Friday, July 18, 2008

A Special Child Introduced

I have been debating all year about posting entries about one of my students, because this child is so very distinct, it would make identification of her easy, and that's not my intent at all. I want it to all remain anonymous, and just be a commentary on the crazy things that people do these days with their children, and what kids are doing, since it is so very funny a lot of the time.


So I didn't write any of the numerous, insane things that happened. And trust me, there are plenty. I don't think I'll have another student like this one, no matter how long I remain teaching.


But as the year is over, and I am gearing up for a fresh crop of kiddos, I feel the need to share a few of the craziest stories about this student, as I just can't hold it in anymore. As countless people have said, as I mention the latest thing she did, "I really don't know how you stood it."


I don't either.


For ease in storytelling, I will give this student a name, which of course isn't the real one. We'll call her Sarah.


Now, Sarah was on another team at my school, but after about 1 month was moved to our team, as we were "a better environment for this particular student." This translates to the other team was full of new teachers and teachers who complain if they have any student that isn't perfect, and so they moved her to our team, since they couldn't handle her.


We had been warned about her; we had a whole special meeting about her. She was placed in my homeroom and in my class for language arts. The first day she arrived, she sat on my floor and told me she didn't want to do the work. This was a little surprising, as I do work with 12-year-olds, and generally it takes them awhile to be comfortable enough to say things like that.


So I said that I was sorry to hear that, but she needed to do it anyway. She promptly threw a fit, and laid down on the floor and kicked her feet, and started screaming.


This obviously shocked me. (and the other students).


No matter how they had talked about her being "special" in the meeting, and how we would have to work with her carefully, I wasn't prepared for a temper tantrum that would make a 2-year-old proud.


I attempted to get her off the floor, and eventually managed to get her in a desk, with her work in front of her. When I stopped by to check on her later, she was playing with a piece of plastic. I asked what it was, and she ignored me, so I asked her what she was doing. Then she told me what it was.


She said, "Oh, this? This is just a piece of plastic. But it's a special piece of plastic. It's part of a bomb that I am going to build to blow you up."


Let me tell you, I was floored.

After school that day, I went to my administrator's office for advice. Now, I do love my administrator, but she has better things to do than worry about this child, so I was basically just told to make do, deal with it, and ignore the threats.

I then went to several other people at my school, and I was told just to ignore it, she didn't mean it.

I was angry about it then, and I still am. Whether or not she meant it, she said it. It's not safe to have hear around other students when she is making threats like that. It's just not. If she were of low intelligence, maybe, but she has an extremely high IQ, past Giftedness even, and she could easily figure out how to make a bomb.

But I had to go back and just do my best. Throughout many other threats to me, my co-teacher, and the other teachers on my team, we were told just to have a little compassion for this student, who is going through so much.

What about me? What about the other students? I kept trying to get them to see that if something did happen, and she hurt other students, we would be in very deep trouble, since she was threatening them!

I kept a log of everything she did, so that if anything did happen, I had a list of things leading up to the event.

Eventually I had enough, and wrote a referral for a threat to me and one of the other students. Nothing really happened, just one day in ISS, but it made it so that she was aware it was not okay to make threats anymore, and she mostly stopped. But she still did things like throwing herself on the floor, screaming, telling the other kids they were stupid, yelling out during tests or when was reading out loud, etc.

I really do not know how I made it.

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