It's Quiet Time in Ms. Donaldson's Special Ed class (the teacher I'm subbing for), which means we draw the shades and turn the lights off. Everyone is expected to put their head down and rest for a good forty-five minutes. That is, everyone besides Johnny and Eluvenay, who are constitutionally incapable of this and instead reel their heads around the room eying different parts of the ceiling. I write by the only dim light in the room which seeps under the two inches of window not covered by the shade. We listen to a recording of keyboard Beethoven backed by ocean sounds. In several films I have heard the genius lull of the real Beethoven sonatas somehow paired with scenes featuring the quiet simmering pathos of a man on the verge of some senseless act of cold violence. What are we to conclude about you, Beethoven? That only people in some way out of their minds or divorced from normalcy really understand your work? I'd prefer to reason that these sonatas are chosen to ballast these young ones down into sleep, and that in their full form these children are much more like small concertos, startling pieces that boggle the mind.
I wonder if this new age stuff is standard issue for Metro school teachers or if the Educational Assistant Mrs. Solomon hand-picked it. It doesn't seem her style, really. She has just informed me that she is taking her lunch break, will be back in half-an-hour, that I should not turn the lights on until she returns. She then walks ten feet away to a corner of the room where she pulls out a five foot tall, accordioned piece of cardboard which she positions around a small desk. Here she eats her microwaved lunch. In the dark. Obscured in sight but not sound, her munching a lonely effect. There's just something very desperate about telling me that she's leaving, instructing me on "hold the fort" protocol, and then hiding behind her own makeshift fort across the room almost as if she were playing a trick on me. Or it's like we live in a cramped ghetto where there's nowhere else to go and such awkward living arrangements are our only option.
I'm ashamed to admit it, but I hadn't liked Mrs. Solomon within five minutes of our introduction. These five minutes were ironically the most personal, friendly moments of our entire day together. Tony, an Asian boy with cerebral palsy, had begun fooling with the Trix cereal that she had spread out before him when she started in on what she assumed was her entirely necessary chant- "Tony, bite. Tony, bite. Tony, bite." Over the course of Tony's ten minute breakfasting she said this non-stop. By this same logic, the rest of us should have been cheering him on towards the finish line, I guess. But it wasn't like that. She wasn't sitting beside him looking intently into his empty eyes, motheringly imploring him to eat. She was merely parroting the phrase over and over again as she walked around the class doing other morning duties. Her words sounded utterly drained of meaning, obviously said every day during this same ritual.
It seemed quite clear that once he had started eating, he needed no further motivation to continue. What's more, her broken verb choice had to be baffling everyone. Bite? Tony, bite? Tony like "Huh?" Rest of us like, "Tony no bite, he not doggy! Tony eat!" It took me awhile to even discern the word. This was in part due to the strange context she was using it in, but also because it was hard to filter through the thick haze of her Arabic accent. At many points throughout the day she would yell at one kid or another--"You hear understand me yes!?" With me standing by thinking, "Lady, I sure as hell don't, and that poor kid doesn't understand a lot of things."
This language barrier was ubiquitous to the room, really, creating walls upon walls between us all that were as dense as the Pentagon. Many of the kids were non-verbal. If they did talk, when asked a simple, direct question they might reply with some Confucian non sequitur like "In the sky?" This particular phrase came from Johnny, a manic little guy whom Mrs. Solomon had developed a special distaste for (one can tell). These phrases were usually succeeded by a beam of satisfaction spreading across his wide-eyed face, a reveling in his own peculiar genius and/or comic timing. This tendency in Johnny was actually an excellent example of what is a commonly beloved past-time among the delayed: deliberately frustrating other people. Practiced by most of the Special Ed kids at one time or another, this kind of aggravation creates a strange tension in the aggravated party. On the one hand, patience and the ability to long-suffer typically unacceptable, abnormal behavior is not only par for the course, it's pretty much rule number one. On the other hand, what I'm talking about is decidedly intentional. A condition of this discipline of patience is the understanding that They know not what they do. But while they might not know some of what it is they're doing exactly, they're nevertheless often intuiting something of the meaning of their action, able to measure it in our reactions. If I have it right, I think that they know the frustration they are causing and that their intention is something of a mirroring effect. It's an exact communication that transcends many barriers; they create in us great frustration so we can feel what they feel. It's a request, not for a hug or a pat on the back, but for true empathy and shared suffering. Which is a hard but good sharing that makes the day totally worth it.
