Beautiful Child (17 page)

O
f all the children, the one I felt most concerned about was Jesse. Despite the testing earlier in the year, which substantiated Jesse’s normal IQ, he remained academically low functioning. He could not read even the most basic sight vocabulary. Indeed, his skills were little better than Shane’s or Zane’s, who were both younger and more severely challenged intellectually and behaviorally.

His Tourette’s syndrome created numerous problems in this department. The tics interfered with his concentration and flooded his mind with obsessive thoughts. In particular, he was inclined to get sidetracked repeating words, either out loud or mentally, and this required extra time to do everything. In addition it seemed to incline him to a general restlessness that made it hard for him to sit down. Even when he was concentrating, he fidgeted constantly. But mostly he didn’t sit down. Two minutes with bottom applied to chair was about as long as he lasted before he was up. Often he didn’t wander. He just had to get up, move around, and reseat himself, which, of course, was very disruptive to his work. This restlessness also seemed to feed into a more general tendency toward aggression and irritability. Partly this was caused by the other kids becoming distracted by his movement and reacting, but partly, it seemed to be a sort of global irritability that Jesse felt toward almost everything. I think this was connected to the Tourette’s and to Jesse’s frustration at trying to control the tics enough to get through the demands of the day. Whatever, it took a terrible toll on his schoolwork.

I attempted to deal with this by responding to the positive things Jesse did and ignoring as much as possible the tics and their consequences. The other children were remarkably good about accepting Jesse’s various noises and actions without too much ado. As inclined to fighting as they were, it was seldom personal. Most of the aggression in the classroom seemed to come more out of each individual’s inability to control his own impulses rather than any particular animosity toward others, and hence, the children could be surprisingly understanding and diplomatic. Indeed, Billy sometimes even intervened on Jesse’s behalf on the playground when children from other classes teased him about his tics.

In an effort to address Jesse’s reading problems, I resorted to an old favorite of mine – the homemade game. There
is a children’s board game called Candy Land that involves progressing along a long snaking path made up of different colored squares, and the players move forward by drawing cards from a pile and then moving their playing piece to the matching square on the path. When I’d first started teaching, I’d discovered that replacing the colored cards with math problems that the children then had to match to the right answer on the path made a good, quite enjoyable game. This led me to see what a wonderfully adaptable game Candy Land was in general, and I’d created many other variations along the way. In this case, I thought I would adapt it for Jesse, using simple sight words like
was
and
what
and
saw
, things he was always encountering and always confusing.

One of the pluses about Candy Land is that in the real game there are “wild cards” that can advance the player dramatically forward – or backward – in the game, depending on when they are drawn, and this added element of chance always lent excitement for the players. When I designed my own games, I added extra of these cards. Some of them, as in the real game, advanced players toward winning, but additionally, my cards included silly things on them – stand on one foot and hop around the table – or surprise prizes, like getting a bonus star for the star chart or five M&Ms. This not only lent excitement to the game, it also allowed a certain amount of general movement, which cut down on inappropriate restlessness.

One afternoon, I was playing Jesse’s version of the game
with him and Billy and another little boy named James, who came in occasionally for reading help.

Jesse had had a bad day in general. His tics tended to wax and wane both in frequency and in strength, and in the previous week or so, some of the noisier, more intrusive ones were definitely on the increase. We were also having to give him more time to do things, like answer questions, because his tendency to get caught obsessively repeating words slowed everything down. Billy was relatively patient with this, but James found it annoying.

“Come on, kid, take your turn,” he kept saying, which only increased the time necessary for Jesse to answer.

I reached across and touched his arm. “That isn’t helpful, James.”

“He takes forever. We could have played this game about six times, if he’d just hurry up,” James replied.

“He’s doing the best he can,” I replied.

“He’s got tics,” Billy offered. “That’s how come he’s taking so long.”

“Don’t talk about me like I’m not here,” Jesse muttered.

“Yes, you’re right,” I said. “I’m sorry. Can you take your turn now?”

Jesse’s shoulders twitched. He held out his card and studied it carefully. I could tell by the expression on his face, he was mentally repeating something. There was this huge sense of expectation. He was
just
on the edge of speaking, but –

“
Geez
,” James finally said. “This is taking
forever
.”

That was it. Jesse exploded. He leaped up abruptly from the table, knocking the playing board off with one swift movement. The cards fluttered everywhere. Within the space of a breath, Jesse was over the table and had hold of James.

“Hey, hey, hey!” I said and pried them apart. “Jesse. Over there. At your table. Get your folder out and start your work. James, here. Sit over here. Billy, to your table, please.”

“Geez! Do something to him, would you?” James squawked. “He’s not getting away with hitting me.”

“You let me take care of this,” I replied. “You sit here. You’ve only got ten minutes left anyway.”

Jesse couldn’t sit down. He tore around the classroom in a way that I knew would end in mayhem if I didn’t physically reorient him. I looked over to Julie, who was working with Gwennie. “Could you get him? Help him sit down and get on with his work?”

“I could help him,” Billy offered cheerfully.

“Thanks, Billy, that’s kind of you, but I think it would be more helpful if you just sat down at your own table and started your folder. When you’re done, you can check to see if Zane needs help with his work.”

“I don’t!” Zane replied testily.

“Yes, well, whatever,” I replied. “You do your work and Billy can do his. And you, James, on with yours.”

Julie managed to catch Jesse and get him seated, although this meant leaving Gwennie, who was trying to work on a report on peanuts for her other class. This was proving a
real trial for her. Gwennie clearly had no idea what the whole point behind doing a “report” was. Even as basic as the requirements for a third-grade report were, they were too abstract for her. The previous time she’d had to do such a report, she’d simply reproduced what she’d read verbatim, so Julie and I had been trying to get the concept of summarizing across to her. Not easy. And Gwennie found it stressful. She resorted to numerous distraction techniques and persistently endeavored to get the conversation around to her favorite topic: foreign countries. And the more stressed Gwennie felt, the more likely she was to engage in autisticlike behaviors, such as spinning her pencil or echoing back words and phrases said to her.

Julie got Jesse to sit down and open his folder, at which point one of the twins needed attention and she went there. I stayed with James, as his time in the room was almost over. Peace reigned for three or four minutes, which was about as long as I’d expect peace to reign with this group.

“Fuck you!” Jesse cried out. I could tell by the way he said it, it was a tic and not actual swearing. This wasn’t a common tic for Jesse, but it did happen occasionally.

I ignored it and bent back over the work with James.

“Fuck you!” Jesse cried out again.

“Aren’t you going to stop him?” James asked in amazement.

“He can’t help it,” Billy said. “Just like you can’t help being a nosy bastard.”

I put a finger to my lips and looked over at Billy. “But
you
can. So get back to your work.”

“Fucker!” Jesse cried again.

And then suddenly, “Fucker!”

We all looked up. It was Gwennie. She had her head down and continued concentrating on her work. But just as Jesse barked out his swear word, Gwennie echoed it.

A surreal moment followed. Back and forth they went. Over and over. Jesse was aware of what was happening, but the stress and the attention made him unable to control his tic. Gwennie was blithely oblivious.

“Fuck you!”

“Fuck you.”

“Shithead!”

“Shithead.”

Billy started to laugh. “Listen to you guys!”

“Man, you’re crazy in here,” muttered James, who had clearly had enough of us for that day. He collected his stuff together and prepared to go.

“Poophead!” Zane shouted, not wanting to miss out on this fun.

“Yeah, Poopyhead!” said Shane.

It deteriorated from there. All the boys were laughing uproariously by that point. Even Jesse, who was still barking out swear words, joined in. Gwennie started to laugh too. They all laughed. Raucous laughter. Lots of swear words. More laughter. More swearing. Everyone was holding their sides with hilarity.

I laughed too. And let them play noisily with the various words until everyone fell panting into their seats.

The only person who didn’t find this merry was Julie. She stood apart and smiled tolerantly and waited for all the hoots to subside before she said very tactfully, “It probably isn’t very kind to laugh at Jesse’s and Gwennie’s challenges.”

Billy turned to look at her. “It felt good. That was fun.”

“How would you feel if someone laughed about something you couldn’t help doing?” Julie asked.

“Well, sometimes you shouldn’t. But sometimes, I think it is okay. Because just now we weren’t laughing at them. We were laughing because it was funny,” Billy replied.

There was a moment’s pause.

Billy continued, “If we stopped laughing when Jesse said something funny because he’s got something wrong with him and we don’t want him to feel bad, then what we’re
really
thinking about is that Jesse’s got something wrong with him. But that’s not what we
were
thinking then. All we were thinking was that he said something funny. Which means we forgot he wasn’t just like everybody else. So, I think that’s okay. Sometimes you got to laugh. Sometimes stuff is just funny.”

The other person not included in the laughter of the classroom was Venus. This was because she wasn’t there. Again. Her attendance had never been spectacular. Even during the first months at school, Venus tended to be absent quite a lot, but since she had returned from homebound education,
she often missed a day or more every week. I had chased this matter up on a number of occasions only to be met by the same two excuses: she was sick or Wanda had forgotten to bring her.

When she was there, despite the tentative first beginnings of a relationship between the two of us during the time we spent alone together, she remained almost catatonic in class. Each morning Wanda brought her up to the classroom, she took her seat, and she remained there, silent and immobile, unless one of us went over and physically reoriented her. Sadly, because she was so silent and motionless, it was all too easy to ignore Venus entirely. To include her fully in our activities would have required a full-time aide to make sure that she changed from activity to activity physically and to ensure that she picked up a pencil or other item when appropriate and made the necessary motions to use it. We didn’t have such resources. Left to her own devices, she just sat. Her folder, once passed out, remained unopened in front of her on the table. Her pencil lay untouched. Venus sat throughout, enigmatic as an Easter Island stone head.

I was uncertain what to do with her during these times when I really needed to tend to the other students. I tried to ensure that at a minimum of once an hour during the school day, I sat down with her, talked directly to her, orienting her face, if necessary, to look at me, and endeavored to get her to try something. If she categorically refused all effort at participation, I kept it up for about five minutes
and then moved on to the other children. I couldn’t do more, as I had a lot of students during the time the resource children were coming and going and had to keep to a fairly strict schedule to give everyone their appropriate amount of time. And, of course, with Billy, Jesse, Zane, and Shane, who could be very demanding, even when the resource students weren’t there, I was usually fully occupied.

Julie’s attitude was that it was more than okay to leave her, that it was actually the right approach, that Venus needed time to feel comfortable with us, and when she finally did feel secure enough, she would start to respond. I wasn’t willing to go that far. Given that Venus had already spent half a year with us and was not yet showing any signs of “feeling more comfortable,” and indeed, she had already spent the two previous school years “not comfortable,” I didn’t feel leaving her alone was an “approach.” It was a make-do measure, because to do more would have been to do miracles. But because Venus was starting to act with some spontaneity during the time we spent alone, I was able to live with her inertia, at least for the time being.