Just Another Kid: Each was a child no one could reach – until one amazing teacher embraced them all. Torey Hayden
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Dirkie’s voice grew deeper and became urgent sounding, taking on a tone that made him sound permanently appalled. Then, as the excitement increased, he’d lose control and be unable to form words. He hooted instead. Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo. No other sound, just that. And he’d begin to clap. Physical excitement took over from there, and he could no longer sit still. On his feet, he’d adopt a mincing, disjointed sort of locomotion, like a marionette with a very bad operator, and usually, he’d end up under the table, where he’d sit, clapping and hooting, and frequently, masturbating frantically on the table leg. Then calm would return.
Sometimes I could successfully interrupt the hoot-and-clap syndrome early enough to quell the frenzy and reorient Dirkie to the task at hand. More often, I couldn’t. And if he’d gone beyond a certain point, he needed to continue, because otherwise, he exploded, screaming and yelling, kicking and slapping, tearing papers from the bulletin boards, magazines from the shelves, overturning chairs, ripping his clothes and banging himself against walls and furniture. But even without such cataclysmic conclusions, Dirkie’s obsessions ruled us.
“Do you have a cat?” he asked me on the first day.
“Yes,” I answered, not realizing what I had started.
His eyes grew shiny with excitement. “What kind is it?”
“Just a cat. Tabby and white.”
But that wasn’t enough information. “How tall is it? How long is its tail?”
Thinking to put him off, I explained it wasn’t even my cat, but rather a cat on loan from my grandparents to keep me company. So I didn’t know the beast too intimately. But this didn’t put Dirkie off. Indeed, the novelty of the arrangement intrigued him, and he questioned me endlessly. “What color eyes does your cat have? When’s his birthday? How long did your grandparents have him before you got him? Here,” he demanded and gave me a piece of paper. “Draw a picture of your cat.” When I demurred, he panicked. “Draw it! Draw it! Draw your cat! Draw your cat in his basket. Draw your cat in the bathtub. Draw your cat eating food,” he screamed, his voice becoming louder with each demand. So I began to draw, and immediately, Dirkie quieted. “That’s your cat. You’re drawing your cat. You’re drawing your cat sitting up.” But when I finished, he thrust another sheet of paper under my nose. “Draw your cat lying down.” The room was soon a veritable gallery of my rather undistinguished cat drawings.
Our whole relationship began to revolve around my cat. Every time Dirkie saw me, he had to query me exhaustively about my cat. This conversation could be repeated twenty or thirty times over the course of the day. All I had to do was go out of Dirkie’s range of vision and return and he’d need to have a cat conversation with me. And if it wasn’t my cat, it was other cats. Did Mrs. Renton, the secretary, have a cat? Was it a big, yellow tomcat? Did it weigh seven pounds? Did it eat from a green bowl? A white bowl? I felt ridiculous asking Mrs. Renton what color bowl she fed her cat from, but I did ask. It was either that or make it up.
Equally absorbing to Dirkie but with considerably less scope for conversation was the length of my hair. I had quite long hair, well past my shoulders, and this fascinated Dirkie. “You have long hair,” he would say. “I like your hair. Are you going to cut it?”
“No,” I’d reply.
“Don’t cut your hair. Leave your hair long. I like it long. I like long hair.”
This would be quickly followed by: “I need to touch your hair.”
He was, I quickly discovered, much better off not touching my hair. On the occasions he did, it only fueled his excitement, and he’d run off in a full hooting session. He also tended to grab and pull very hard instead of simply touching.
But the conversation over long hair was repeated, if anything, more often than our cat conversation. Or perhaps it just seemed like it, since there were not many dimensions of my hair to talk about. Again and again he asked me about it. One morning I counted him asking me about my long hair fourteen times during one hour. By the end of the first day, I was tying my hair back. By Friday, I was ready to shave it all off.
Leslie proved to be only slightly less of a challenge than Dirkie, and in some ways, she was more. Being untrained, she left me with the distasteful task of wrestling wet diapers off her several times a day, made less pleasant by the need to root around in them with a dipstick to check her sugar levels. Changing her presented other problems. Either I had to leave the other two alone in the classroom while I rushed Leslie down the hall to the girls’ rest room, or else I had to retire discreetly to the depths of the steel shelving and hope there weren’t going to be any nasty surprises. Taking Dirkie and Mariana to the rest room with me was out of the question. Seeing Leslie undressed and my cleaning her proved too much stimulation for Dirkie. He would masturbate frenetically against the sink or toilet-stall doors and use incredibly descriptive language. This, in turn, would get Mariana going. Sexuality and sexual matters were very much a part of both children’s disturbances, and I couldn’t allow Leslie to be exploited in this way. But it made the logistics of changing her difficult to cope with.
In the classroom, Leslie did nothing. If I told her to sit, she sat. But if I didn’t, she would remain stranded wherever I had left her. She did nothing without being physically oriented to it and told to do it, but once started, she would continue a task until physically stopped. For example, if I gave her crayons and paper and asked her to draw, she would begin making marks on the paper and continue until the entire page was covered and still continue coloring over this.
She was the most withdrawn child I had encountered. I had the impression some days of not only mental absence, but almost of physical absence as well, as if she weren’t really there at all, as if I were in the company of a hologram.
On the other hand, admittedly, Leslie was no trouble in other ways. If left to her own devices, she got up to no mischief. She got up to nothing whatsoever, other than a little self-stimulation. She didn’t speak. She gave no indication of being able to, although her file stated that she had spoken, when younger. She made no noises whatsoever except when she cried, which wasn’t often.
In my opinion, Leslie needed very intensive work, the kind of one-to-one stimulation that was next to impossible within the constraints of my classroom. I had to leave her far too often quietly “disappeared.” I compensated by using every spare opportunity to make physical contact, to hold her, to touch her, to cuddle her and keep her close. Even then, Leslie seemed to be not much more than a body with no child in it, but holding her was the only way I could reassure myself that she really existed.
Poor Mariana was in lousy company. Regardless of her own problems, compared to Dirkie and Leslie, she was a world ahead. Glumly accepting that she was going to have no best friend in this class, she took her folder of work each morning and sat alone at the far end of the table. She was just as hopeless at academics as everyone had said and could have used a whole lot more of my time, but her difficulties were neither serious enough nor dramatic enough to compete with those of the other two. I was grateful for Mariana’s presence, however, from a purely selfish point of view. She was someone with whom I could have an occasional sane conversation. And I tried to reserve her some special, uninterrupted time, but with Leslie and Dirkie, that was a challenge. They couldn’t be ignored, and Mariana was capable of understanding that sometimes I did have to ignore her. So she soldiered on without complaint.
I knew what I needed—an aide. Desperately. During most of my years as a teacher in special education, I’d worked with children at the severe end of the emotional-disturbance spectrum and had had some kind of assistance in the classroom. Even with my smallest classes, there had been an extra pair of hands. It made all the difference in the world. Someone to change Leslie or watch the others while I did, someone to oversee while I gave a child individual instruction, someone to provide feedback, to laugh with, to chew over the day’s events, to compare bruises on the shins with—that was what I needed.
I discussed the matter with Carolyn. We had joined the local health club and started going down to the spa most evenings after work for a swim and a sauna, or a soak in the whirlpool. I quizzed her during those relaxed evenings. She had one full-time trained aide and two volunteers,