Flying Chairs and Valentines
“Aaron* didn’t throw the chair at me,” I remember saying to the principal, believing my own lie. I didn’t deny that it had been hurled across the room during a reading lesson. Aaron was now crouched in a corner, eyebrows contorted into upside down v’s, tears suspended on eyelashes. Fury was rising off of him like steam. I have no recollection of what the catalyst was for the meltdown on that particular day years ago, but much about the day lingers.
Aaron was an only child dealing with a whole hell of a lot for his small body and developing mind. His parents were in the midst of a contentious divorce, the details of which I knew far too much. On more than one occasion his mother had to be turned away from driving him home from school because of the alcohol on her breath. Her love for Aaron was evident, but the grip of addiction was slowly siphoning off her ability to nurture him.
Aaron struggled to regulate his emotions. He brought the unpredictability of the weather system of his home into the classroom. He alienated his peers with growls and outbursts. I did not want him to feel he had alienated me while the adults in his life vaporized around him. If I admitted he threw the chair at me, where would they send him?
Aaron had a special education “label” and therefore he received programming for his learning disability. These labels are not without issue and contention. Most scholars agree that the hallmark of a learning disability is a demonstrated “unexpected underachievement.” That is, a bright child such as Aaron would be expected to read at grade level, but in fact his disability rendered the words clunky without a specialized type of instruction and assistive technology. Many students have benefited from these labels and designations designed to provide access to services; the difficulty is that not all students have. Some suffer from the stigma that may come in tandem with the access more than others.
Individuals with learning disabilities experience often experience myriad traumas as they reconcile their learning profiles. It’s confusing to be told that you are bright, but struggle to demonstrate what you know in the ways schools most like to assess: reading print and writing. Parents are also often misinformed. In a 2014 survey by Cortelia and colleagues, up to one third of people surveyed attribute learning disabilities to inaccurate causes. Sixty-four percent of parents in the same 2014 survey indicated that their child’s school doesn’t provide information on learning disabilities.
Outcomes for students with learning disabilities can be bleak, particularly for males, who are often over-diagnosed. This is especially true for males like Aaron who have challenging behaviors in the classroom. Students of color are often overrepresented in special education categories as well. The 2014 survey reports that sixty-eight percent of students with learning disabilities leave high school with a diploma while 19 percent drop out and 12 percent receive a certificate of completion. Incarceration and substance abuse rates are higher for individuals with learning disabilities than neuro typical learners.
As with defining any construct about what is "typical" learning and what is not, a lack of nuance may come closely behind. Nuance can get lost in the prescriptive programs. Sometimes teachers fail to leverage both knowledge of special education policies and practices as well as a curiosity about the individual child and their particular family, background, history, etc. I didn’t want to fail Aaron in this way.
Stepping into the classroom to teach each day is the stuff of vulnerability-making, as is the process of learning...and students don't really have a choice about being in that space. For students with academic and social emotional difficulties like Aaron, school represents spending a lot of time doing things that are difficult, challenging, and sometimes downright embarrassing. The acting out and the anger and the not paying attention are not a personal attack, but what happens when humans are trying to do hard things. Aaron taught me this in my early years of teaching. The chair-throwing incident was not without consequence. However, the consequence was not losing my dedication to his education and an effort to promote his sense of belonging in our classroom.
One Valentine’s Day, Aaron gave me a card that is on my bulletin board in my office to this day. He drew a bat. He also scrawled a heart, the ink smeared as his hand drifted over the damp ink of his written message. Under the bat wing he wrote, “You have changed my life compleetly.” I knew it couldn’t be true, but my heart lifted just the same.
Source: Cortiella, Candace and Horowitz, Sheldon H. The State of Learning Disabilities: Facts, Trends and Emerging Issues. New York: National Center for Learning Disabilities, 2014.
https://www.ncld.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/2014-State-of-LD.pdf
*Name is changed to protect student identity