Authors: Debra Ginsberg
Those who weren’t bad off enough to warrant placement outside public school in an institution such as my father worked in but who still needed “extra help” got the brunt of the teasing schoolchildren are famous for. These kids—the ones who needed remedial English or math—who had to attend summer school or vocational school, were “retards” or worse. The worst mark of failure was to have to ride the small school bus—a dead giveaway that you were a hopeless social write-off at best, functionally retarded at worst. Because the stigma was so severe, especially as we advanced through the grades, the kids who needed this extra help or who continued to fail in regular classes, merely dropped out of school early or joined a tough crowd, taking up smoking or drinking or delinquency. I had no intention of signing my child up for thirteen years of this kind of torment. My goal was to get him the hell out of special ed before he could realize that he was even in it.
Ironically, the ultimate goal of the special-ed class and the special-ed teacher, I was told, was quite similar. Their directive, Dr. Roberts told me, was to get the kids “mainstreamed.” That is, normal enough to fit into a regular classroom. Whatever time they could spend outside the special-ed classroom was to be encouraged. Therefore, Blaze would be spending some quality art and recess time with the Ice Princess and her class.
I liked Sally, the special-ed teacher. She seemed to me to have all the qualities that Ice Princess was missing. She smiled and laughed, for one thing. The tone of her voice changed, encompassing some highs and
lows instead of remaining at a steady, hospice-worker level, and she actually seemed to
like
the children. She would be one of very few teachers in Blaze’s school career who wouldn’t look at him as if he were an alien life-form she’d never seen before. Sally was creative and she took a creative approach to solving problems in her class. When I came to pick Blaze up after his first day in her class, for example, she informed me that she felt the two of them were going to get along just fine. She had asked Blaze to do some work, she said, and Blaze had responded that he would work if she took her long blond hair out of its ponytail. Sally complied and Blaze performed whatever task it was that she was requesting. Sally wore her hair down for the rest of the year.
Because she was the special-ed teacher, I learned later, Sally was allowed to think outside the box. Teachers in regular ed are allowed very little creative latitude. Therefore, Ice Princess became “very concerned” when Blaze said something like “The floor hurts my feet”; no matter how much I explained that he was trying to tell her that his ankles hurt from sitting cross-legged on the hard floor, she was convinced that he was having delusions of the floor attacking him. Sally, on the other hand, was likelier to ask me what I thought Blaze meant if he used language in a metaphoric way. She’d tell me that he’d mentioned having “red lasers” in his stomach and I was able to tell her that he used that term whenever he was nervous about something. She’d think about this for a moment and then tell me that, yes, that nervousness did sort of feel like red lasers, didn’t it?
Above all, Sally was determinedly cheerful but not in the false, fabricated way I was starting to recognize from other school staffers. Sally’s cheerfulness was both positive and genuine. This was more than I could say for her class. Since there was only one special-ed class in the school, Sally had a mix of at least four grade levels in her classroom and what seemed to be an astonishing array of “issues.” There was one little girl in a wheelchair and one boy who had severe vision
problems. There was an older, bigger boy who continuously shouted out a pattern of loud sounds in an unchanging loop. A couple of kids sat at the edge of the room, desperately working on computers as if their lives depended on it. The rest of the class merely looked tired and dispirited as if they had already had enough of the whole school experience. Despite Sally’s creativity and her innate warmth and compassion for her students, I don’t remember them ever looking happy when I dropped Blaze off there every morning. They looked, to me, like prison inmates waiting for a reprieve. I liked Sally but I hated leaving Blaze there every day. It was depressing and I was depressed about the whole situation.
As the days wore on, I wondered how long it would take Blaze to come around to my father’s philosophy of “give your teachers what they want” or if that would ever even happen. Blaze’s placement in special ed right out of the gate underscored the feeling I’d always had that I’d never really fit in and that, although I’d been able to cover it well, whenever I went “out there,” I was merely visiting. Obviously, I now thought, the same applied to my son and he was apparently less able to camouflage his differences than I had been. Although I’d always tried to see Blaze as his own person, always listened to him when he spoke to me, and constantly defined my role as his mother, I still had his identity very much tied up with my own when he started school. I filtered his experiences through my own impressions, which was all I had to go on. Blaze was stingy with the details of his life at school. If I demanded information, I got nothing. If I waited a few hours after he got home, when he finished processing his day, I’d get some odds and ends, such as what book the teacher was reading or who cried on the playground, but never more than that. I had to rely solely on what the teachers told me and what I personally could observe and interpret. I was in the position of being both his defender and translator on a daily basis.
Sally, Dr. Roberts, and the speech therapist began the series of
psycho-educational tests that I’d signed off on. Blaze was uncooperative in the extreme. For Dr. Roberts’s tests, he refused even to remain seated, let alone finish drawing triangles or squares.
“Blaze had great difficulty staying seated and attending to the directions of the standardized tests given,” she later wrote in her report. “During the testing session, the reinforcer offered was time to play in the playhouse outside the examiner’s door; this reinforcer was not powerful enough to motivate Blaze to cooperate. He threw the testing booklet on the floor and began to kick the filing cabinets, the door, and the examiner.”
I was very disappointed in these results. Blaze was proving me to be a liar. Even though I begged him to cooperate and even sat in the room while Dr. Roberts administered one of her tests, Blaze was as intractable as he had been in the days following his birth when he’d refused to nurse or cry or get on with the general business of living. He had decided not to take the tests and so he didn’t. No amount of cajoling or pleading would get him to change his mind.
Sally was only slightly more successful in obtaining any kind of valid information from the tests she administered. No matter how carefully a test was disguised, Blaze always seemed to know exactly when his abilities were being measured against a standard and immediately shut down. At least, it seemed that Sally was beginning to understand that Blaze did have some academic skills. “He knows his letters and most of his sounds,” she told me, “it’s just really difficult to know what else he knows because he won’t tell us.”
I considered the speech therapist an absolute lunatic. She jumped up and down, alternately told Blaze that his behavior was inappropriate and that she thought he was a wonderful boy, and sang show tunes out loud. For once, Blaze seemed totally stunned into silence, if not submission. His fascination with the speech therapist was short-lived. After the first few sessions with her, he refused to work with her and simply hightailed it out of the room whenever he was scheduled with
her. Luckily, she was reassigned to another school shortly after this and another, much calmer, woman took her place.
None of the teachers who tested Blaze got what I felt were accurate results in determining his intelligence, potential, or what was “wrong” with him. In a way, it was like a repeat of the medical tests given to him right after his birth. Again, no conclusive results, nothing specific, no diagnosis. Only Blaze, it seemed, knew what was really going on and he wasn’t saying.
I attended a series of meetings during those first few months of school to review the findings of the tests and assess placement for Blaze. Not surprisingly, all the school staffers felt that Blaze should remain in special ed. “What’s really important,” Sally told me, “is that he start forming some peer relationships and learning appropriate social skills.” I couldn’t imagine how Blaze was going to learn “appropriate” social skills from the kids he was now in class with. He seemed most intrigued by the boy who made noises and shouted out non sequiturs and had taken to imitating him. In fact, Blaze found the most
inappropriate
behaviors very appealing and sought to mimic them whenever possible. If he wasn’t acting like a total nut when he entered school, I reckoned, he certainly would be by the end of kindergarten.
I began taking my father with me to the meetings at school. I had a paranoid hunch that my status as waitress–single mom wasn’t helping me when I tried to get answers from the staff about what exactly they thought was wrong with Blaze and why, exactly, they thought he needed to be in special education. My father was a big hit at the meetings. Dr. Roberts thought he was just wonderful and for the first time, I actually heard some of the other (all female) staff giggle. I found it vaguely repulsive that it seemed I could only get taken seriously with a man present, but I accepted it as fact and, from then on, I wouldn’t attend a meeting without him.
Although I ran the gamut of emotions that year, from depressed
and angry to ashamed and then vaguely hopeful, I never felt that Blaze would spend his school career in special-ed. I saw very few of the other parents in Blaze’s class on a daily basis, but I felt no kinship with those I did speak to occasionally. When the mother of the little girl in the wheelchair asked me if I would like to join a support group for parents of children with disabilities, I was actually insulted. My child did
not
have a disability—he was just not cut out for a regular classroom. He was not a round peg. He wasn’t even a square peg. The board for his shape peg hadn’t been built yet. And I had a nagging feeling that this was all a big joke to Blaze, that he understood the drill and could have followed it if he’d wanted to. But since the moment of his birth, Blaze has been both stubborn and unyielding. If his behavior was under his control, he wasn’t letting on—not to Sally, not to Dr. Roberts, and not to me.
I could tell that most of the staff thought that I just couldn’t accept my son’s problems and most of them treated me as if I were likely to become hysterical at any moment. It would be years later, when I found myself working in special education, that I would finally be able to see what they saw or even have a point of view other than the one I held to then.
Talking to the Ice Princess was especially horrible. Every time we had a meeting, she brought out more examples of Blaze’s “work,” which looked like textbook illustrations from the loony bin. There were Smoky the Bear puppets with eyes glued where the mouth should be, drawings of houses that looked like they’d been through Hurricane Andrew, and the letters of his name drawn in fragile, shaky lines. She seemed bent on making me understand that my son was really damaged in some way. All the while, that pitiless demeanor of hers never changed, no matter if I was cheerful, teary, angry, or distant. During one meeting, I asked her if she had any children of her own because I just couldn’t see a human baby coming out of that sub-zero body. She admitted that she hadn’t yet had children but she was
planning to and—in any case, she added defensively—it made no difference to her ability to teach kindergarten or love her students. I thought perhaps if her students were all robotic Popsicles that might actually be true. What I told her, though, in a rare moment of honesty, was that I hoped that if she did someday have children, she would never have to face the kind of parent-teacher conferences I was having with her.
I’ll never know exactly why Blaze’s first day of school resulted in such a complete disaster. I can’t tell whether or not he would even have been noticed if the school were in an urban area or catering to a different demographic. Sometimes I think that if the Ice Princess had been slightly warmer and willing to give him a chance at a second day in her class, perhaps things would have been different. Then I wonder, if Blaze’s behavior had sent up so many red flags, why had nobody ever mentioned them to me before? And I wonder why, although Dr. Roberts et al. asked me questions that were clearly geared to elicit certain responses (Does he line up his toys? Does he make eye contact with you? Does he cry when he hurts himself?), nobody ever told me what
disorders
they thought Blaze might have. The fact that I had never suspected school problems would be in store for Blaze made me ill equipped to handle what I felt was a full-scale attack the first day and I do believe that the tenor of those early meetings have affected my attitude toward the school system ever since.
Many years after those first dark days of kindergarten, when Blaze was nearing the end of sixth grade, I requested a copy of his school file that was, by then, several inches thick. The special-education secretary was very busy that week and I was working at the school at that point, so I volunteered to copy it myself. The secretary happily complied since there aren’t many school jobs as onerous as copying (the copier’s always broken, the upper-grade teachers always have something more important and more urgent ot copy, and the staples are always getting caught). Parents of children in special education
always get copies of all the IEP forms they sign at all the meetings they attend, but there are other pieces of paper in the file that most parents don’t see. There are notes between teachers, for example, work samples, written observations of the child’s behavior and other odds and ends. I would never have had the chance to read any of these if the secretary had copied the file herself. As I yanked staples out of paper packets and tried to catch floating Post-its, I paid careful attention to the beginning of the file. Dr. Roberts had since moved on to less stressful pastures, but I could picture her all over again when I saw her incredibly controlled, neat handwriting, not a dash or comma out of place. What intrigued me the most were the notes of her initial observation of Blaze on his first day of school. She had observed him from 9:00
A.M.
to 9:20
A.M.
and decided his entire school future in less than half an hour. She wrote: