In addition to substitute teaching, I teach kids who are temporarily not able to attend public school.
The program is formerly known as “Home and Hospital Teaching.” Because I prefer to teach younger kids, I teach a lot of sick elementary school children. Once in awhile, though, I branch out and teach someone who’s a little older.
Recently, I chose to teach a child in 8th grade. Shane’s in 8th grade, so that seemed like something I could handle.
The paperwork said my 8th grade student had “severe school anxiety.” He had abruptly left school in mid-7th-grade. Nearly a year later, my job was to sit with him for an hour a week, inside the school, to get him re-acclimated. I was also supposed to give him work from the 8th grade curriculum.
So I did. I met with him several times, in the school environment, along with his mother.
As we walked through the halls, he would yell to his friends, “Hey, Bobby! How ya doin’?” and “What’s up?” and “Yo! How’s it goin’?”
Hm. This did not look like a student with “severe school anxiety.”
Then, when we’d get situated in our private room in the back of the library, this student refused to do any work. I tried a multitude of different tactics: easy worksheets, simple assignments, more complex assignments….
“I can’t understand this,” he would say without looking at it.
“Can you just read the paper out loud?” I would say. “Then I will know what parts are confusing to you.”
“No,” he said. “That won’t help.”
I examined all the possibilities. His reading levels were exceptional. His testing scores were good. He had no learning disabilities at all. He found math to be easy.
He just didn’t like work.
I tried to keep him going through one simple assignment: “Pick a book,” I said. “Any book will do. I just want you to let me know the name of your book by next week.”
And the following week, he claimed that he couldn’t think of anything he’d want to read.
“I went to the library for him,” his mother said. “But without him, I didn’t know what to get!”
A light bulb went on in my head.
“You went without him to the library?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “He just didn’t want to go.”
So I asked my student, point-blank, during one of our useless sessions: “What do you do at home all day?”
“Mostly I just watch videos and chat with my friends and stuff,” he said.
“Aren’t your friends at school?”
“Yeah,” he said. “But they come over when school is over and we just play video games and stuff.”
His mother allows him to do whatever he wants, I thought. There are no consequences at home for his refusal to do school work. In fact, she lets him stay home all day, every day, and do whatever he wants, seven days a week.
“It’s a struggle,” she told me. “He just doesn’t want to do anything.”
So my student did no work. He didn’t pick out a book, or turn a page, or read aloud, or write an answer to a single question.
This went on for three months.
Finally, after hearing from his other teachers, for whom he also did no work, and after several in-school meetings with parents and administrators, the student was dropped from the program, and did not plan to return to public school.
I can only imagine what he will do with his life.
This morning, Shane was dumping his leftover cereal and milk down the sink. At 14 years old, he finally knows to run the garbage disposal when there are large chunks floating around.
He ran the disposal for half a second. The large chunks went down the drain and, most likely (although we couldn’t see them), sat in the sink where they would rot all day until someone else ran the garbage disposal.
“Try running it a little longer,” I said.
He turned it on again, for two seconds. “Like that?” he said.
“Much better,” I said.
Then I realized that he wouldn’t learn “why” unless I explained the reasoning behind running it longer. I said that the big chunks would be stuck if they didn’t get sufficiently broken up and pushed through the pipes.
“Look, I’ll show you,” I said, opening the cabinet to show him what was under the sink.
“There’s something under there?” he asked, genuinely surprised but not terribly interested.
“Yes, there’s something under there,” I said.
I knew Shane wasn’t joking around, not knowing what was under the sink. I didn’t know there were pipes under there until well into my marriage, when my husband got under there to fix something.
I remember being genuinely surprised at the size of the contraption that was our garbage disposal. I remember being curious about where the pipes led. I remember questioning the entire sewage and water department, and I still wonder how those cereal chunks don’t end up in our drinking water.
But I was decades older than Shane when I learned about those pipes.
I’m the type of person who likes to learn only if I must learn. I could go the rest of my life without understanding anything new, and be perfectly content.
It never occurred to me that there was anything odd about this way of life, until I met my husband. While I spent my childhood walking around in awe, staring but not really caring, he was taking apart everything he could find, whether or not he could get it back together. He wanted to see what made it go.
But I still remember when I was admiring someone’s car one day, watching the water beads run down across the hood, sparkling in the sunlight. I thought it was just spectacular – those little droplets of water carrying so many colors.
“Do you know why that happens?” the car owner asked me.
I was in my mid-twenties at the time. “No,” I said. “I don’t know why it happens, and I don’t really care. I just know it’s beautiful.”
I think Shane has the preferential ignorance gene, too.
Schools are closed today.
About a week ago, school was canceled for the prediction of ice. It wasn’t icy. In fact, there was one day when our driveway was so icy, we couldn’t get out of it to go to school. But school was not canceled that day. We couldn’t get there, but it wasn’t canceled.
So instead, they canceled school when it was supposed to be icy, and wasn’t.
As a result, our school year was extended by a day – meaning that now the kids have to go to school an extra day this summer.
That was irritating. But this is worse.
Today, it is supposed to be very windy.
My husband, who is a big fan of all things weather-related, told me last night that they were calling for high gusts of wind today.
“What am I supposed to do with that information?” I asked, genuinely curious. How was my day going to change if the wind is blowing? Should I stay indoors more? Oh wait, I am already indoors for everything….
“Well, I just want you to be mindful of it,” he said.
So I became mindful.
Today, I woke up and got ready for the gym. I had just enough time to get there before going to work. I thought about my kids, who both had colds, and considered keeping everyone home.
But not for wind. I wasn’t going to keep them home for blowing air.
I realize that it might be bad wind. Some buildings have already lost power. Maybe it will be the worst disaster the D.C. area has seen in years, with school buildings being crushed by trucks that are thrown from the highway onto a third grade classroom.
But maybe it will just be another day of summer that we don’t have, because of a day off where we could just sit inside and watch the tree branches flail.
This morning, I left a copy of Dylan’s semester contract on the breakfast table. I highlighted the part that said, “Be downstairs at 6:45 – not 6:50.”
A few minutes after he came downstairs (still five minutes late), Dylan said, “Stop being so smart!”
I wasn’t talking. I was making his lunch and had my back to him. “I didn’t do anything!” I wailed. “And I’m not all that smart.”
“Yeah, but on here you were,” he said. I turned around, and he was pointing to his contract.
“Oh good,” I said. “I like to be smart.”
“I don’t like it, but everything you said on here was true,” Dylan answered. “The first time I read this, I didn’t even pay attention to the part about consequences. But now that I’m looking at it again, I realize that everything you said has already happened.”
“You mean, now that you’re doing what you’re supposed to do, things have changed?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“So what does it say?”
Dylan read:
You will be labeled “dependable” again. You will be considered “mature” and “responsible” (even if you are still your regular, playful self). Teachers will develop a new respect for you and your intelligence. People will start to recognize the kind, funny, genuine person you are, and your attitude toward people could improve. You will recognize your own self-worth. You will realize how much you can do, once you decide it’s worthwhile to actually do it. You will realize the Tortoise had it right, and the Hare … maybe not so much.
Your stress levels will actually drop. Your grades will improve. Your GPA will go up. You may even find a teacher by the end of the year who is willing to write you a letter of recommendation for college. And you might even turn around the beliefs of your drama director, who could give you a larger role in the musical next spring. You will prove to them what we always knew: that you can do it all, if you take it one step at a time.
“And all of that has happened already!” Dylan said, with genuine surprise.
“That’s awesome,” I said. “And you’ve only been doing this for a few weeks. Imagine what will happen if you do this until the end of the year!”
There was a flicker in Dylan’s eyes that made me realize I was pushing my luck.
But hopefully, he’ll keep going anyway. It’s amazingly wonderful to see.
Shane started playing league ping pong a few weeks ago. I watched while he was in a match with a much younger boy.
I didn’t like what I saw.
Shane made a shot and the kid slammed it back, completely missing the table. “That’s my point,” the kid said. “It hit the table.”
“What?” Shane asked, perplexed.
“It was my point,” the kid said again. “The ball hit the table.”
“Okay,” Shane said.
That ball never hit the table, I thought.
They played another point. Shane hit the ball back and it hit the net, then fell onto the other side of the table. As unlucky as it was for Shane’s opponent, legally Shane should have had the point. But…
“That shouldn’t have gone over,” said the kid. “I get that point.”
This went on and on and on. Shane kept shrugging, confused, but accepting the kid’s word as if Shane had no idea how to play ping pong.
He’d never met a cheater before. And though Shane was five years older than his opponent, he had no worldly wisdom on which to draw. He simply gave away point after point after point, until the kid had won the match.
Afterward, the boys had to write down their scores.
“He cheated!” I said, looking at Shane – but loudly enough for both boys to hear. The kid looked at me guiltily. “You cheated!” I shrieked. I started to nitpick about each point that the kid had stolen from Shane.
The kid’s dad came rushing over. He didn’t look at me. “You won the game,” he said to his son. “You won the game so you write that down.”
“He cheated the entire time!” I shrieked.
The father ignored me. He didn’t defend the boy’s actions – but he certainly condoned them.
Ten minutes later, that same dad was watching his daughter play ping pong. He was berating her for every point she lost. She was older than her brother, and cringing at every word he said. In fact, it looked as though she didn’t want to play the game at all. She struggled through, clearly not wanting to play, and lost the match.
I realized quite suddenly that their dad was the problem – even more so than the cheating child. He was raising kids to win at any cost. And as a result, he was raising a cheater and a quitter.
I was disappointed that Shane didn’t stand up for himself. We talked later about how to do that. But I was proud that he hadn’t sunk to the boy’s level, tried to steal points, or given up on himself.
Shane was raised to be kind at all times. The Golden Rule is still the most important one we have.
And Shane lives by it, wholly and well, every day and in every activity. And while he may have lost that ping pong match, he will go much farther in life, and be much happier, than that cheating ping pong player – or the cheater’s father – ever will.
Like most people, I am horrified about what’s been happening with guns. Last week, I told my kids not to run if there’s a shooting, but to fall to the floor. I hoped it would increase their odds of survival. I can’t believe I had to tell my babies what to do “in case” someone opens fire with an assault rifle. But I did.
And when something violent hits as close to home as it did yesterday, I jump way beyond “horrified” to “utterly terrified.”
Yesterday, my dad was driving down the street, thinking about doctors. My dad’s body isn’t cooperating with him lately, since he’s 75 and hasn’t stopped moving since someone handed him a basketball in 1955. So he decided to call his doctor, and picked up his cell phone to find the number.
I am not condoning using a cell phone while driving. In fact, it’s a horrible idea. But he wanted to call the doctor, and that’s how he was going to do that.
A policeman saw my dad, phone in hand, and assumed he was texting – which is highly illegal in our state, as it should be everywhere.
So the policeman hit the flashing lights. My dad, who would never text and drive, pulled over immediately. Wanting to explain the situation, my dad started to get out of the car.
And that’s when the policeman pulled out his revolver, and aimed it at my dad’s head.
My dad froze. His life flashed before his eyes. One second he was driving down the road and the next, he was at gunpoint. My dad is a 75-year-old white man. If he had been black, he might already be dead.
Instead, eventually, the gun was holstered and my dad was allowed to drive home.
But just as quickly as my dad realized that he shouldn’t have gotten out of the car, he could have been killed.
My dad shouldn’t have gotten out of the car. Anyone who has ever seen an episode of Law and Order knows that. But my dad made the grave error of assuming that the policeman was a civil human first, and an officer of the law second.
In this instance, there was no room for civility. And this is our society today. We prepare to kill before we listen.
I have spent a lifetime reminding myself that people are inherently good and that I don’t have to be so afraid all the time. But the media is constantly cajoling me to believe otherwise. And this policeman obviously was trained to expect the worst, all the time.
Sadly, this is a lesson I now have to convey to my teenagers.
Kids, I will say, for your own safety, I need you to know: you can’t trust anyone, not even a police officer, to be rational. So you always have to be the rational one.
They already know not to use their cell phones in the car. But now I have to also explain that if they are ever in the company of a policeman, they should not even move. Be respectful, yes. But also be still. Be very, very still.
This isn’t what I wanted to teach my kids. I remember my childhood as all about bicycles and ice cream. I thought policeman were like Andy Griffith, and guns were those green plastic things we filled with four ounces of water.
Whatever happened to that world?
On the way to Dylan’s IEP meeting, I had one clear, repetitive thought:
This is my favorite thing to do.
And this year – Dylan’s junior year of high school – was my last year to do it. Next year, we’ll meet to discuss Dylan’s transition to college, hopefully. But we won’t need to meet and rebuild the 39-page document that we started building when Dylan was in second grade.
A meeting like this should not be my favorite thing – for so many, many reasons. I mean, who wants to have a kid who has such specialized needs that his teachers and administration have to meet with his parents every six months for years?
Yet, I do. I like my kid having these particular special needs. I am sorry it has been hard for him, and I am sorry it has been hard for us, and I am sorry for all the things in the future that will be difficult in his life because he has such serious ADHD.
But I wouldn’t change him for the world. And while researching ADHD at home has kept me busy – quite literally – for years, having this IEP has given me a glimpse into the school environment – the one place that I wouldn’t have been able to really know without it.
Over the years, I’ve gotten to know all of Dylan’s teachers. They’ve all been such unique personalities, and so many have taught me things about how to deal with (and not deal with) Dylan. I’ve learned a lot about what really goes on in the classroom, how Dylan handles it, what he does to cope, what he does to distract himself.
In a way, I guess, the IEP has kept me in touch with my son’s world. And going to the IEP meetings every year has given me a chance to voice my observations, my concerns, and my opinions, even if most people didn’t want to hear them.
Over the years, I’ve offered input on so many, many, many ADHD-related topics. I mean, it was my life – my life, even more than Dylan’s. Since that first month of first grade, when he wrote “I hate school” in his reading journal, finding ways to help Dylan has been my entire life.
But this year’s IEP meeting was brief. Whereas our first IEP meeting included a principal, vice principal, special education coordinator, speech therapist, case manager, counselor and a teacher, this year only Dylan’s case manager showed up. Two teachers stopped in for five minutes. Dylan’s counselor came by for less than a minute. And a vice principal showed up just as we were wrapping up.
But mostly it was just the case manager, Bill, Dylan and me, chatting about how Dylan should prepare for college, what classes he should take next year, and how he should continue his exemplary behavior for the rest of this semester.
And then we all went our separate ways – as usual – Dylan back to class, the case manager on to another student. We smiled and shook hands and said, “Take care.”
And no one else seemed to notice that it was the last time we’d be doing this. No one else seemed to care.
But I started to cry.
After a few weeks of his “last chance-last semester” contract, Dylan is still working hard to make sure nothing is missing.
He checks with his teachers every day. He does homework at home. He tells me what needs to be done, sometimes, almost as a way to remind himself. (I don’t remind him.)
Dylan gets up for school on time, except for one day – mentioned in a prior blog – when he didn’t. None of his teachers are complaining. I am still getting emails from them, saying he is doing well.
He missed a class because of Ski Club one day, and his classwork was “missing.” So he did it, and turned it in right away. He even made sure that the teacher emailed me to let me know that it was in.
We have an IEP meeting scheduled for Dylan soon. I am wondering what to discuss at that meeting. Do I judge his behavior by the past seven years, or by the past 20 days?
Dylan’s case manager said, “We’re probably not making any changes to his IEP this year, so we can spend some time discussing his schedule for next year.”
We surely won’t need to make any changes to his IEP this year. In college, there will be no IEP. There will be extra time allowed for testing, probably, but his professors aren’t going to allow for “extra time” to get things done. Now that I think about it, maybe we should explain the concept of “extra time” to Dylan now.
Dylan obviously can do it. He knows how to do it. He is able to do it. At this point, it’s just his choice. Will he continue to do it, to ensure his own future?
I am just sitting on the sidelines, like I’m watching a really close-scoring game, and holding my breath.
Sometimes I work as a substitute teacher at my kids’ former elementary school.
In a way, this is fun. I know my way around the school, because I volunteered there so frequently. I know a lot of the staff and teachers, some who have been there since long before Dylan started kindergarten. The school has a lot of good teachers, and it’s a generally positive environment.
But in another way, working at their old school is not fun. In fact, it sometimes strikes me as devastating.
On the short drive to the school, I don’t have to think. I drove that path so many times, I know it by heart. It was a drive I treasured, because I had chattering kids in car seats in the back of the van. There were sippy cups with chocolate milk strewn about, and purple-crayon-scrawled pages on the floor amidst stray Goldfish snack crackers.
Now the car is clean. The ride is silent.
Turning on the radio doesn’t help. There’s nothing to replace the sound of little kids being little kids.
So I get to school, and I park in the lot. I used to drive through the drop-off line, along with the other parents. I see the other parents now, and I remember the time I dropped off Shane on Dr. Seuss day, dressed as “Thing 2.” Except it wasn’t Dr. Seuss day at all, so six-year-old Shane felt completely out of place and rushed after my car in the parking lot – but he was too late. I got a call from the office asking me to come back and talk to my sobbing child. He was the saddest “Thing 2” in the whole world.
Then I walk through the familiar front door. I walk into the office and greet people I know so well, who don’t remember me at all.
Day after day, I would walk into that office and call Dylan out of class. I’d feed him a handful of almonds and go outside while he ran around the perimeter of the entire building. Exercise and Omega 3s, I’d read, were helpful for kids who needed to focus. I did this for a few weeks, until the principal found out what was going on and put an end to my “ridiculous” behavior.
“We can’t have parents coming in here and disrupting the school day,” she reprimanded.
Once, she appeared in a BMX bike show in the school gym. I took toddler Shane; Dylan was in kindergarten. The principal sat on a raised wooden platform while a BMX bicycle literally flew over her head. Everyone was awestruck.
That principal was all about test results and government funding. She retired way, way, way too late.
But now they have a new principal – a great one, who was the vice principal when my kids went there. I remember turning to her when we had real problems, and she always got results. She doesn’t remember me.
I can’t count the hours I spent pushing a breakfast cart for staff appreciation days, chaperoning field trips, running back and forth from the stage during school talent shows, volunteering at lunchtime, and watching school assemblies. I helped with so many room parties, I can’t count them all.
Now my boys are teenagers, and there are no room parties. Assemblies and field trips are rare. My boys listen somewhere while a teacher lectures. The good teachers find ways for the kids to actively learn – and my kids still have some good teachers.
I try to be a good one, too, even as a substitute.
Even though I am sad.
Since Shane was very small, he’s been a pug fanatic. I don’t know how it started or why, but he absolutely loves those pudgy, google-eyed dogs.
I don’t want a pug, but I found a way to (occasionally and temporarily) get some pugs for Shane. We transport rescue pugs for a local pug rescue organization.
Recently, we had the opportunity to drive three pugs from a small town in Virginia to a foster home in Maryland. To make Shane happy, I volunteered. We would be picking up the pugs about an hour from home, from another driver, and taking them to their final destination – a foster home, about another hour away.
According to Mapquest, the entire trip should have taken less than three hours.
But it was dark and raining, so the traffic was awful. It was like rush hour (on a Saturday evening) and our “highway” speed averaged a mere 30 mph.
We were only a few miles into the trip when I had a quick flash of flu-like symptoms, and determined that I was having a heart attack. What I actually had was a little wave of nausea, probably since I’d had a slight fever the previous day. But I went into a full-blown panic attack and started teaching Shane how to drive, in case I should suddenly pass out behind the wheel.
After a quick stop and some fresh air, I felt perfectly fine.
We arrived only 15 minutes late for our pug pick-up.
I picked up my phone to text the first driver, and got a barrage of group chat messages:
My GPS won’t work. Can somebody email me directions?
I sent directions.
Where are you now?
I am still here.
Do you have the dogs?
I don’t know where I am.
Uh-oh.
There was no explanation as to why the first driver wasn’t at our meeting place – or if/when the dogs would arrive.
We would have to wait.
So Shane and I had dinner and waited – a substantially longer time than it would have taken for us to pick up the pugs at their original location. We stood in the rain for almost two hours.
The first driver never arrived.
We eventually drove another 20 miles to pick up the pugs in a completely random location. There, the first driver offered no more than, “Sorry.”
We loaded up three pugs’ worth of stuff. Shane got in the back of the minivan with the dogs; then we drove them another 70 miles to their foster home – and then another 40 miles back to our house.
All of this happened in a steady rain, on unfamiliar roads, with huge patches of fog that never lifted. But we helped the dogs.
They hadn’t had any water, so we pulled over – in the downpour – and tried to get them to drink. Holding three dogs is no easy task, and these three constantly pulled and snorted and snuffled about. Only one of them drank water.
The dogs smelled so bad, we had to open the windows while we drove. They obviously hadn’t been bathed – maybe ever, and the smell was amplified by their wet fur. When we finally dropped them off, we raced to a nearby Dunkin’ Donuts to wash.
I’d left the windows open so long that I had to mop the door wells, which had collected half an inch of water.
So it wasn’t a perfect evening.
But when I looked in the rearview mirror, as we were galumphing down the road with three pugs, Shane was smiling amongst those smelly dogs, utterly elated.
I wouldn’t change a thing.
