The Tiger’s Child: The story of a gifted, troubled child and the teacher who refused to give up on her. Torey Hayden

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

      Our town, Marysville, was in proximity to a large mental hospital and a state penitentiary, and this, in addition to the migrants, had created a disproportionate underclass, many of whom lived in appalling poverty. The buildings in the migrant camp had been built as temporary summer housing and many were literally nothing but wood and tar paper that lacked even the most basic amenities, but they became crowded in the winter by those who could afford nothing better. It was here that Sheila lived with her father.

      A drug addict with alcohol problems, her father had spent most of Sheila’s early years in and out of prison. He had no job. Currently on parole, he was attending an alcohol abuse program, but doing little else.

      Sheila’s mother had been only fourteen when, as a runaway, she took up with Sheila’s father and became pregnant. Sheila was born two days before her mother’s fifteenth birthday. A second child, a son, was born nineteen months later. There wasn’t much else relating to the mother in the file, although it was not hard to read drugs, alcohol and domestic violence between the lines. Whatever, she must have finally had enough, because when Sheila was four, she left the family. From the brief notes, it appeared that she had intended to take both children with her, but Sheila was later found abandoned on an open stretch of freeway about thirty miles south of town. Sheila’s mother and her brother, Jimmie, were never heard from again.

      The bulk of the file detailed Sheila’s behavior. At home the father appeared to have no control over her at all. She had been repeatedly found wandering around the migrant camp late at night. She had a history of fire setting and had been cited for criminal damage three times by the local police, quite an accomplishment for a six-year-old. At school, Sheila often refused to speak, and as a consequence, virtually nothing was contained in the file to tell me what or how much she might have learned. She had been in kindergarten and then first grade in an elementary school near the migrant camp until the incident with the little boy had occurred, but there were no assessment notes. In place of the usual test results and learning summaries was a catalog of horror stories detailing Sheila’s destructive, often violent, behavior.

      At the end of the file was a brief summary of the incident with the toddler. The judge concluded that Sheila was out of parental control and would be best placed in a secure unit, where her needs could be better met. In this instance, he meant the children’s unit at the state mental hospital. Unfortunately, the unit was at capacity at the time of the hearing, and thus, Sheila would need to await an opening. A recently dated memo was appended detailing the need to provide some form of education, given her age and the law, but no one bothered to mince words. Her placement was custodial. This meant she had to be kept in school for the time being, because of the specifics of the law, but I need not feel under any obligation to teach her. With Sheila’s arrival, my room had become a holding pen.

      Youth was my greatest asset at that point in my career. Still fired with idealism, I felt strongly that there were no problem kids, only a problem society. Although initially reluctant to take Sheila, it had been because my room was crowded and my resources overstretched already, not because of the child herself. Thus, once I had her, I regarded her as mine and my class was no holding pen! My belief in human integrity and the inalienable right of each and every one of my children to possess it was trenchant.

      Well, almost. Before she was done, Sheila had given all my beliefs a good shaking and she started that very first day. As Anton and I were sitting in the front office that lunch hour, reading Sheila’s file, Sheila was in our classroom scooping the goldfish out of the aquarium and, one by one, poking their eyes out.

      Sheila proved to be chaos dressed in outgrown overalls and a faded T-shirt. Everything she said was shrieked. Everything she touched was broken, hit, squashed or mangled. And everyone, myself included, was The Enemy. She operated in what Anton christened her “animal mode.” There was not much “child mode” present in the early days. The slightest unexpected movement she always interpreted as attack. Her eyes would go dark, her face would flush, her body would take on alert rigidity, and from that point it was a finely balanced matter as to whether she would fight, or panic and run away. When she was in her animal mode, our methods were a whole lot more akin to taming than teaching.

      Yet …

      Sheila was different. There was something electric about her, about her eyes, about the sharpness of her movements that superimposed itself over even her most feral moments. I couldn’t articulate what it was, but I could sense it.

      I loved my children dearly, but the truth was, they were not a very bright lot. Most children with emotional difficulties use so much mental energy coping that there simply isn’t much left for learning. Additionally, other syndromes often occur in conjunction with psychological problems, either contributing to them or resulting from them. For example, two of my children suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome and another had a neurological condition that was causing a slow deterioration of his central nervous system. As a consequence, none of the children was functioning at an average level for his or her age, although undoubtedly several were of normal intelligence. Thus, it came as a surprise to me to discover during Sheila’s early days with us that she could add and subtract well, because she had managed only three months of first grade.

      A bigger surprise came days later, when I discovered she could give the meanings of unusual words. One such word was “chattel.”

      “Wherever did you learn a word like this?” I asked when my curiosity finally overwhelmed me.

      Sheila, little and dirty and very smelly, sat hunched up on her chair across the table from me. She peered up through matted hair to regard me. “Chattel of Love,” she replied and added in her peculiar dialect, “it be the name of a book I find.”

      “Book? Where? What book?”

      “I don’t steal it,” she retorted defensively. “It be in the garbage can. I find it.”

      “Where?”

      “I do find it,” she repeated, obviously believing this was the issue I was trying to explore.

      “Yes, okay,” I replied, “but where?”

      “In the ladies’ toilets at the bus station. But I don’t steal it.”

      I smiled. “No, I’m sure you didn’t. I’m just interested in hearing about it.”

      She regarded me suspiciously.

      “What did you do with the book?” I asked.

      Sheila clearly couldn’t puzzle out why I wanted to know these things. “Well, I read it,” she said, her voice full of disbelief, as if I’d asked a very silly question. There was a worried edge to it, however. She still sensed it was an accusation.

      “You read it? It sounds like a rather grown-up book.”

      “Well, I don’t read all of it. But on the cover it say Chattel of Love and so I do be curious about it, ’cause of the picture,’ cause of what the man be doing to the lady on the cover.”

      “I see,” I replied uncertainly.

      She shrugged. “But I couldn’t find nothing good in it, so I throw it away again.”

      With an IQ we soon discovered to be in excess of 180, Sheila was electric all right. Indeed, she was more like nuclear.

      Discovering Sheila was a highly gifted child intellectually did nothing to change the facts of her grinding poverty, her abusive background or her continuing and continually outrageous behavior. Uncertain СКАЧАТЬ