This series of posts will be dedicated to some of the most influential teachers I have had thus far in my life.
Top Teacher #1: J.R.
At this time of year, I always take a few moments to reduce the size of my bloated files by taking out all information that I will not be needing for the next school year. It's really gratifying, especially, to clear out those "Memo" files and extremely entertaining to sift through the "Personal" file. It's at this time that I get to look over the cards and pictures and other personal items that I collected throughout the year, thinking about which ones still have meaning and which will have meaning in future years. Now that I've got a few years under my belt, I also like to look through my "personal" files from past years of teaching. My 2005-2006 school year file has an entire folder stuffed into it marked with a student's name who will hereby be referred to as "JR".
Each school year, it seems, there is one student who gets their own file, filled with memories of what made them particulary challenging. Inevitably there are old planning documents, behavior plans, drawings or pictures, and funny writing assignments stuffed in there... "JR" was the first student who got his own file and in the past five years I have found myself unable to throw away a single scrap.
When I was in college, I would tell anyone who would ask that I would never teach a primary grade, no matter how much I was paid. The reality of finding a job, however, landed me as a second grade teacher in a small rural school in south central Pennsylvania. I convinced myself that second grade was not primary, put on a brave face, and smiled and said "guess" when a student would ask me age (21), rather than give myself away. Despite the challenges, the first week of school went quite well and I started to gain some confidence. And then I got a new student.
JR came to me from the school district I grew up in. He looked innocent enough at first. After about 10 minutes in my classroom, however, he had used at least three 4-letter words, winked and licked his lips at a particularly shy girl, and my room began to smell alarmingly like motor oil.
It took about four days for me to fully grasp that JR was a part of my class. He would not be leaving. He would not be absent. My hands (because I had to hold his hand not only in the hallway, but pretty much all day every day) would smell like motor oil for the entire year. The thought came crashing down on me during a brief conversation with my guidance counselor, a few minutes before picking my students up from recess. To my horror, I actually started bawling.
It's funny. I've always been a reflective person, a journal keeper. I set out that school year to record the ups and downs of being a new teacher. I wrote a beautiful entry just before the parents arrived on Back-To-School night before the year began. I wrote again the day that I realized the impact JR would have on my life. I did not write again until the 2006-2007 school year.
In the early days of that year, I couldn't stop to think for even a few moments, lest I suffer from a panic attack or nervous breakdown. Parents were calling me, telling me they had to have "the talk" with their seven year old because of a curious comment JR made to them. He got banned from the playground, the cafeteria, specials, because any time there weren't adult eyes on him he made sly comments to other kids or ate something he should not. So JR became my full-time companion. We were together, all the time, for 9 straight months.
I quickly became disenchanted with the "identification" process that promised to remove JR from my room. It dawned on me that only I could control the destiny of my classroom. I started to come up with ideas to not only keep JR busy, but to actually help him learn. We started simple... I created some word sorts using the "a" sound, the only vowel he could recognize. We sorted cards between long a and short a. The first time I left him alone with his word sort, he ate it. The entire thing. Swallowed it. I was shocked, but I printed another and we tried again.
It took almost 2 months before we moved on to "e", another month before "i" and I'm pretty sure we never got to"u" by the end of the year, but JR began to develop the habit of sitting down and doing his sort once a day. This afforded me about 8 minutes of peace a day.
Now that Language Arts was covered, we moved on to math. JR was intrigued by the timed math tests my students took each day. At first he only wanted to control the timer because it made him feel important and a part of things, the most important currency I could use with him, I found. Eventually, though, he wanted to try too. Again, we started simple. His first timed math test was tracing numbers, followed by filling in the next number in the sequence. By the end of the year he could do one digit numbers plus 1. I now had 10 minutes of peace a day.
Thinking back, I don't think I ever got more than that. JR is now bussed to another school where, I am told, he is a star student compared to some others in the class. It took him calling the school psychologist the b-word and stomping on his foot, plus a case of a library book covered in human urine to even get him through the identification process, a process that took until May of the 2005-2006 school year. JR was in my room full time for one full school year. I still cringe a little when I smell motor oil. But you know what? This child taught me one of the most powerful lessons of my teaching career.
You are on your own.
There are "services", sure. They are not miracles and they are not guarenteed. Often times, the providers of said services know even less than you do, which is a hard pill for a 21 year old to swallow. You make small strides and they never feel like enough, but they are. I was worried about my class that year, that they would be traumatized, that they would be hurt or damaged by JR. In fact, those same students as fourth graders actually said, "Who?" when I asked them if they remembered their former classmate. With hindsight to guide me, that is enough for me to know I accomplished something that year. My second graders learned and were safe, JR's time was only wasted for 5 hours and 50 minutes each day and I became an independent teacher, a problem solver, and someone who never looks to someone else to solve the mysteries of my classroom.
