D97 Teacher's Writes: 'Teacher Finds Way to Reach Struggling Kid'

Editor's note: The following "Teachers Speak Up" blog post, written by Oak Park Elementary School District 97 teacher Catherine Clarke, was posted on Evanston Patch on Oct. 30 (Intro is by Steven Zemelman.

Teacher Finds Way to Reach Struggling Kid

I've been busy organizing a TEDx talks event on teachers' great educational strategies (more about that when the talks are up on YouTube soon) so pardon my absence from this site. But I'm back. And here's a beautiful piece by special education teacher Catherine Clarke on what it took to make a difference for a difficult child.
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The classroom was small, having been, in a previous incarnation, a storage room for musical instruments. There was barely room for a teacher's desk and the six or so student desks that occupied the space. It was tucked away, as "special" classrooms so often were, in a hidden corner of the 100-year-old junior high building. The smells of yellowed floor wax, chalk dust, and boy-sweat were the olfactory background that permeated our days.  Sounds were muted here, so far from the normal cacophony of junior high drama. This was the hidden world in which my students and I worked, played, and learned together -- I as much as they. I don't remember, these many years later, all of their names, but some stay forever in a teacher's mind and heart. They are the ones who leave indelible fingerprints on my soul.

Jeffy was one of those. Sandy-haired and freckle-faced, this little boy was far too angry and defended for a child so young. Rarely speaking, seldom working, he seemed determined to scowl his way through his school days. When moved to speak, to connect in even the smallest way with the world around him, his favorite answer was, "Yippy, skippy." How do I reach you? I know that you are in there, but every time I think I see a chink in the mortar of your lonely walls, you shut me out, shut me down before I can widen the gap to gain entry to your pain.

Every child responds to praise and kind words, true? That would seem to  be common wisdom. Forgive my naivete. I was still so young and new in this teaching business. I wanted to fix all their hurts -- and somehow believed that I could. Such grandiosity! Every time I praised dear Jeffy for anything, however, the scowl deepened, his eyes flashed with anger bordering on rage, and his rare outburst of desk pounding and profanity escalated. "Jeffy, you need to stop!"

"Yippy, skippy."

This was not the reaction I wanted; these were not the words I needed to hear. Wait a minute, when did this become about whatI needed instead of what Jeffy needed? A true light-bulb moment. I knew this child needed positive feedback. How to give it in a way that didn't incite his anger, which I now believed to stem from embarrassment and anxiety over the pressure he felt to perform. I had no deep bag of teacher-tricks to pull from -- I hadn't been at this work long enough to fill much more than a small paper lunch bag and nothing in there to fit this situation. What I knew was that Jeffy needed positives and I had to let go of any need for a particular reaction in return.

What developed was a rather surreptitious method of noting accomplishment and positive behavior. Thank the goddess for the then-recent invention of sticky notes. That became our primary method of communication -- or rather, my method of speaking to him; it would be a long time before there was anything like a give-and-take conversation between us. A sticky note with a sticker on it, a sticky note with a positive message. Don't make a fuss, just walk by and casually place it on his desk. "Yippy skippy," whispered under his breath. A fist unclenches, a hand snakes across the desk -- the note disappears, never to be seen again. No smiles, no comments. Three times a day, four times, ten times. Slip the note onto the desk, "Yippy skippy," the note disappears. And the weeks went by, as weeks are wont to do. No miracles, but a lightening of the scowl, a few less outbursts, a little more classwork -- progress of a sort. I'll take it.

A day came when the intercom crackled to life at an unusual time. Not morning announcements, the pledge long over, what can it be? "All-school locker check. Teachers, please direct your students to stand by their open lockers. Please visually inspect all lockers for contraband . . . blah, blah, blah, droning on. Ever dutiful, we enter our hidden hallway and my boys open their lockers. Jeffy opens his slowly, though, steps back and looks down at his shabby sneakers with a secret smile on his face -- perhaps the first smil I have ever seen him wear. I look in his locker and blink away the tears that begin to pool in the corners of my eyes.

There on the door of his locker, neatly displayed, is every sticky note that ever graced his desk. Dozens of them covering nearly his entire locker door. Jeffy raises his eyes to look at me without lifting his head. I give him the briefest of smiles and a subtle nod of my head. His smile widens, only a fraction. No words are spoken as we move forward with the day, nor is it ever brought up in the days to come. I do not know what became of Jeffy beyond that year. But my heart was forever changed.

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