the orientation. “Be sensitive! Know what to do during a seizure! Support your students in their effort to meet their IEP goals! Take data all the time! These students are beautiful and life-changing!” The cherry on the terror sundae was what is called Nonviolent Crisis Prevention and Intervention training, or NCPI. (The N is a new addition. When in a hurry, CPI will do just fine.) It’s a set of basic instructions on how to deal with a student trying to hit, kick, or bite, and how to restrain that student if it gets bad enough, all in a way to eliminate injuries to both parties. (I would later learn that most of this goes completely out the window when you’re trying to keep your glasses from getting smacked off your face.) Not only did I have to be baptized in special education, I had to learn special ed kung fu.
I couldn’t sleep the night before I started. I kept imagining all the ways I could fail, all the things that could go wrong, and all the awful, sandpaper-like parts of my personality that would be utterly unwelcome in the environment I had conned my way into. I imagined the people who worked in special education were all middle-aged women who had cross-stitched pictures on their wall that say “God Bless This Mess” and three kids. And what if I said “shit” in front of a student? It’s a word close to my heart, honestly, and certainly close at hand. Would I get fired on the spot? Who do I have to become to do this? For a lazy college graduate with a sense of entitlement, this is probably too much responsibility. Did I accidentally hypnotize the woman that interviewed me? This, for some reason, felt like homesickness. This wasn’t just a job; it was my first full-time job after college, albeit one that I didn’t get because of my degree. It was the second biggest change in my uneventful and sheltered life.
The class I was assigned to had twelve students and a total of about thirteen staff, including a handful of specialists and two teachers that split the case load. (I’m tempted to talk about the students in terms of their various diagnoses for simplicity’s sake, but it does nothing to get at what they’re really like. If you hear that someone has Autism, you know nothing except that they fall somewhere on the spectrum between someone who’s social skills are less than adequate to someone who is totally non-verbal and might be at a first grade developmental level. This was lesson #1 for me: the individual kid matters far more than whatever they’ve been diagnosed with when it comes to deciding how best to teach them.) I was assigned to work with a different student almost every period, although I was first assigned to the students and activities that tended to be easier, due to my inexperience.
The first boss I had, Ms. Andrews, was a deafening fifteen year vet, a baseball fan, a consummate leader, an awe-inspiring teacher, and mother of two. “Do you need to talk to Ms. Andrews?” became a magic phrase we could pull out at almost any time and it would bring instant obedience, but not through fear. Well, okay, it was fear, but there was also intense adoration in equal measure. They responded to her better than I have ever seen a student respond to a teacher. It was from her that I learned possibly the most important lesson I would ever learn about special education: They’re people. For all of the difficulties in relating to students like the ones I’ve worked with, if I patronize them, there’s no point. They have tastes and moods and sex drives, and in high school, they’re only a few years away from job training and the rest of their lives. Pity is the cardinal sin. I learned quickly that I wasn’t there to feel bad for them. Everyone already does that. I saw it countless times when we would make trips to the grocery store or restaurants in the area. People would make special concessions to them because they were obviously different, things like overlooking certain charges or automatically giving them special privileges. But I was there to help them get as far as they could possibly go toward independence from a small army of teachers and family member, and treating them as anything less than their age would render their time in school meaningless.
Since then I’ve messed up a lot and gotten poop on my hands.
P.S. (5/1/10) Apparently I’ve gone 3 or 4 months without noticing that I said I’d had three experiences and listed four. I won’t change it for now, since its kind of funny to me.