Just Another Kid: Each was a child no one could reach – until one amazing teacher embraced them all. Torey Hayden

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СКАЧАТЬ was gloomy there. The steel shelving blocked off the light from the windows and the overhead fluorescents. Taking out a stick of colored chalk from its box, I handed it to Shemona.

      “Make me a seven,” I said.

      She did.

      “Good job. Now, draw a set of seven squares.”

      She drew carefully, making each square precisely and coloring it in. As I had hoped, the colored chalk appealed to her immensely.

      We went on like this for several minutes, making numbers and corresponding sets of objects. I drew some too, and had her make lines to connect the sets with their numbers. Shemona was good at numbers. I wanted to relax her, to involve her in the pleasure of this new medium, to please her with her own expertise. It was a trick I’d often used with other elective mutes that had always been very effective, because once involved and relaxed, the child took readily to my increasing the speed of the activity, of making a racing game of it. I then took over more and more of the game, so that I did most of the writing and most of the answers. I verbalized what I wrote. I speeded the pace up even more. And if I did things right, the excitement became enough that when I eventually asked a question and didn’t answer, the child would. It was a simple trick that had worked so often for me with elective mutes that I’d videotaped it and used it in presentations of my research. One colleague, intrigued by the results shown on the tape, maintained it was a kind of hypnosis. I’d never thought of it that way. To me it was simply mental sleight of hand.

      It took effort to get Shemona going. She was more interested in drawing with the chalk and wanted to make her drawings carefully. She would erase with her finger and try again in an effort to make her triangles exactly straight or her circles exactly round. So, in the end, I had to take the chalk from her and tell her she could use it afterward.

      “Show me an eight. Show me a four. Show me an eleven. Twelve. Six. One. Fourteen. Zero.” I went faster and faster. Shemona was getting caught up in the process by this time. Some of the numbers were written a bit too high for her to reach, and she had to jump to point to them. This pleased her and she giggled. “Six. Nine. Three. Thirteen. What’s this? Five. What’s this? Seven. What’s this? Two. What’s this? Fifteen.”

      On and on and on. Faster and faster and faster. The whole board was covered with my quickly scribbled numbers, and Shemona was panting to keep up with me. She was smiling and giggling loudly enough that I could hear sound.

      “What’s this? Four. What’s this? Ten. What’s this? Eight. What’s this?”

      Silence.

      The next answer was six, and Shemona knew it. She’d already leaped up to point in that direction, waiting for me to say six. When I didn’t, she fell back abruptly, her arm still raised. She was panting. An expectant smile was still on her lips, and I was reminded of my Labrador dog and the same enthusiastic, expectant expression he had, when I paused, midgame, with the ball in my hand.

      “What number is this?” I asked, pointing to the six.

      She looked at it. The smile faded and she regarded the number a long moment, as if it were written in a foreign script.

      “What number is it?” I tapped the board.

      She continued to gaze at it.

      “What number is this?” I knew the impetus was gone. I knew I had failed. If I hadn’t caught her in the excitement of the moment, I knew I wasn’t going to now. I smiled in an effort to keep the good feelings between us. “It’s a six, isn’t it?” She gave a halfhearted little jump to point to the six, wanting to keep the happiness in the situation as obviously as I did.

      I handed her the box of colored chalk. “You did that really well, didn’t you? You know all your numbers. Here. You may use these until recess time.”

      Carolyn and I had worked up a system whereby we alternated playground duty at recess. Because of her aide, Carolyn wouldn’t have needed to stay down on the playground during the fifteen-minute recess period. I did, as there was no one else to look after my children. However, Carolyn, understanding the pressures of this sort of job when there was no break, had offered to alternate with me, watching my kids as well as hers. So every day I had a fifteen-minute break, either in the morning or the afternoon.

      Usually, I used the period to catch up on miscellaneous tasks, such as running off the children’s worksheets on the mimeograph or setting up art projects. Some days I did no more than collapse in the teachers’ lounge. On this particular morning, I’d gone to get the keys from Bill, the janitor, to open his cleaning closet on my floor so that I could wash out the mucky gray from our easel. I had the tap running, and dirty water was gurgling noisily down the drain, so when Leslie appeared in the doorway of the closet, I jumped with surprise.

      My first reaction was to glance at my watch, because I was suddenly alarmed to think I’d lost track of the time and my children were back in the room. But there were still five minutes remaining of the break.

      “What are you doing here, sweetheart?”

      Leslie was red cheeked from exertion and looking a whole lot more alert than usual.

      “What do you need?”

      She turned her head and looked down the hallway.

      “What is it?” I stuck my head out of the closet and glanced in the direction she was looking.

      Back and forth between me and the stairwell Leslie glanced. Her body was taut with excitement.

      “You shouldn’t be up here, you know,” I said. “You’re supposed to be down on the playground with Miss Berry and Joyce. Do they know you’ve come up here?”

      She raised one hand and pointed down the hall, then she grunted. It was the first intentional sound I’d ever heard Leslie make.

      Again, I looked around the corner of the closet door. “What is it?”

      “Crying,” she said hoarsely.

      “Crying? Who’s crying? Can you show me?”

      Leslie took off. I followed her down the hallway, down the stairs, through the fire doors. As we came out of the stairwell, I was accosted by noise. A general hubbub filtered up from the area around the main office.

      Carolyn was just inside the office door when I reached it. She had hold of Dirkie by the collar of his shirt and Shemona by her coat. Dirkie was crying angrily. Shemona was hysterical. She twisted and turned, all the while screeching at the top of her lungs.

      “Oh, thank God,” Carolyn said when she saw me. “I thought you’d gotten lost.”

      “What’s happened?”

      “She tried to kill me!” Dirkie shouted. “That girl, that girl with the long yellow hair, she tried to kill me!”

      “Dirkie was just being Dirkie,” Carolyn said. Letting go of him, she reached over the top of the barrier to grab a handful of tissues. She held them out to Dirkie. “You were being a bit annoying, weren’t you, Dirkie? You kept wanting to touch Shemona’s hair. I asked you several times to leave her alone.”

      “She tried to kill me!” He displayed a scratched cheek.

      “I СКАЧАТЬ