A Play and Some Flaming Sword in the Classroom

That last post took two sittings to finish and, re-reading it, you can tell. But I've decided not to be too hard on myself re the quality of my writing but instead to just get stuff down.

So far I haven't been doing too well :-)

The follow-up to the plate smashing episode was seeing the Year12's actual performance last week. The play was entitled 'The Nerd' and it was a hoot. The main character was brilliantly played by a lad I had taught way back when he was in year 5. In those days he was a quiet and conscientious boy with a nervous laugh and an air of insecurity. On Tuesday night he was a fully fledged clown with multiple 'voices' and not a shred of self consciousness to be seen! He wasn't the only surprise. The son of our PE teacher had been a little more lively in his primary school days but known more for his musicianship than anything else. He strode onto the stage as a 6 foot tall 'business man' who 'hadn't laughed since 1974'. He was hysterical. I still smile thinking about it. Sadly, the two girls still hadn't really got the plate scene working, although I could see where they'd incorporated things we'd done into their performance. Oh well, the boys more than made up for them.



ETBED boy has been giving us hell again, of late.  The Friday before last saw him removed from his classroom, by the Head of School, and deposited in my care. He proceeded to try and trash the place although, compared to Slugger last year, he is really a bit of a light weight.

Firstly, he turfed all the furniture out of the doll's house and proceeded to throw it over the wall into my office where I was sitting, trying to ignore him. Seeing that this wasn't working, I came out and tried to engage him, to no avail. He overturned a chair and moved on to the whiteboard full of magnetic letters. Scraping them off in handfuls, he scooped them up and began hurling them at the wall. My good humour and professionalism was beginning to wear off. I grabbed both his hands and held them in his lap.
"You will NOT throw things around my room, I don't care how angry you are!" I seethed at him.
"What gives you the right to come in here and throw my things around? I don't care what you do with your own things, but you are NOT going to throw mine around. And if I have to sit here for the rest of the afternoon holding your hands...SO BE IT! It's going to be a pretty boring afternoon!!!!"
We eyeballed each other for a few moments and I let him go. He belted over to the opposite side of the room and picked up a rubber ball (don't ask me why we have these sorts of things lying around the room, it's a pretty multi-purpose room) and stood there holding it and looking at me. I decided to switch tack and spoke nonchalantly to another teacher in the room who was quietly trying to do some marking and ignore the ruckus. He walked past us with the ball and began to deliberately bounce it.
"I don't mind if you hold the ball, it's good for squeezing, but please don't bounce it in the classroom," I said, in what was a pretty good rendition of a calm voice. He immediately bounced it all the more. As he saw me get up and come towards him, he flung himself over the ball and curled up so that it was trapped underneath him. Fortunately he is Extremely Tiny, so it was no problem for me to flip him over like a turtle and wrench the ball from out of his grasp. He glared at me in fury and lashed out with his foot. I side stepped and in a mammoth show of self restraint, just stopped myself from kicking him back. "Don't test me," I spat at him," I will always win." And I strode away to secure the ball elsewhere. Something clicked within him and he rolled over, located a toy on a low shelf and began to play quietly with it. He did this happily for the next 20 minutes.
"By the way folks," I announced, rather breathlessly, to the other teacher and SSO present, "that was not how the text book tells you to do it!" They grinned.

By the time his mother arrived, he had cleared up the mess he'd made, with only one prompt, and was standing next to me at a table, completing his maths worksheet. He leaned into me as we read the words and glued them under the appropriate shape pictures. We were friends again.

Last week he had a relatively good week and I was only called down to the classroom once. We're all praying it can be sustained this week. His teacher is in a better 'place' with him and I'm hoping we don't need to repeat the power struggle of a week ago.

Keep us in your prayers if that's your thing :-)

Total Meltdown and A Regret

Every day is an escalation.

Today, his mum was in talking to the Principal while we tried to deal with him. I had walked back into the room to find him twirling a metre ruler over his head and when I asked him to give it to me,
"Hey Slugger (smile, cheerful), may I have my ruler back please?"
he threw it at me. Luckily there was no harm done but he was in a foul frame of mind. As his Minder started to try and move him towards his work table, I ducked out to see another pupil in another class. On my way back in, Mum was leaving the Principal's office and approaching the classroom. I could see that Slugger was settling to work and I feared seeing Mum would break his concentration so I suggested she just go, without calling into the room.

BIIIIIIIIIG Mistake!
He saw her out of the corner of his eye and he saw her leave without saying goodbye.

The destruction was truly spectacular to see. This 6 year old child up-ended large wooden tables (the type that seat 6!), kicked things around the room, swung chairs, threw things at the ceiling fans and topped it all off by locating the only two pairs of non safety scissors in the room and hurling them in our direction.

Through all this I kept saying to him "You're feeling angry, this is not a safe way to be angry..."
and he bellowed back through tears "I want MY MUUUUUM!!!! Where IS SHE????????"
"Shall I phone her to come?" I asked.
"NAAAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWWWWWWWWWW" (more tears and throwing things)
"Well how can we get her to come if we don't ring her?"
"NAAAAAAWWWWWWW (throw, swear) DON"T YOU PHONE HER!!!!!!!!!"

Now, this may seem illogical, to those not 'in the know', but 'phoning his mum' is a threat we have been using for some time. In the early days our line was 'if he's violent, he goes home'. Foolishly, the Principal bowed to parental pressure when the mother eventually got sick of coming to pick him up. Additionally, I guess there was the issue of actually giving him practice at following the rules and accepting the consequences here. Not that it seems to have helped.
So, even though he desperately wanted his mum, he did NOT want us to phone her as that would mean he was in trouble and would have to go home.

The violence continued.

Eventually he bellowed from the depths of such heaving sobs it would break your heart:
"She went home (sob) and she forgot (sob) to say (sob) goodbye to me..."

I felt like such a heel.

All the kid had wanted was for Mum to say goodbye to him. He probably would have cuddled her and got back to what he had been doing (errrr.......which was throwing a metre ruler at my head...). Here is where we come unstuck. We keep looking at things through adult's eyes. Why should Mum not saying goodbye matter so much?

But it does. It matters a LOT. Because for Autistic children the world is so unpredictable, there have to be some things you can rely on. And when THOSE things fail you, it is akin to the end of the world. I should have known better.

But I apologised to him and then we made him help clean up the room. And all the time he kept asking, in typical Autistic fashion, with no idea of the impact he had had,
"Why hasn't my teacher come down to see me?"

Tomorrow it is my day off and I am actually going to take it. I have an important wake to attend. As a result, Slugger's minder has decided he doesn't feel safe, coming in for the day and who can blame him. It is definitely a two person job. Slugger will be kept at home tomorrow.

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And Yesterday He Bit Me.....

Slugger's been at it again.

But we did get a win. He didn't get what he wanted and after 10 minutes of chair throwing and table clothing ripping, he sat down and got back to his work.

Today, as two new families waited in the foyer for meetings with the Principal etc, Slugger streaked through the double doors and out the other side with his minder in hot pursuit.

We all just shrugged and went about our business.

He has two weeks to make a breakthrough, according to our Principal. After that he'll need to look for a 'fresh start' elsewhere.

I am really hopeful we can make a difference here. After all, I don't want those incisor marks to be in vain.....

Dangerous Professions: Bullfighting, Lion Taming, Teaching

Slugger is not the only problem child I have to deal with.


This week, as well as being punched and kicked by the aforementioned little charmer, I was pegged in the head with a whiteboard eraser by WildBoy. You've got to admire his aim.

WildBoy had been my major concern up until the arrival of Slugger. WildBoy is 10 and, before the age of 1, was a victim of such terrible neglect and abuse that he has been left emotionally scarred, for life. He only attends school up until morning recess and, after clocking his teacher in the face with his pencil case back in May, has also been attended by a large, male, teaching aide. The purpose of this was to ensure that he could be safely removed from the classroom situation if he 'lost it' but I am happy to report that things have been progressing well with him and he has not caused me much concern, until Tuesday.

The thing is, lately we have been so preoccupied with Slugger that WildBoy almost seems normal in comparison. Unfortunately, he is a ticking bomb and it doesn't take much to set him off. You see, WildBoy believes that he is intrinsically 'bad' and doesn't deserve the good things that happen to him. He is in a constant state of 'fight or flight' and too often descends into 'fight'. WildBoy believes that no-one can possibly love him (after all his parents didn't) and therefore he might as well push you away as fast as he can, or give you a reason to reject him, so he can 'cut to the chase' as it were. In proving that you will indeed, inevitably, send him away, he confirms his own understanding of the world, which is comforting and affirming for him, in an unhealthy way.

I have been working with WildBoy once a week to try and establish some academic baselines so his mum can target his patchy learning at home. He has missed so much school and had so much focus on his behaviour, that his learning has fallen behind and, although a clever little boy, his lack of skill is now a source of enormous frustration to him. Our sessions have varied in both content and success but we have been making some progress in the Maths field. Last week I pushed him a little too far.

I knew I had bitten off more than he could chew when he started scribbling over things with a whiteboard marker...notably my hand. I stayed focused and kept encouraging him and we made it through the 20 minute activity by the skin of our teeth. I was quick to point out how he actually had been able to do it after all (albeit with a huge amount of prompting and support) and breezily got up to put things away before walking him down to meet his mum. As I stood with my back to him, trying valiantly to shove a folder back into the overcrowded resource cupboard, I felt the shock of a sharp pain through the back of my head. Spinning around I saw the offending whiteboard eraser on the floor at my feet and WildBoy standing whitefaced and mortifed at his own actions, some feet away.

I was so taken aback that I did all the things you're not supposed to do with ODD children. Firstly, I questioned him.
"Wildboy, did you throw that eraser at my head?"
No response; 'fight or flight?' was probably racing through his mind.
"I didn't appreciate it." I said, breaking yet another ODD behaviour management rule: don't communicate a value judgement.
He responded by throwing two large rubber dice up onto the top of the cupboard.
The adrenalin rapidly departing my system, I started to think clearly again and switched to jovial encouragement.
"Come on mate, mum's going to be waiting downstairs. Let's go and tell her how well you did on that maths game."
He raced to the door and physically blocked the way; I think he thought I was going to tell her what he'd done.
"Maaaaaate," I said, in my best impersonation of an Italian builder," You don't wanna go there do you? C'maaaaarn...."
This seemed to do the trick. He relaxed, smiled and looked at me suspiciously.
"Where'd you get that from?" he queried."I've heard that before."
Of course he has. It's what his foster dad does when he starts to get aggressive. He had given me the strategy on a previous occasion, when I asked how he handled the physicality, but I don't think WildBoy had ever heard it coming out of the mouth of a woman before. It was enough to defuse the tension and we made it safely out of the door and downstairs to mum.

On the way he was still 'sparking' so I asked him if he was feeling angry. On his positive response (an achievement in itself, being able to identify his own emotions), I suggested he kick the brick wall. He did so. Then I suggested he kick the tree. He did this too. Then I suggested he thump the stobie pole and that was enough to break his mood. He looked at the concrete ediface and then at his fist, decided against it and laughed up at me.
"You're silly Mrs A!" he announced, and raced off into the waiting car.

On reflection, I wonder if he hit me by accident. He may have been trying to throw the eraser up on top of the cupboard. There are large cushions up there and it may have simply slipped off and down onto my head. In fact, when I think about it, that would match up with the look of horror on his face. The thing was, I had pushed him too far too fast. I had made him feel unsuccessful and that is unsafe. Unsafe for him I mean. For WildBoy, unsafe expresses itself physically with random aggressive behaviour. In the past he has pulled posters down off walls and overturned the nearest thing when he perceives himself 'threatened'. Really, throwing things onto the cupboard was a pretty tame response.

His foster mum and I talk about him a lot. What will become of him? Will he ever be recovered enough to fit into society? He only attends school up until recess time because he can't be trusted in the playground and around the other kids. His life is rigidly controlled to create security but as a result he has no passions and no interests. He can't play team games because he is unco-ordinated and thumps other kids if they beat him to the ball. His fine motor skills are too poor to be a model maker or artist. He has played the drums but this didn't last long as he couldn't take instruction and the teacher gave up. And to add to the mix, just yesterday his mum told me they think he is Asperger's and, at ten, he is well into puberty.

Great.

But we'll keep battling on with him. He didn't ask to be the way he is and to have been treated the way he was. Somewhere out there in the world there is a purpose for him. I just have to make sure I don't rush him into it too fast.























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