Miles To Go Before I Sleep

by Jackie Nink Pflug

  “It’s better that these kids know me, because I have a lot to offer,” I countered, “especially with the understanding of learning disabilities I have today. It’s better that these kids know me than that they not know me at all. If I have to be off, I’ll be off. But I’ll come back, and I’ll be ready to teach them again.”

  We shook hands and I left. I didn’t expect to hear back.

  Later that evening, the phone rang at our house. It was the principal calling to say the job was mine!

  It felt great to be back in the classroom. I quickly established a special rapport with a tough group of kids: learning disabled boys in grades four through six, the kind with a lot of behavioral problems. They were wonderful. I could really relate to them, because I was one of them.

  I had a hard time reading. I knew how hard it is to be thought of as lazy because our brains don’t allow us to focus. I knew what it was like to feel as though you can’t keep up with what people are saying. I felt the frustration of looking normal and having people get mad at me because I didn’t experience the world the same way they did.

  The new job gave me the chance to share what I knew and was learning about learning disabilities.

  It was a perfect fit for me in other ways too. It allowed me to ease my way back into the worlds of work and teaching. The part-time position gave me the time and flexibility I needed to stay focused on my recovery and rehabilitation.

  I was excited about going back to work. I’d always had a special place in my heart for kids who had a harder time than the rest.

  After my first year of teaching in Baytown, Texas, I’d decided to focus on teaching kids with learning disabilities. Looking back on those years, I remembered the excitement I felt from seeing my first- and second-grade students’ progress. There were also frustrations. They often tested my patience. It took a lot of energy, patience, persistence, creativity, determination—and love—to reach these students. I racked my brains to invent specific, concrete ways to teach the kids how to write and say their ABCs.

  If we were working on the letter B, for example, we’d all make B sounds and write the letter B in different colored crayons or markers. Together, we’d repeat different words that started with B. I’d bring red and black licorice to school and, together, we’d form it into letters. One time, I brought in a box of sand for the students to write their letters in. We’d bake cookies in the shape of Bs. We’d all curl our bodies into B shapes and pretend we were Bs.

  When we were done, I’d say, “Okay, what’s the letter for the day?”

  “B! B! B!” the kids sang out in a happy chorus.

  Before shifting gears to work on another subject—such as math—I’d tell the kids, “Okay, in about an hour we’re going to come back, and I’m going to ask you what this letter is.”

  Just to refresh their memories, I’d make the B sound again: “Buh”—as in the word Be, and the word Bat, and the word Boy. And they’d say, “B! B! B!” and laugh.

  An hour later, we’d come back to our letters and I’d ask the kids, “What’s the letter for the day?”

  Their faces went completely blank. If I was lucky, one child might hesitatingly say, “B?” Everyone else would chime in and say, “B! B! B!” But the only reason most of them got it was because they heard what the one child had remembered.

  “We just did this,” I’d say. “Don’t you remember? We made the cookie in the shape of a B. What else did we do with the letter B?”

  No one remembered what we did with the B. No one remembered that we all became Bs by forming our bodies into the shape of a B.

  Why wasn’t I getting through to them?

  Then it hit me: we’ve got twenty-four more letters to go!

  Sometimes, I took my students’ learning problems personally—as if I had failed as a teacher. At those times, I grew frustrated and impatient. “Why aren’t you listening?” I’d ask. “Why aren’t you paying attention to what I’m saying?”

  They hung their heads in shame. They felt terrible about disappointing me.

  Parents of my LD students also became frustrated with their kids, because they didn’t understand their child’s problem. I remember one father who was so frustrated because his little boy couldn’t follow simple instructions around the house. “We ask Timmy to go clean up his room and, a few minutes later, he’ll come back and say it’s clean,” the father reported. “But when we go to check, the place is still a mess. I don’t get it. Is he trying to drive us crazy?”

  I understood his bewilderment. “You have to keep your directions very simple,” I explained. “If you want him to take care of his bedroom, you can’t say, ‘Clean up your bedroom and when you’re finished with that, I want you to go wash your hands, and then I want you to come down for lunch.’ You just can’t do that.”

  I told parents that their LD kids didn’t know what they meant by a “clean bedroom.” It was too abstract. The parents had to show them, in a concrete and specific way, what constituted a “clean bedroom.” To a child, it might mean just putting his or her shoes in the closet.

  The parents would have to say just one thing at a time and actually show their children how to do each task—“This is where your gym shoes go. This is where you hang up your jacket. Your socks go in this drawer,” and so on. As parents, or teachers, we couldn’t take anything for granted.

  I encouraged parents to stay with their children and watch them pick up the room—to make sure they had actually learned. Only then could they be expected to clean their room.

  I often wrote down information on learning disabilities and handed it out to parents to help them understand what they were dealing with.

  Some children followed a behavior modification program to help them stay focused and responsible at home and school. I suggested that parents make a list of the chores that the kids were supposed to do and put it in a prominent place like the refrigerator. After finishing each task, the kids would then put a sticker or a check mark by the task to show that they had done it. This helped kids see their accomplishments and feel good about them.

  Sometimes, the teaching stuck and sometimes it didn’t. In the beginning, I wasn’t very good at predicting what would work. It was neat to see the progress of my students even though it was always very slow.

  At first, speaking publically about the hijacking was a form of therapy for me. It was a way for me to make some sense out of a terrible tragedy, and, hopefully, encourage others to persevere through hard times.

  Though I had no public speaking experience before the hijacking, I was discovering a new gift: the ability to hold a crowd in rapt attention. I got a high from seeing people sitting on the edge of their chairs, so interested in what I was saying that they couldn’t take their eyes off me. I got excited when people were listening and getting what I had to say, when the room was so quiet you could hear a pin drop.

  When I first started speaking, I wrote my speech on thirty-two large note cards. I used a red ink pen, because red was the easiest color for me to read.

  In Toastmasters, I learned it was important to use audiovisual materials to illustrate the points I made in my speeches. I started using video news clips from the hijacking.

  I was also learning that my speaking style had to come from inside me. Lots of people were giving me advice on what to say, how to say it, how to stand—you name it. I tried to remember what they were all saying, but my memory was too weak. I found that I couldn’t listen to what they were saying and stay focused on my speech. I had to find my own voice as a speaker.

  Finding my own voice improved my speeches. People were very interested in what I had to say, and were particularly curious about the hijacking. “Do you think they should have stormed the plane?” a man asked me one time.

  “I have to be real careful not to be judgmental about things after the fact,” I said. “There were a lot of lives lost during that action….”

  Although my speeches centered around my experience in the hijacking,
my focus was really on what the hijacking taught me about life, about what’s really important, about survival.

  During the question and answer period following one speech, I talked about the importance of meditation and getting centered in my life.

  A woman in the audience raised her hand. “I feel like God is standing up there in a red dress,” she said.

  I was wearing a red dress that day.

  She continued, “How do you get that feeling that you’re talking about? How do you get to that point?”

  “I get into a deep meditative state,” I said. “When I come out, I feel energized. I feel that I’m tapping a power that has always been there. When I reach that, I feel that I’m becoming stronger. Sometimes, I ask questions when I’m in that state. I’m always asking God questions.”

  I enjoyed so many touching and sometimes humorous moments with the people I shared my story with. After speaking to a church congregation one time, the pastor announced that, after my speech, coffee and cookies would be served. “This will give Jackie a twenty minute ‘headstart’ to get off the highways before the rest of us have to be on the same roads,” he said.

  We all laughed.

  CHAPTER 12

  NO TURNING BACK

  SHORTLY BEFORE THE 1987–88 SCHOOL YEAR STARTED, I went in to see Dr. Maxwell, my neurosurgeon, for one of my regular checkups. When I first started seeing Dr. Maxwell, I went in once a month. As my condition stabilized, my appointments tapered off to once every six months.

  On this particular visit, Dr. Maxwell announced, “I don’t think you need to come in anymore. Your condition is pretty good. You should continue to see Dr. Leppik, but I don’t think we need to worry about the bone fragments still in your head. There has been no change for the past year, and the scar tissue seems to have developed nicely.”

  The news felt good. But I still had a problem—namely, a huge soft spot in my head. “What are we going to do about my caved-in head?” I asked. “It limits me from being able to play softball and ski hard, from doing all the fun things I want to do.”

  “Jackie, there’s a lot of people in this world running around with caved-in heads,” he said.

  “That’s fine,” I said, “but I don’t want to be one of them anymore. I’m tired of having a hole in my head.”

  “Okay,” he said, “then let me tell you about the surgery.”

  He explained the risk involved from the anesthesia. Dr. Maxwell would shave my head, lift up the skin covering my brain, then use a drill to attach a plastic mesh to my skull. Then he would take some putty and lay it over the mesh—to hold it in place. Finally, he’d shape the putty to blend in with the rest of my skull. When the putty hardened, the doctors would put the skin flap back over the wound and stitch me back up.

  I had the surgery and was still bald when school started that fall. I wore a turban or a scarf over my head. You could tell I didn’t have any hair, because a scarf over hair looks different from a scarf over baldness—it lay flat against my head.

  The kids probably knew that I didn’t have any hair, but none ever said anything about it to me. Until one day.

  I got to school early one hot, muggy morning, and I had to run a bunch of errands. The scarf felt hot and uncomfortable, so I decided to take it off until the kids arrived.

  One little special education boy came into the room and saw my bald head. “You’re bald!” he pointed at me and started to laugh.

  This little boy had emotional problems, and I knew he didn’t mean to hurt me, but I still felt bad. It didn’t feel good to have someone making fun of me.

  I was getting another good lesson in humility, in what it was like to be handicapped, in what it was like to look different. It reminded me of how hard it is for kids. When adults saw me bald, they would do a double take. But it’s different when a child sees you bald. They make fun or point.

  In the 1987–88 school year I was teaching full time. I was still teaching learning disabled children in the mornings, but I was now teaching a mainstream first-grade class in the afternoons. I shared the first-grade class with Marcia Behring, and the two of us soon became close friends. I enjoyed talking and laughing with Marcia.

  She was such a big help to me at work. When parents wrote me letters about their kids, Marcia read them to me—it would take me forever to get through them. Sometimes, when I got lost on my way to school and was late for a staff meeting, I called Marcia and asked her to let the other teachers know that I was on my way. Marcia and I got together outside the classroom too. She and her husband, Bill, were both very supportive of what I was doing in my life.

  I enjoyed teaching my two different groups, yet I was having a difficult time of it. It was a lot harder working full time than I had remembered. By the end of each day I felt really drained. Attending meetings, doing paperwork, and preparing lesson plans took a lot of mental and emotional energy for me. I loved working with the kids, but all these other duties were taxing.

  In some ways, the counselor I saw at the Minnesota Center for Epilepsy was right. My expectations did need to change. Teaching was much harder than I imagined it would be.

  When I worked as a teacher before the hijacking, I’d always gotten “A” ratings. I was a good teacher. But now my evaluations were not so positive. A teacher evaluation specialist spent a lot of time in the back of my classroom, to make sure I was doing a good job. She often gave me ideas on things to do with my students. Before the hijacking, I never needed other teachers to give me ideas. I was always coming up with them on my own. People came to me for ideas.

  It made me feel even more frustrated and unsure of myself. I knew something was wrong with my brain that blocked me from coming up with ideas or even remembering those I had used before. I was struggling just to do the basics. I was gaining a new appreciation for how hard it is to be a teacher, always having to think and make decisions.

  I also understood why LD kids didn’t like surprises. As a teacher, I learned not to change things on them suddenly, but to keep a regular and predictable classroom. They needed to stay at an even keel. If I changed or interrupted their schedule in any way—say by canceling a physical education class one morning to go on a field trip—it threw off my LD kids.

  Now, I felt the same need for order and predictability in my life and routine. If my principal announced any kind of change or added something extra to our jobs as teachers, I got mad and frustrated. I’d think, My God, now how am I going to do this? Now I have to learn something else! I’m having a hard enough time as it is. Before the accident, I could go with the flow so easily—with no whining or complaining. Now my brain didn’t have the ability to change gears all the time.

  Discipline was another difficult thing for me. I had to think hard about how to manage kids’ behavior in the classroom. I had to really concentrate when two kids started fighting. What do I do now? How do I handle this? Before the hijacking, my responses came naturally. I didn’t need to think through every situation.

  Fortunately, Scott was there to give me some support when I came home, exhausted, with stacks of papers to grade. He often helped out by grading papers. If I had some new assignments from the principal, Scott read them to me.

  In time, I calmed down and adjusted to my new job. It became easier. I felt more comfortable in the classroom.

  Yet deep down, I knew I didn’t belong in the classroom anymore. My heart was no longer in teaching. Every morning when the alarm went off, all I could think was I don’t want to go to work. My body was rebelling too. I got sick more often, had a lot of sore throats, and was eating a lot. I used up all my sick days. I needed to move on.

  I thought about how two months after the hijacking, I’d given my first speech about what happened on the plane and on the tarmac to a congregation at my church in Baytown. In the following months, I received speaking requests from church groups and schools that had read about my story in newspapers or seen the hijacking on television.

  Early on, speaking was somet
hing I needed to do to heal, a way to make meaning out of my painful experiences in recovery. I also genuinely loved speaking to people.

  Now, I kept hearing, I’ve taken you this far in the world and given you life, now share your story with the world.

  I was answering back, No way, Jose.

  I just kept stuffing and stuffing that message. I’d never taken a speech class or had any formal speech training, but I just kept getting messages that speaking was where I needed to be. Becoming a public speaker and sharing the details of my personal life with thousands of strangers was the last thing I ever imagined myself doing.

  Then one day, I came home exhausted after a taxing day in the classroom. My Inner Voice kept saying, Share your story. Share your story.

  I sat down in a chair, closed my eyes, and asked, How do I share my story?

  Television, my Inner Voice said.

  Television? What did that mean? Then, I remembered. Right after the hijacking, I was swamped with interview requests for talk and news shows. I turned them all down, because I didn’t feel like I had anything to say at the time. Yet Scott and I made a list of everyone who called.

  A year and a half later, I pulled out the list and scanned it from top to bottom. I stopped by Philadelphia P.M., a talk show in Philadelphia. I wanted to go somewhere far from Texas and Minnesota, where no one would recognize me. I dialed the number and spoke to PM.’s producer. I told him who I was and explained that I was ready to share my story and that I could promise them an exclusive interview: it would be the first time I had shared my story on television. The producer remembered my story and booked me for the show.

  I had a great time doing the show in Philadelphia. As I told my story to the host, I felt my body responding. I felt really good again: my posture was better; I felt my old glow coming back.

  I had more than a hijacking story to tell now; I also had a message that could help people. It was a message about weathering adversity, going for dreams and goals, and not giving up. The talk show host opened the show to callers wanting to ask me questions. One woman called in to ask me all sorts of questions about my life and about the hijacking.