Beautiful Child: The story of a child trapped in silence and the teacher who refused to give up on her. Torey Hayden
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I was maintaining not one “quiet chair” but five – one for each student – because they all had a knack for getting into one big fistfight together. Not a single day went by that week without my needing to use all five simultaneously at some stage. Indeed, most of the first three days were spent “sitting on chairs,” as Billy termed it.
Bemused by having four feisty boys with cowboy names, I decided I’d capitalize on that in my efforts to bond us together as a group. I decided we’d become a cowboy “gang.” We’d think up a name and a code of behavior and some fun things to do together to denote our “belonging-ness” and that would be the beginning of group harmony.
Unfortunately, no one told the kids that was the point of it.
I realized my mistake immediately. While cowboy gangs meant belonging and being loyal to an agreed code of ethics and sticking up for one another, they also meant guns and shooting and lots of macho behavior. In a word, outlaws. Not something I needed to encourage! It was Jesse who first noticed this. We’d be an outlaw gang, he said brightly when I was talking about us being a “gang.” I said, no, that wasn’t the idea. We weren’t going to be outlaws. Billy, ever being Billy, then chirped up, “Oh? Does that mean we’re going to be in-laws?”
I quickly quashed the opportunity to live out violent fantasies. The boys were thus left to come up with something different for our “gang.” In the end, they chose to become “The Chipmunk Gang,” which seemed ironically meek to me, but they were happy to make up rules about how to be a good Chipmunk. Billy really got into this. He wanted a pledge and a secret handshake to denote membership. Jesse then suggested that it ought to be a secret society and we could have other special signals too, to let one another know we were Chipmunks. By the end of the week, the Freemasons had nothing over on us.
Throughout all of this, Venus remained a world apart. She did nothing. Almost catatonic in her lack of response, she had to be physically moved from place to place, activity to activity. However, an accidental bump would result in her coming alive with such unexpected fury that it was almost as if someone had pushed an “on” button. Once in “on” mode, Venus screamed like a wounded banshee and indiscriminately took after anyone within range. There seemed to be no coherence to her rage. It was unfocused, all-embracing, and dangerous.
I tried to include her. Whenever we brought our chairs into a circle to talk about something, I always made sure Venus was there, although this involved moving her chair for her and then moving Venus. In the afternoons, when Julie was there to look after the boys, I endeavored to spend some time alone with her. To do what? I was never sure. Just get a reaction, I think. One day I tried coloring. She would do none of it herself. Another day I tried dancing. I put music on and pulled her through the motions. “Pull” was the operative word. On yet another day I piled building blocks up in front of her and stacked them one by one on top of one another to make what I felt was a very appealing tower. It just asked to be knocked over. Could she knock it over? I challenged. Nope. No response. I lifted her hand for her and knocked over the tower. It fell. Venus didn’t even blink. I built the tower partway up and put a block in her hand. Could she add it to the stack? Nope. Her hand just lay there, the block loose in her fingers. I finished building the tower. Then again. And again. Each time I lifted Venus’s hand and knocked the blocks down again. She didn’t even so much as give an impatient sigh of boredom.
Perplexed and frustrated by Venus’s behavior, I took my troubles with me into the teachers’ lounge. I didn’t really expect anyone to give me answers when I moaned about what was going on in my classroom. Indeed, I wasn’t even upset, just frustrated. Being a rather noisy person by nature, this was my way of coping with the pressure. It was also a way of thinking for me. I’d go down to the lounge, complain about what was happening, and in the process of hearing myself articulate the problem, I’d often come up with alternatives.
Julie, however, appeared unsettled. “You’re feeling really angry about Venus, aren’t you?” she said to me one afternoon after school when we were alone.
Surprised, I lifted my eyebrows. “No. I’m not angry. Why?”
“Well, you just seem angry. In the things you say. You’re always complaining.”
“It’s not complaining. Just letting off steam, that’s all.” I smiled reassuringly at her. “That’s different from anger. I don’t feel anger at all.”
Julie looked unconvinced.
I was having to face the fact that I’d rather misguessed Julie. Her small size, her sweet face, her long hair with its thick bangs and girlish, beribboned styles gave the sense of someone young and, well … naive and impressionable. I’d rather arrogantly assumed I’d have a protégée, someone I could introduce to my special milieu and help her grow into a competent educator, much the way Bob had done with me. Only a week on, however, and the cracks in this fantasy were already beginning to show.
For instance, on Wednesday, Shane picked up the fishbowl from the window ledge to bring it to the table. This was something he had attempted to do on two or three other occasions, and each time I’d intercepted him and explained very specifically that it was forbidden to carry the fishbowl around because it was heavy and awkward, which might lead to a nasty accident. Moreover, the fish didn’t like it very much. This time, however, he managed to pick it up without my noticing, and disaster struck. The water sloshed, surprising him, and he dropped it. Water, broken glass, and goldfish went everywhere. Shane immediately started to bawl.
Julie was closest to him. She smiled, knelt down, and put her arms around him. “Poor you, did that frighten you?” she said in the most soothing of voices. “Don’t cry. It was just an accident.” She took a tissue and dabbed his cheeks. “That’s okay. You didn’t mean to drop it, did you? Accidents just happen.”
Listening to her, I felt ashamed. My immediate reaction had been serious annoyance and I would have said to him, probably not too pleasantly, that here was the natural consequence of picking up the fishbowl and, thus, why we didn’t do it. I wouldn’t have comforted him at all. I would have made him help me mop up the water and catch the poor fish. Julie’s response was so much more humane.
Thus it was with Julie. I found her almost pathologically compassionate. Nothing the boys did seemed to upset her. If someone was perfectly horrid, she’d say, “That isn’t thoughtful,” in a quiet, even voice. Or “I’m sure you didn’t mean to do that. It was an accident, wasn’t it?” when the little devil was looking her straight in the face. So too with Venus. No, Venus didn’t respond any more to Julie than to me, but that was okay. “I’m sure she just needs time to adjust,” Julie would say. “It’s a loud, active environment. I think if we allow her to move at her own pace, she’ll become more comfortable and trust us enough to feel like joining in. Let’s not force anything. Let’s just wait and see.”
Instinctively, I did not agree with Julie’s approach to Venus, but there still seemed to be logic in it. I could see that. The problem was that it just wasn’t my way of tackling things. I was not a wait-and-see kind of person. I was a do-it-now, a something’s-got-to-work kind of person whose success rested largely on a terrierlike refusal to stop harrying problems until I got what I wanted. Just leaving Venus to sit like a lump on a log was anathema to my whole personality. But I didn’t say this. In the face of Julie’s serene patience, I felt ashamed of my restless need to intervene. After so much failure with Venus, I decided I would go right back to basics; so, I arrived Monday morning with a bag of M&Ms.
“Remember these?” I said to Bob as I came through the front office to collect my mail. I rattled the bag of candy.
Bob smiled sardonically.
Back in our very early days together, Bob had caused something of a scandal in the school district by using M&Ms to reward his students. This was the early 1970s when behaviorism was considered a radical approach and classrooms were still quite formal. In our quiet, semirural backwater no one had yet thought of equating something like candy with learning. Bob changed all that. Like many of us of that generation, he was out to build a better world. In his case, he wanted to show that his ragtag group of unruly, deprived youngsters could rise above their