Sticky People

ATTACHMENT 

  This is what I miss most as I watch these children move through their day.  The persistent absence of attachment forces them to dangle dangerously like live wires, crackling and exploding with hot current.  

Once the technocrats encamped, the atmosphere of detachment became pervasive, even mandatory.  The act of objectification demanded it.  One cannot embrace the humanity of a child while casting her in the role of a medieval serf summoned to service THE SCORE.  

Meanwhile, it is just plain dangerous to detach from our children.  We all know that.  They are sticky people.  They adhere by their very nature and for all the right reasons.  They glom on like gooey, go-getters and hold fast.  That is how they grow straight but they can also grow crooked and misshapen when there is nowhere to imprint and no one prepared for their cling.

     And what of Domingo?  He dismounts from the federally-funded daycare van at 7:00 AM and immediately slumps into my body.  He melts, clings and attaches at the hip.  This is very unlike him as he is 100% boy and usually upbeat and energetic to the extreme.  But today is Monday and he is exhausted from a weekend of no respite for mind or spirit.  In tears, he describes his weariness.  How can I console him?  Which words should I select?  I rest my hand atop his shoulder and tell him I wish he could have stayed at home, snuggled in his bed, munching Pop Tarts and watching Scooby-Do cartoons.  The make-believe scenario seems to soothe him but his reality is that he has no place of his own for a weekend retreat.  He is regularly tossed about by family like ocean debris and come Monday, washed up worn and weary onto the shore of a school where he is invisible until he makes trouble.
     By Tuesday his deep exhaustion has been replaced by a more familiar aggression and hyper-inattention.  He clobbers a fellow classmate at 8:00 in an argument over who gets to shut a cupboard door.  He spins out of control on a recess sidewalk and at 2:30 his teacher reports that his eyeballs have literally rotated in their sockets all day long, incapable of focusing anywhere or on anyone for more than 3 seconds.  He is known for arriving at school in forty degree temperatures wearing nothing but a thin, short-sleeved tee shirt.  Never a hoodie, a sweater or an insulated vest.  He shakes, rattles and rolls from the rapid-fire traumas of home neglect and emotional abandonment.  The only semblance of emotional tenderness surfaces on a Monday when he signals a need for comfort, too wiped-out to whisper his own name.
 

Frances Pockman Hawkins At Work With Water

The Logic Of Action
Young Deaf Children At Work
Frances Pockman Hawkins


Everyone tried his hand at the water pool this morning.  Phillip, unaware of anyone's scrutiny, would fill his large plastic syringe with water by pulling out the plunger while the tip was submerged, and then shoot the water to the opposite side of the pool.  He was expert at controlling the force and speed on his plunger as he aimed the small stream.

Janie kept watching Phillip's actions.  Quite obviously she wanted to do the same thing with her syringe, but she was unable to fill it with water.  Finally, she turned again to watch and she thought about it.  This time, with syringe out of the pool she pushed down the plunger, then put the tip in the pool and slowly pulled up the water into the transparent syringe.  The final part of the sequence, shooting water across the pond, proceeded, but Janie's success in using eyes, hands, and mind to fill the syringe was for her, I submit, an achievement of equal merit.  To write about it is in some degree to share her pleasure.

Water Table Watsu

Christopher is 4 years old and frequently grown-up angry.  One morning he stomped out of his classroom and into a restroom area down the hall.  Suddenly aware that I was nearby and watching, he turned to me with a jerk and shouted, “If I am mad at somebody, I just look at them and say, ‘Hey Bitch!’”

I clamped my hand over my mouth to keep from laughing and considered carefully before responding, the fewer words the better.  “Guess I just never say it.”

“What?” he replied in a rapid-sharp voice.  “What do you mean you don’t say it?”  Surprised I wasn't reprimanding him?  Wondering if I was telling the truth?  Curious if I had an alternative to his harsh way of talking?

“I simply don’t speak to people that way. It does not come out of my mouth.”  I delivered this with a silent, shoulder shrug and pretended to get interested in a developmentally inappropriate, preschool worksheet stapled to a bulletin board.

Since his outburst didn't provoke me, he immediately abandoned it and became absorbed in the water fountain, turning it on and off and diverting streams of water with his tongue and his fingers, in other words, exploring the properties of water.  It was a soothing diversion and ultimately calmed him enough that he could walk back with me to rejoin his friends.  Too bad there wasn't a water table set up as a workstation for this little man with the mouth.  But those also have gone by the Leave Every Child Behind wayside.

Alternately, Jorge healed himself at a water table.  He arrived for a visit, having lived in 10 different foster homes before his fourth birthday.  His hyperactivity and anxiety were so extreme that no family could soothe him or survive him, therefore he rotated from one placement to the next.  Prescribed a steady dose of Clonidine, you wouldn't have known it from the way he ran directly at a solid wall, smacking full force, face-on and then collapsing in fit of giggles.

It was the water table that drew his attention.  The girls usually commandeered it, washing baby dolls or dishes, transferring liquid back and forth from tea kettles to jam jars.  Most days, boys weren't allowed but somehow everyone knew Jorge was different and for him the rules did not apply.  He spent two weeks standing behind the crowd of girls listening in on their conversations.  He always wore a smile, sometimes nodded his head in agreement with an opinion expressed but never edged past the periphery of bodies to join in the fun.

Then the earth’s orbit shifted and his hands slipped into the delicious drench.  There was no moving him after that.  He was polite, always patient and ever alert for that perfect moment when it would be okay to slide into place.  He had figured out the human arrangement and was careful to comply in ways that guaranteed access to the dreamy drink.  There he would vibrate in endless delight, stuttering less and speaking more, solidifying an identity and a circle of friends who did not fail him.  In the water he learned how to become.

Septima Clark

Helen Keller Could Have Seen It Coming

I stumbled across Eva who could not read a lick.  I found her tucked up in an empty classroom, sound asleep.  She was snoring peacefully in second grade.  No one knew she was missing in action and no one cared that she was alone, separated from the herd and dozing on her lunch hour.  

Despite her illiteracy, there would not be any intervention for her, no tutoring, no read aloud, no big books or story dictation.  In fact, there would be no reading instruction for her of any description.  Second grade does not count on the accountability scoreboard and therefore, is not heavily proctored   

Thousands will be spent this year on a series of no-nothing, "school reform" consultants, who themselves know zippy-zero about reading as a process or a passion.  They will wander in and out like the contract zombies they are, drawing down dollars triggered by testing mandates for 3^rd grade and beyond.  

Helen Keller could have told them back in September who would be failing come January.  But everyone at this location turned blind, deaf and dumb when it came to the cause of Eva. Since Eva knew hopeless when she experienced it, she responded by curling up in The Back Of The Bus and surrendering to a dreamless sleep.  

Years of here, there and everywhere leave children like Eva undisturbed and unlettered.She has been allowed to float like a beautiful flower in a big pond, not a ripple approaching from any direction to dislodge her and prevent her from sinking into the treacherous waters of insensitivity and indifference.  Had she been growing up in the Sea Islands back in January of 1957, she might have been scooped up by Esau Jenkins, Bernice Johnson or Septima Clark and taught to read at the back of a beat-up school bus or in the midst of a busy, beauty parlor.  Their make-do movement imagined literacy and democracy walking hand-in-hand and ultimately exploded into a nationwide uprising against the entrenched, Jim Crow suppression of voting rights.  But Eva is enrolled in a data-deranged Public School, not a Citizenship School and she will never chase Esau across the sandy, marshy low country of Johns Island.