DETAILS: I worked at one high school my first year (Fabulously Affluent High School) and another my second year (Slightly-Less Affluent High School). Now, at the beginning of my third year, I’m back at FAHS.
I. My roulette placement awakens my inner class warrior. Not the shifty placement, I mean the high schools themselves. One morning at FAHS, while waiting for a student to arrive by the front entrance, I was watching a TV showing videos made by students. One of them was a montage of students and staff filling in the sentence “I am [blank]” and ended with a bunch of students saying “we are FAHS.” They were goofy or cliched (or both) for the most part, but one in particular stuck out. A student said “I am destined to succeed.” I balked. Obviously! How can you possibly aim lower than moderate success in life when the median income of your community in 2007 was $150,670! A paltry 2% of the population is below the poverty line. (If it’s relevant, the community is 95.80% white.) This school boasts a $40 million budget, some of the best programs in the country, and a community in love with their high school. (Seriously. The annual talent show is one of the highlights of the year for the entire area.) The term “head start” doesn’t even begin to describe it. These students are growing up in a parallel universe, and their phenomenal education can be tied directly to the money the community is able to pour into it. It’s not bad that FAHS students are getting a spectacular education; it’s bad that students not 20 minutes away will get swallowed up by gangs, drugs, or a dead-end job because of the economic situation they were born into. This is a lot of impotent college rage, I admit. I’ll never go to law school and go into education reform like I sometimes fantasize about.
II. The experience of working with a classroom full of students with special needs is almost entirely based on how they interact. At SLAHS, there were three students in particular who would feed off of and into each other. Vince would start swearing, Richard would either imitate him or bother him until he started screaming and/or swearing more, and Angela would either imitate them or protest wildly when one of them would antagonize her. Any loud or insistent reaction from any one of them would encourage the others to continue or step up their antagonism until the classroom was a screeching dungeon in Hell, attended by harpies. That lightless closet is where evil librarians go after death. There really aren’t interactions like that at FAHS. Most of them are much higher functioning than the students at SLAHS and are therefore far more independent and less socially abrasive. This is unusual; as far as I understand it, the organization I work for is to serve the needs of students too low-functioning to be served by the district itself. It takes students with behavioral problems too severe for a school district but not severe enough to go to a special facility or group home. But that’s just one more way that FAHS is some kind of educational nirvana for everyone involved. I don’t mean to say I hated it at SLAHS, but it was and is far more stressful and frustrating than FAHS.
III. Parents of kids with special needs’ capacity for self-deception is evidently unlimited. I’ve heard stories about hopes parents have of their children going on to careers and lives of independence when it’s clear they’ll never know how to get to the grocery store, much less know how to write a resume, understand a lease, or drive a car. I recently heard of parents of a girl at FAHS who thought that someday she would wake up and be free of all disability. This is not criticism or judgment. From what I understand, the decision to rear a child like those I work with is a path paved with heartbreak. I can’t criticize people who have to mourn the loss of every stage of life every parent expects their child to experience, and in the midst of that loss, construct a fiction about that child’s future in order to cope with the heartbreak. Some medical or psychological professional lets a bit of optimism or positivity seep through in their assessment and the parents cling to it. It’s a kind of hope, and having very little responsibility myself, I can’t possibly pass judgment on these people. I’m an outsider who can see their student with more objectivity than they can, but I will probably never experience the emotional and psychic turmoil they shoulder every day they decide to love their child who will never be able to survive on their own.
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Stephen Hull is roughly a quarter-century old and writing in places like Canceled Forever, Some Experience, his notebook, bathroom walls, etc. He lives around Chicago.
Thanks for sharing this, Stephen. I would love to hear more about your education experiences.