December 2007

I need to address the issue raised by Blake’s teachers during our meeting about his difficulties at school. During what they called a “SBIT” (pronounced “sih-bit”, stands for “School-Based Intervention Team”), the following conclusions were arrived at:

1. He thrives on one-to-one tutoring, but they can’t spend that kind of time with him,
2. His difficulties with learning in the conventional classroom require more frequent and intense positive reinforcement than is currently given to the children, and,
3. The frequent positive reinforcement has to be given in such a way to NOT disturb the other kids and make them feel like it’s unfair.

It is this third point that I want to focus on. On its face, and during the meeting, it seemed reasonable. However, I began later to think more deeply about how defeated I felt following this discussion. Basically, they pretty much said they can’t give him what he needs. We opted instead for a watered-down, inconspicuous method of giving him small rewards (a sticker on a card) throughout the day, and a cumulative one for a good day.

Blake got a card on one day of the following week. The card had 3 out of 6 stickers on it, with no explanation about what they were for, or what the blank sticker spaces were for. The rest of the week, no card came home, no explanation why, and Blake made multiple visits to the principal’s office. They were supposed to notify us when he was sent to the office so we could follow up at home, but they never did. Blake told us he didn’t go to the office, and we rewarded him. We were told on Friday that he visited the office every day that week.

One of these visits resulted in a phone call home, and my husband had to go to get him.

I believe my son deserves more than absence from the classroom, a meeting with the principal, and being sent home. This is the second time he’s been sent home this semester — his first semester of public school.

The reason for sending Blake home is because he is threatening other kids: He pinched a girl once, swung his lunchbox at a bunch of kids another time, and another time he twisted a girl’s arm. I can’t defend this behavior, but I know my son enough to know that there’s something going on in his head at the time he chooses to do these things. Usually, it’s anxiety. He did NOT act like this in preschool. He had his days there (every kid does), but not consistently. Now, it’s expected every day that Blake will act out. They expect it, he expects it, we try to stay optimistic and hold our breath during the day, hoping for good news.

In addition, it is expected that the de-facto remedy is to remove him from the classroom. This is, we are told, to protect the other kids, either from a learning disruption or physical harm. Aside from the obvious half-hearted efforts to work with us to help him, this attitude of prioritizing the harmony of the classroom over my son’s learning bothers me the most. Let me deconstruct before you start blasting me about the fact that these kids are other people’s children, blah, blah, blah.

Keeping the kids safe: totally agree. If someone is acting unsafely, you have to remove them. But, someone skilled with kids should know when a child’s mood is escalating, and head it off at the pass. In my son’s case, it escalates quickly, but the signs are always there. The key is to intervene BEFORE it escalates, so there is no need to remove him. That’s where the positive reinforcement comes in, and is so important.

But, as long as the priority is to not seem unfair to the other kids, vs. my son’s learning, then we will get nowhere. First of all, why not step up the positive for ALL the kids? Are they trying to save on stickers? I’ll buy the damn stickers, or candy, or toys, or whatever. I’ll buy them for all the kids.

Okay, say they don’t want to over positively-reinforce the kids (is there such a thing?). Their choice is: Have too-late attention drawn to Blake for harmful behavior, thus disrupting the classroom, and perhaps physically harming another kid, and for certain continuing to make Blake more and more anxious, defeated, and miserable.

Here’s how I parse this rationale:

1. It’s too painful for a roomful of kids to see another kid get repeatedly rewarded for outstanding effort
2. It’s desirable for a roomful of kids to see another kid being repeatedly punished for inappapropriate behavior

Am I making myself clear here? This explains a lot to me about our culture at large. We grow up miserly of spirit in our culture. We don’t like to see others getting rewards that we don’t think (emphasis on “we don’t think”) they deserve. It makes us angry. But, we do like folks to get punished. Heck, western culture has for centuries made theatre of it, and America continues with that. The destruction of the spirit, mind, or body of a “bad seed” fills us with glee, makes us feel secure and superior.

The trouble is that, in these early social structures of a kindergarten class are planted the seeds of our later society. Imagine if the children were asked to celebrate how hard another kid is working, even if the results of their work are not so good? Imagine if we taught them how to notice when another kid has trouble, and is working hard to overcome it? Imagine if wonderful, consistent, over-the-top rewards for true effort was not seen as unfair, but desirable for the group? Imagine if the kids were taught to see themselves as members of a team that supported each other, helped each other, and made room for differences?

The story of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-28) is familiar to many people, Christians and non-Christians. The spirit in which it is taken is to illustrate the expansiveness of God’s love. However, the older brother illustrates the kind of love that people tend to give, based on what will seem a familiar, and childish, sense of abstract “fairness” rather than deeper justice:

“…’Look! All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!’
‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ “

I’d like to see a society that actually comprehends the object lesson of this story. It’s not just that God forgives everything (boy we love that part!), it’s that we have to be magnanimous enough to see when the road others travel may not be as easy as the one we take (boy, we don’t pay attention much to that part). For some, they have inner struggles that manifest in embarrassing and sometimes dangerous choices. Some of us wind up in AA. Some of us wind up never getting there. Some of us wind up in prison. And some of us die in the struggle.

We all deserve the benefit of the doubt, and the support of a caring world. We are not here to judge and punish, we are here to love. I don’t care what your faith is, if you’re an atheist or what, compassion seems like the universal language. Where in the world would it be more important to lay down the groundwork for this kind of society of forgiveness, expansiveness, understanding, and love than in a kindergarten classroom?

I was put through Catholic school from 1st grade through high school. It was a different time then. The tuition was free when I first started in 1965, and then it went up to a hefty $100 per year by the time I graduated 8th grade. By 12th grade, in 1976, the annual tuition climbed to a steep $400.

Even adjusted for inflation, the cost of what was a pretty high quality education was pretty low. Now, the choice to send your child to a private school is a staggering one. And, if you have a child with behavioral special needs, try finding a private school that will take him.

I had hoped that the current trends in public schooling, and the recommendations about how great Albemarle schools were, and how great the school district we moved to is, would guarantee that my son’s needs would be met. But, alas, one semester in to this fine district and it’s failing. We are now faced with the possibility that we may have to homeschool. Blake requires one-to-one tutoring, and we are not rich. In what passed for some sort of intervention meeting, his teacher, with 22 years of experience, threw up her hands said that there is just not the time to give to him with a roomful of kids. How resourceful. We walked away with a lame plan to issue him short bursts of positive reinforcement that would be not so intrusive so the other kids wouldn’t notice that he’s getting special attention.

Philosophically, I could write volumes about this dynamic of distracting special attention, and I will tomorrow, but for now I’d like to concentrate on what we’ve been doing in response to the school’s inability to respond in an intelligent way to our son’s challenges.

We are now one week into the new lame positive reinforcement plan, and Blake has been sent out of the classroom to the principal’s office every day this week. It is not even remotely working. Face it — if you are a kid that’s crying for help with his lesson, feeling ignored amidst kids that aren’t having his troubles, would you go for the delayed-gratification of a little sticker on a piece of paper, or the immediate gratification of face-to-face contact with the principal who will take an interest in what’s bothering you? No brainer, I’d say. So, the positive reinforcement he’s now getting is “act up, and you’ll get the dedicated attention that YOU REQUIRE. In his case, he requires it to learn. But, the school seems capable of delivering it only to punish.

So, my husband and I began talking about homeschooling. I’ve joined a couple of online groups, and am asking questions about how folks combine full-time work with homeschool. People are doing it, and since I work at home, it is a possibility if I can get someone to watch Blake during the lion’s share of the workday when I need to be available for calls and sometimes meetings. It will be hard, but you have to make your priorities straight. I have yet to let my job suffer for family life, even with all the moves and telecommuting. I do my job well, and that’s unlikely to change. I just have to stay willing to work in the wee hours, and meet objectives.

That in mind, as I have read through posts on these sites, I’ve seen a pattern. Other than those who homeschool for religious reasons, the others are folks who pulled their kids out of public schools because they had some learning issues that were being inadequately addressed. I am starting to smell injustice here. Why should the parents of kids with learning disabilities, or behavioral disabilities, be burdened with providing their kids with adequate education when the law requires the schools to do so?

I mentioned our troubles to a dear friend whose son is severely autistic. She had to leave one Virginia school district to move to Charlottesville so that her son could attend VIA (the Virginia Institute for Autism). It took lots and lots of appeals to the school district to finally get them to admit that they could not accommodate his needs in the public schools, and that they would pay the tuition at this private institution. In the meantime, my friend and her husband were paying local rent, a mortgage on the house they had to leave, she had to quit her job, her husband goes back and forth for his work, and their other son had to be uprooted. My friend, as a result of her battles, is like an encyclopedia of every possible thing to try with the public schools to advocate for your child. She is living proof that whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.

After speaking with her, I’m now feeling like we played a shell game at the meeting: they are trying to take our eye off the ball, which is that our son is entitled to an Individualized Education Program due to his having a behavioral disability that “impedes the child’s learning or the learning of other children.” That’s pretty much how is behavior has been described to us: The teachers have to send him out of the class for periods of time, or send him home (interferes with learning, I’d say) because his behavior is disruptive to others (interfering with the learning of other children, I’d wager).

So, we all have this information: Our son learns with one-to-one learning, the current teacher and classroom setup cannot give that to him, and his learning is suffering. We had originally planned to perhaps repeat Kindergarten, but from what I’m reading, statistically, for kids like my son, that doesn’t work. It’s just another year of being taught in a learning style that doesn’t work for him. And, it actually costs the school system more to retain him a year than to get him one-to-one tutoring NOW.

I will begin now to push for a formal IEP. I invite any and all people who have formal experience with this process to please give me any information, words of wisdom, words of hope, that you have on this. I don’t want to hear bitching — I want to hear how to get the best for my son that I can. I will continue to report on the progress of this as it unfolds.

There was an AA meeting in the West Village in lower Manhattan called “Midnight.” Those who were regulars called it “Midnight Madness.” Meetings began at 8 pm every day, and went through until 3 am. There were also some mid-day meetings there, mostly specialty meetings for HIV positive folks, or just women, or just gay men.

Midnight was the meeting you went to when you didn’t care what you looked like that day. It attracted all kinds of people, including lots of homeless guys with Hefty bags. You could hear them snoring during all the meetings.

Many of these men had obvious mental illnesses. These were the folks that we wound up speaking to most frequently, and we invited a few of them to our wedding. My husband and I developed an ease around these people that we don’t seem to have around the rest of the “declared sane” world. As with all alcoholics, there was manipulation going on, but many of them were just honestly trying for a connection through these meetings. Perhaps looking for a warm place on a cold day, perhaps drunk, but seeking the fellowship, and really non-judgmental embrace, of this room (one of the few meetings that still allowed smoking, thank God!!!). This is the room where you were most likely to know someone who would eventually die from their addiction. This was the room where having 24 hours was celebrated wildly, and having 24 years was so what.

These were the non-bullshit AA people, the kind that made me feel ashamed that my life wasn’t worse than it was. But I shared something profound with these people. Like many of them, I struggled with demons that were not good to bring up in polite company. We were the folks that were politely prayed FOR by respectable people, but never WITH them.

Today, I find myself in a respectable church, praying side by side with the respectable folks. But, although I share their religious faith, I share little else. What made the darker rooms of AA so much more comfortable for me was their utter lack of propriety. Unlike in church, we did not go there to celebrate how wonderful we were. We went there to celebrate how lucky we were, and to share the aches and pains in the struggle to get better, to go towards what my sponsor called “the light of the spirit.” To get in the door, you had to humble yourself; really, the circumstances humbled you without your having to do much. So you met at your lowest, and sharing your lowest moment with total strangers, if you are honest in the process, is a profoundly life-changing phenomenon.

I had not gone to church for a few weeks for quite a few circumstantial reasons, but I went this week. Since I’m in a pretty deep depression these days, it took some work to get ready, and I was a little late. In walking to the church doors, I felt not worthy to go in. Not in the face of God (he made me, so I figure to him I’m okay). But, the building is so nice, so clean, brick, modern, and neat. White walls that you wouldn’t want to mark, not a whiff of cigarette smoke, no one milling about outside the doors to take a break. I entered alone, and it was silent. I walked to the staircase door, opened it, and instantly smelled the clean rubber tiles on the steps. I went up one flight to the main worship level, and skulked into the sanctuary.

I listened to the minister’s words, which always bring me comfort when they don’t provoke me to think more deeply. My minister is the main reason I go to this church. He is a smart, gifted, understanding person with an open mind and a true gift for what he does. And, unlike other ministers and priests I’ve known, he’s not creepy. Absence of creepy is good. And there are folks there for whom I care very deeply. But it’s getting much harder to steel myself up to go.

I think I’m looking for a church that doesn’t exist. The church with the Hefty bags full of personal belongings, snores, body odors, and cigarette smoke. The church with the non-sequitors coming from all corners of the room, where the laughs are hard-earned and from the pit of everyone’s soul, the church where anyone can walk in at any time and know that they are welcome, even if they didn’t wash their hair.

Can you have that kind of church in the nice, modern, white brick building? I miss the decrepit tenement that housed Midnight, the long flight of badly-lit stairs from the door at the street to the door of the meeting. I miss finding myself talking to people I otherwise would not have the opportunity to meet because we live in different neighborhoods, sociologically and geographically. I even miss my whining sponsee who kept on seeing her destructive boyfriend and calling me to cry about it.

I read this blog entry today, and it reminded me of a fantasy I’ve had about starting a church where everyone struggles with addiction and mental illness, for whom faith is the key to their salvation, in this case defined in what I think are its most real (read: not romanticized) terms: the ending of suffering, self-inflicted or otherwise, in this life, which is eternity.

Oh, woops, I think that church already exists. It’s called AA.

Do you feel it? It’s the weight of Christmas bearing down on your psyche. In my case, the weight of guilt over just who made these items, what their lives are like, why I’m buying them, or in most cases, not buying them. I can’t afford to shop at the ever-so-landed-gentry Downtown Mall, and I’m not sure that shopping there eliminates the possibility of exploiting an invisible sweat shop worker. It also raises my blood pressure to walk into stores where I know they know I can’t afford to be there. You can always tell by the shoes, by the way.

So, I try to minimize rather than eliminate the kind of shopping that I’m doing. We already own Christmas ornaments, some gifts, some bought years ago, but they no doubt had a dubious beginning. It’s hard to weigh the carbon footprint of a one-time-use live tree against the human cost of a re-usable artificial tree. Tossup, really, or maybe not. Somewhere, someone is doing the algorithms for all this. I’m just not sure how you calculate variables like the value of a human life, extent of human pain, the lack of empathy on the part of the US consumer, the joy of Christmas morning, etc. I’d like to think that God is a grand mathematician who knows the value of all of these things, but the units are not monetary. Perhaps there is some transcendent unit of measurement that escapes our grasp, kind of like the value of infinity. But, like math, it all balances somehow. It’s all perfect, if awful, all at the same time. I imagine that God, like the nun in my 2nd grade class, would like to bang our heads on the blackboard to try to get us to understand what’s being calculated. I like to think God has a temper

This weighs on me as I order Blake’s Christmas gifts online, avoid the diseased, frenzied craziness of the Fashion Square mall, and try to keep away from buying extras that none of us really needs. I’ve done pretty well in that regard, but, I know that the trampoline I ordered, that he’s been asking for since he was 3, is most probably made in China. The company is in the UK, but for all the searching I’ve done, I can’t find if they get the trampolines from China, or make them in the UK.

What do those of us do who cannot afford to buy made in the developed world finery, who are grossed out when we walk into WalMart (which I still admit, I do, because there are some things I can get only there, like the trampoline, which was the cheapest there), who feel a little less bad about walking into the far hipper Target, and who in general feel the weight of what it is to consume amidst the deprivation of so many others? Is there a way to balance the equation of pain we are all a part of?

I’ve ventured a bit into the Craig’s list/Freecycle world, and that’s helped somewhat. I got a free jacket for Blake, a free artificial tree. I gave away the baby stuff to folks who needed it. I’m trying to become more conscious of the ramifications of my choices, which is not easy. But this seems only once removed from the pain that gave rise to these items. Like my sister’s hand-me-down beaver skin coat: I wasn’t the original owner, so the pain of the animals that made it was kind of cancelled out. Darn, I loved that coat until so much duct tape was holding it together that I just had to let it go.

I was going to begin this blog with an ironic juxtaposition of a Wal-Mart Christmas ad linking to this video, followed by a “Every Kiss Begins with Kaye” ad, linking to this news story. But, it’s all so obvious, like shooting fish in a barrel. We are all tainted to fewer or greater degrees by the entire global economy, and finger pointing just makes me feel nasty.

But, being human, I take silly pride in my lack of a diamond solitaire (I was so happy when my husband didn’t buy me one for our engagement, and, I’ve never sported one in the past), but that hollow pride is somehow mitigated by the fact that I have a house full of stuff that was probably manufactured on the backs of so many folks struggling to keep going, including the retail workers right here in the good ‘ol USA. I worked at Saks Fifth Avenue for Christmas in 1987, and I made minimum wage. So you can’t escape that exploitation, even in the high-end stores, even though they ask you in stores like that to dress like you don’t need the job.

Is the answer to give to charity, to live like a monk, to work tirelessly to balance the equation, or to wipe the abacus clean, so to speak, and begin with a whole new way of calculating what goes to Caesar and what goes to God in the grand balance sheet of life. I wager I’m giving a bit of my soul to Caesar, and that’s just not the coin of that realm, except as leverage to release my more readily recognized currency.

I think that’s called marketing, the voice outside our head that increasingly substitutes for a conscience, becomes the way we measure the value of our actions. We are a sad bunch, for sure, a country so wealthy that we are losing ourselves to our own success. There are no simple, self-help answers to this. This is the kind of thing that can only be approached through silence, meditation, soul-searching, prayer, and gaining the inner strength from these actions to walk the talk of human justice. If I’m honest with myself, I’ll admit that I’m not there yet. Not by a long shot.

For the better part of my adult life — well all of it, really — my personal annual rhythms have gone counter to those of the world-at-large. There were years of working all-nighters, and all weekenders, for school. Like, on a bright sunny Saturday morning, I’d be riding on the subway to go to Canal Street for plastic parts for some model I was building. I would be on the train with tourists that were also going downtown, but to get to the ferry for the Statue of Liberty, or to visit the World Trade Center. They’d be in crisp pastel colors, and I’d be in Salvation Army clothes that I had on for a few days, having eschewed sleep for productivity in service to neurotic perfectionism.

In my more tired moments, looking at those well-groomed tourists, I would feel sorry for myself. But it would not last — I felt superior to the pastel-clad “bridge and tunnel crowd.” I guess, it would appear, I still do. Sigh.

Then you have a kid. Suddenly, the normal annual and weekly rhythms of the surrounding society (Virginia, in this case) place pressures on you to march to their drummer, to provide them with “normalcy.” Kids need things like a church community, schedules, time on the weekends with Mom and Dad, and all the other “normal” stuff that my bohemian years did not reinforce.

Add to my lack of preparation for the normal life the very NOT typical suburban Virginia complication that my husband is a full-time student who has to work weekends to bring in extra money for us, and the ability to build for Blake what others appear to have becomes still more complicated.

I picture myself as a pivot point between my husband’s very unconventional scheduling needs and my son’s highly conventional ones. I turn to their rhythms, and connect them to each other. I have to yield wherever they are moving, and be the place where the tension between these two opposing forces gets resolved. It’s a stressful spot for me to be in over a what has been a protacted period of time (over 5 years now).

When either one of these forces stresses the connection, I absorb it. It’s an exhausting situation for me, but I don’t want to come across as self-pitying, because that’s not what this is about. I accept that this is my role, but express that I do it with little grace and even less ability.

When I have a moment to act on deeper voices and not react to shriller demands, I bemoan not being able to ride that train to Canal Street to rummage through bins of odd parts in service to a little perfectionistic productivity while everyone else mows their lawns. For now, I’m the one pushing the metaphorical mower, and it does not suit me well.

© 2007 Cathy Finn-Derecki

Some days I blend in to the crowd
Almost normal, not so loud,
Clean up good, look just like them
when no one’s there it comes again
It saddles up
right next to me
jumps in my head
pain-shake-me free
it hurts like hell
unbar the door
I fall and soar
and fall and soar

Our name is legion
we are many
we act real weird
we smell kinda funny
we cry for help
we don’t get any
our name is legion
we are many

We’re everywhere, we’re on your street
In every family that you meet
Folks get polite when we walk in
to some it’s weakness, others sin
Cry out and cut
yourself with stones
the shaken cage
the rattled bones
each sound a shreak
each day a year
pure pointless fear
not really here

What do you want with me, Jesus?
Don’t torture me! Don’t torture me!
What do you want with me son of the God most high?
Swear to God! Swear to God!

Our name is legion
we are many
we act real weird
we smell kinda funny
we cry for help
we don’t get any
our name is legion
we are many

Our name is legion
we are many
we act real weird
we smell kinda funny
we cry for help
we don’t get any
our name is legion
we are many
we are many
we are many.

——————-
Nods to Mark.