together and go back to the regular kindergarten world where he belonged. I suppose Dr. Roberts and company would have considered this deep denial. I thought he was brilliant and didn’t belong in special ed at all. But aside from this, I had a host of prejudices about special ed based on my own experiences.
Special-ed kids didn’t mix with the general population when I was in school. The remedial kids attended the “stupid class” but the real tough cases went to school in separate institutions far away from public view. These institutions were so removed that I wouldn’t haveknown they even existed as a child but for the fact that my father worked briefly in one of them when we lived in upstate New York. It had been an intense and draining experience for him. He became too emotionally attached to the kids, my mother informed me much later, and descended into a deep depression that manifested itself in physical illness.
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 andlows 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
Special-ed kids didn’t mix with the general population when I was in school. The remedial kids attended the “stupid class” but the real tough cases went to school in separate institutions far away from public view. These institutions were so removed that I wouldn’t haveknown they even existed as a child but for the fact that my father worked briefly in one of them when we lived in upstate New York. It had been an intense and draining experience for him. He became too emotionally attached to the kids, my mother informed me much later, and descended into a deep depression that manifested itself in physical illness.
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 andlows 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
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