by Liane Shaw
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Shaw, Liane, 1959–, author
Time out : a teacher’s year of reading, fighting, and four-letter words /
by Liane Shaw.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-927583-32-6 (pbk.). —ISBN 978-1-927583-33-3 (epub)
1. Shaw, Liane, 1959–. 2. Problem children—Education—Canada. 3. Mentally ill children—Education—Canada. 4. Teachers—Canada—Biography. 5. Authors, Canadian (English)—21st century—Biography. I. Title.
LA2325.S477A3 2014 371.10092 C2014-900020-0 C2014-900021-9
Copyright © 2014 by Liane Shaw
Edited by Carolyn Jackson
Copyedited by Kathryn White
Designed by Melissa Kaita
Cover photo © iStockphoto
Printed and bound in Canada
Second Story Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.
Published by
Second Story Press
20 Maud Street, Suite 401
Toronto, ON M5V 2M5
www.secondstorypress.ca
Dedication: For David,
who taught me to look for the
gift inside of the moment.
Introduction
Before the beginning
Early on in my teaching career, I was presented with the amazing, albeit terrifying, opportunity to work with a group of “behavior kids”—children who had managed to outstay their welcomes in numerous elementary school classrooms. Overwhelmed with life and underwhelmed with support, these students took everything that came their way as a challenge to a fight.
Including me.
Maybe especially me!
For the next several years, I dealt with a steady stream of students whose lives were desperately out of control. The children came from all kinds of backgrounds: two parents, one parent, working parents, parents on welfare, foster parents, group homes. We had it all.
The one thing they had in common was that the efforts of the myriad of adults involved in their lives—parents, teachers, social workers, psychologists, doctors, even lawyers—never seemed to be quite enough to address the serious nature of their mental health issues. Too many schools, too many foster homes, not enough social workers, limited psychiatric hospital resources, lack of appropriate residential placements—the list went on and on.
It was an incredible journey, and as I traveled down the strange pathways that led to the lives of my students, I ended up learning far more than I taught. In later years, I often thought I would like to share some of our experiences in a book. I hesitated though, worried that perhaps readers would find it outdated. After all, it happened a long time ago.
Ten years after saying good-bye to my last group of “behavior kids,” I took on the new challenge of working as a consultant for our school board. In this role, I once again came into regular contact with students with serious behavioral challenges and the teachers trying to work with them. And I discovered that very little had changed. There were still far too many students in need and far too few practical resources to provide long-term, sustainable support.
And so I decided to make an attempt at telling our story after all, or at least the first chapter. Names have been altered, locations changed, chronologies shifted, and the gender of the occasional adult switched to protect privacy. But the events are real. The children are real. And the issues are all too real.
Anyone who reads the daily news is aware that the mental health crisis facing our young people is still significant and is growing. But as awareness also grows, perhaps we will finally find a way to ensure that fifteen years from now—hopefully sooner—this story will finally be outdated.
Chapter 1
In the beginning
“I said sit down. Now!”
The teacher’s voice is panicky instead of authoritative. They’ll sniff it out like ponies, rearing up and throwing him off before he knows what happened.
“And I said fuck off. Now!”
The child’s voice is authoritative instead of panicky. A resounding crash shakes the thin wall separating us. I think the teacher’s down for the count.
I should do something, but I’ve been told not to interfere without an invitation. I don’t hear anyone inviting me in.
I do hear laughter, high pitched and triumphant, accompanied by the sounds of running feet and objects being thrown. I have a sudden mental image of wild horses running across a farmer’s field, hooves pounding out a path of destruction as they celebrate their freedom.
My grade seven Resource kids look at each other, eyes grinning, mouths carefully still so I won’t notice. These are kids with learning issues who are struggling in class. They come to my room every day so I can help them figure out a way to access the math curriculum, although recently they’ve been a lot more interested in the vocabulary lessons coming from the other half of the room. I keep teaching, raising my voice to drown out the mayhem until I’m shouting out the virtues of Pythagoras for the whole school to hear.
The noise next door escalates until I can’t ignore it anymore.
“Okay, I’m going to send you back to your classes a bit early today. Do what you can with this on your own, and we’ll pick up the pieces tomorrow.”
They pack up their books, grinning openly now. I’m pretty sure not one of them is going to be finishing up on their own. They all saunter down the hall, prolonging the brief moment of freedom.
I walk down to the neighboring door, wondering where the troops are. It’s obvious there’s a free-for-all going on here. Surely Peter’s called the office by now.
The door opens suddenly, and he stumbles out into the hall. He leans against the wall and shakes his head. “I’m done. I can’t do it anymore. I’m out of here. I called the office. Someone should be here soon.”
Before I can say anything, he’s gone. I look up and down the empty hallway. No troops. Just me.
I step to the door of his room and look in.
“Hey!” I raise my voice so that they can hear me, but since they’re pretty busy throwing textbooks around and knocking over chairs, they don’t notice me right away.
I watch them for a moment. It’s kind of fascinating, really. The little blond in the corner is very methodical and careful, picking up each book and ripping every page out individually. The tall, dark-haired one with the wild eyes is much angrier. He tries to rip the whole book in half, getting more and more frustrated until he throws it across the room.
“Excuse me, please.” I’m snapped out of my fascination by a hand on my arm. The principal and vice principal both scoot in past me to save the day.
The boys take one look at them and make like frustrated soccer stars, kicking at anything in their path as they run around the room. It’s amazing how big a mess two little kids can make. I have to put my hand over my mouth to stop from laughing as Mrs. Callahan and Ms. Kruger run around after them, trying to get them to stop moving.
Two against two. The odds are not in the adults’ favor.
“What’s going on?” The voice in my ear startles me, and I whip around, hand still pressed against my mouth.
“I think Mrs. Callahan is teaching gym.” An odd hiccupping noise escapes me as I try not to laugh. The man standing in front of me is straight from the board office. He’s Mr. Norton, the consultant they send in to help us figure out what’s going on with
our kids and to act as a liaison with parents and staff and whoever else is involved in the overly complicated lives of students with special needs. Or is it students with special challenges? The politically correct rhetoric changes yearly. Whatever we call them, he helps me help them. And I probably should try to look professional in front of him. But it’s really hard to do that when two babes in skirts and heels are running around chasing two kids in running shoes—two very agile kids in running shoes. The little blond one just shimmied his way up the bookshelf more efficiently than a spider monkey. I shake my head, accidentally grinning.
“Very talented,” Mr. Norton says. He has a first name, but I can never remember it.
“Who? The kid or the administrator?”
“The kid, obviously. Never been a big fan of administrators,” says the man from the board office.
“Oh, look, the other one is up there too!” I interrupt myself mid-sentence, not even trying to hide my laughter as the tall boy takes a flying leap off a desk and makes a rather shaky landing beside the blond. The whole bookshelf starts to rock madly, and both administrators just stand there staring at it, presumably trying to stop it from falling with the power of their laser-like gazes.
“Maybe they’re hoping it will fall and that will solve their problem,” Norton says in a totally calm and seemingly serious tone. I turn to look at him. He’s shaking his head now. “I’m going to have to go in and rescue them. The kids I mean.”
“You want me to help?” I offer, even though I’m not so sure my help would be appreciated by anyone in the room.
“That’s okay. I can manage.” He flashes a quick grin in my general direction and heads into the fray. I keep watching even though I should be going down to pick up my next group of kids. He walks into the room and straight past the dueling statues.
“Hi guys. Remember me?” he says calmly to the boys up on their teetering perch. They’re starting to look like they realize this isn’t quite as good an idea as they had imagined.
“No!” the blond one shouts as the shelf lurches forward. He grabs the top with both hands, knuckles white with the effort. Norton reaches out and puts his hand on the shelf, steadying it enough that neither boy falls off.
“You’re that meeting dude, right? You came to my other school, right? Talked to my retarded principal, right? Talked to my mother and me, right?”
“Right. All four times.”
“You’re a big liar, you know? You said this place would be better. It isn’t. It sucks.”
“Totally sucks.” The other one joins in.
“Donny, right? And…Cory?”
“How do you know our names?”
“He was at our meetings, asshole! Didn’t you listen to me? Weren’t you there? Are you retarded or what?”
“You’re an asshole. Shut up, asshole!” Cory, or Donny, tries to take a swing, which makes the shelf move. Norton has to brace himself with both hands to keep it from falling. Mrs. Callahan and Ms. Kruger seem frozen in place.
“Whoa, guys. Why don’t you come down, and we’ll figure this out. I don’t want a bookshelf on my head, and I don’t want either of you to break your butts.”
“Break our butts. Ha!” Donny, or Cory, laughs and stops swinging.
“I don’t want to break my butt. Besides, this is getting boring. Let’s go.” They both climb down in about a second and a half.
I’m still fascinated by the show and want to stay and watch to the end, but I’m late so I head off down the hall, wondering what’s going to happen next.
Cory and Donny have been at our school now for a couple of weeks. Both kids were kicked out of their former schools, and for some reason the board decided that the best thing to do with two violent, out-of-control kids desperately in need of help is to put them together full-time with a teacher who doesn’t want to work with them.
Oh, and to put them in a half classroom because the school they chose for the non-self-contained class is pretty much full. To put them in the other half of my classroom, which is already about half the size of a regular classroom, because I am a Resource teacher, which means I am resourceful enough to teach any number of children in any size space. There’s a divider (the kind that’s meant to create cubicles in office spaces) down the middle of the room. The classroom has two doors so Peter’s non-class can come and go without moving through my side of the room.
For the last two weeks, I have heard constant yelling and screaming and cursing.
And that’s just from the teacher.
I know the boys’ names because I’ve heard them a gazillion times, but I’ve never been sure which one belongs to whom. Still don’t know.
“Donny! Sit down. Cory, stop hitting Donny. Donny, don’t throw that. Cory, put that down. Donny, do your work. Cory, do your work. Watch your language. We don’t use those words at school. Donny, leave Cory alone. Cory, leave Donny alone. Both of you, leave me alone!”
And now he’s leaving them alone. What will happen to them? Will they be sent back to their other schools? Or home?
Or just to nowhere, because no one wants them?
Chapter 2
Time to run
I decide in the interests of my own job that I’ll teach my next group in the library. Maybe I’ll get lucky and there won’t be any other classes in there, and I can call it a “research” period—which means my students can wander around looking like they’re working, and I can think while looking like I’m teaching.
The patron saint of special ed. teachers is watching over me today, and the library is actually free. The grade eight kids start searching the shelves for fascinating books to read, their voices raised to a level that makes my head want to explode.
“Library voices!” I add to the noise by shouting. Within seconds there is relative silence.
I sit and wonder about the two athletic little guys who seem so terribly angry with life. Where did they come from? How did they get so angry so fast? It takes most of us at least until the teen years to get truly pissed off with the world. These boys don’t look any more than ten or so. How awful must their first decade of life have been to result in this much havoc?
“Hi.”
I’m startled out of my reverie by the soft voice coming from behind me. Norton (what is his first name anyway?) is standing there. I wonder if the ability to sneak up on people is a prerequisite for the job or something they teach them in that fancy board office that cost untold millions of dollars—money that we were told came from a “different pot” than the money earmarked for actually helping children. There’s probably a special room there just for teaching 007 skills. Probably right next door to the conference room with the $50,000 table that the board of directors bought so that each and every member could have enough personal space. After all, we can’t have crowding at the board office.
Not that I’m bitter.
There are thirty-five students in our grade eight class, crammed into a space designed for about twenty. The board can’t find enough money to hire another teacher so that some of those adolescent and often aromatic bodies could move to another room. Maybe it should find a more effective method of keeping its money than storing it in “pots.” Obviously some of it is getting lost before it gets to the children.
“Oh, hi. How’re the boys?” I ask Norton.
“They’re mostly okay. Waiting for their parents to come pick them up, which is possibly not quite as okay.”
We’re speaking in those hushed tones reserved for libraries, secrets, and cops on stakeouts. It’s probably unnecessary, because the only other inhabitants of the room don’t even seem to know we’re here.
“Tough home lives, I assume?”
“Less than great, as far as I know. They’re both still at home, which I guess can be looked at either way.”
“Either way?”
“So, what now?”
“We send them home and hope no one beats them.” He says this in a nonchalant tone that I have to admit shocks me. Maybe that was the point. I hadn’t really gone down that road in my mind, at least not consciously. I don’t like to think about the truly awful things that happen to some kids.
“I was actually just wondering what happens in terms of school. Though now I’m wondering what’s going to happen at home too. Poor little guys.”
He just shrugs his shoulders and shakes his head. I take that as my cue to speak again.
“It’s stupid. Peter never wanted to work with them in the first place. He’s a grade one teacher for heaven’s sake. They moved him in there because he’s got spec. ed., part one. No experience even with LD kids, let alone these guys. He has no idea, academically, emotionally. Nothing. They should at least have got someone in there with some real spec. ed. experience, someone who’s worked with kids with different kinds of needs and who could at least figure out where to start. I mean, they’re just kids after all. A little angrier than most, granted, but kids, right?”
“Right. Anyway, I have to go. It was nice talking to you.” He leaves in the middle of my rant, and I swallow the rest of my thoughts, choking a bit on my embarrassment. He must think I’m a total idiot.
I spend the rest of the afternoon in a bit of a fog, a state that seems to go completely unnoticed by my students. Somewhat of a commentary on my teaching, I think. About ten minutes after dismissal, I’m sitting at my desk, wondering if I feel like doing some marking or getting over to the daycare early for a change, when over the intercom I hear a polite request for my presence in the office.