*Reflections on Teaching* Third Year

III.
One Purple Candle
third year

The note in his permanent school file said it all. “There’s obviously something not right with this child, but given his home life, what can we possibly do?”
When I was involuntarily moved to fourth grade at the end of my second year, I took a quick look at the last names on my class list. His last name leaped off the page at me. Could this be another child from the same family as the boy I had last year; the chair throwing, screaming, pencil losing child? “Look out,” his teachers from last year warned me. “He crawls around on the floor, barking like a dog. Oh, and sometimes he bites.” Oh, yes, this was certainly the same family.
The skinny boy arrived with smudged glasses, hair in his face, looking at the ground. This wasn’t Chris’s class. He was being forced to repeat the fourth grade. His first fourth grade teacher had convinced mom that having to repeat a grade might convince Chris to stop acting up and start doing his work in school. His old classmates were still in the building, and here he was, stuck with the little kids, in the same grade as his younger half-brother.
I started the year with a basic math review, just to see what the kids could do. Chris aced it. Not one problem wrong. “Obviously he’s not repeating a grade because he needs an extra year with the curriculum,” I mused. “What do I do with this child?” I began the year trying to individualize his curriculum, thinking up challenging projects I hoped he’d be interested in. He half heartedly attempted some of them, but seemed more upset at being forced to do something different from the rest of the class than he was about doing work he already knew how to do. So, it was back with the rest of the class for him.
I waited for the chair throwing, or the yelling, or some form of the violence I’d seen in his older half-sibling. What I got instead were coping mechanisms straight out of a mental hospital. I believe to this day that most of his coping mechanisms were a result of boredom. He could already do about seventy-five percent of what I was teaching. When you’re bored, your mind begins to wander, and the wanderings of his mind may have taken him home. I can’t say for sure. But I can imagine what life at home must be like for the younger, much smaller, sibling of a boy who throws chairs and screams at adults at school.
Thus, the coping mechanisms. He did a bit of crawling, dog-like, on the floor. I think he barked once or twice, but he never bit anyone that year. More commonly, his hand creature would come calling. Fingertips grazing the table, middle finger up and sniffing, his hand would roam around his desk, stopping to read what Chris had written, or glance across the aisle at one of his classmates. The hand never spoke, and he never spoke to it, just made small noises for it. The real fun started when both hand creatures showed up. They didn’t like each other, you see, and trouble ensued. Arms flailing, body careening as far as the confines of the desk would allow, Chris’s hand creatures would battle it out. I’m not sure what they were fighting over; I never asked and he never told me. It’s quite possible he didn’t know either.
He thrived on attention, and like most kids who do, he didn’t care if the attention was coming for something positive or not. Laughter bolstered him, and many of his disturbances were of the garden variety class clown type.
More often, though, Chris’s coping mechanism was avoidance. He avoided school work, he avoided getting too close. He didn’t keep any close friends, choosing instead to flit from one to the next. He’d often escape into art; he drew some of the most amazing comic book art I’ve seen from a child so young.
On good days, when he was more lucid, Chris was charming, funny, and endearing. Sadly, those days were few and far between; most days ended with Chris in the back of the classroom, or in the hallway, lying sprawled on the ground, muttering to himself. He just couldn’t handle life in a classroom most days.
I took his name before the Teacher Assistance Team. Before a child could be referred for any sort of testing, the TAT team had to meet and decide if there were other strategies the classroom teacher could try, or if testing was the right course of action. All his previous teachers had taken his name to the team, and each time, the team had decided that a rough and unpredictable home life caused these behaviors; we could test him, but what good would it do? “But I’ve had kids from bad homes,” I argued, “they lash out, they make inappropriate comments or jokes, or they just get real quiet. Ten-year-olds don’t crawl around on the floor, barking and biting; they don’t pretend their hands are some sort of animals. There’s something else going on with this kid.” But my requests that he be tested by the school psychologists went unheeded. “There’s just nothing we can do,” they told me.
I’d had a pretty good amount of interaction with mom the year before, dealing with the violent older half-brother. I knew a little bit about what home was like. Four kids, three different dads; one dad who was in and out of the home and favored the two that were his. Mom, the one constant adult, sometimes worked, sometimes didn’t, often left the kids home alone with the oldest child, who was mentally about six, violent and unpredictable, undisciplined and unrestrained by the adults in his life. Mom went through phases where she tried, always unsuccessfully, to “get her life in order.” During those phases, the kids would come to school with clean clothes and snacks, much calmer than normal. But it never lasted. One week, maybe two, and Chris would show up wearing the same stained shirt all week, begging for snacks from classmates.
At Christmas that year, I knew mom hadn’t been in one of her “See, I’m capable and we have a normal family” phases, so I was floored to see his sloppy scrawl on the tag on the Christmas present saying, “From Chris.” I knew this had to be something he had taken the time to do himself. I carefully peeled back the wrinkled, over-taped wrapping paper to reveal a small square candle, marbled purple and white, sitting in a delicate silver holder.
“Oh, how great,” I enthused, “this will really match in my bedroom.”
Chris, who was having a good day, needed clarification. “Well, so what color is your bedroom?”
“It’s blue,” I told him, “but most of the pictures and blankets have some purple in them. This goes great. I already know just where I’m going to put it.”
For the rest of the Christmas party, I couldn’t help but overhear snippets of Chris’s grinning conversations with anyone who would listen. “…and it matches her bedroom…she has a shelf where she’s going to put it….”
That little purple dollar store candle still graces the top of my dresser. I can still see Chris, grinning, drawing, hand creatures duking it out, every time I see it. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to part with it.
There are kids who touch us each year with their intelligence, or creativity, or winning personality. Chris touched me with his vulnerability that day. The rest of the year wasn’t easy, bad days still abounded, but I found it was enough for me to know I had connected with this particular child, on this particular day.