The Gentle Ones

This is a postscript to yesterday’s blog. I spoke of the rudeness and shamelessness I have come to expect from today’s high school kids. Today I had a reverse experience while substitute teaching. It’s worth commenting on.
I took the place of the regular teacher in a room full of courteous, gentle, kindly high school kids that remembered me from my past visits. They went out of their way to let me know they were happy to see me again (that’s odd in the life of a substitute!). They obeyed almost instantly when asked to do something.
They were so unbelievably polite. A quick, smiling thank you or thanks for anything I did for them—including passing out work they had to do. That’s what really stood out. I turned to the teacher’s aide for the room and noted how strange I found it that these special kids could be so much more polite and nice to me than so-called “normal” kids.
I spent the day with a room full of intellectually challenged high schoolers. One was in a wheel chair, barely able to sit upright; he also had difficulty speaking clearly. Another one would only answer in mono-syllables. There was at least one Down’s syndrome child. There was a young lady whose arms didn’t quite move synchronomously with her legs, but she had the most dazzling smile.
Everyone present had a real problem. But that didn’t keep them from having a wonderful time today. It was the last school day before Thanksgiving. For years and years this particular suburban district has had a tradition among its special students.
All the high school students and their high school teachers get on the bus and ride over to the middle school where they have a party with their old teachers. Suddenly it’s a group of twenty or special needs kids – delighted to be with each other. They watched a movie (Wall-E) with slapstick comedy that had them howling with laughter.
They ate a hot lunch specially prepared for them by their teachers. (My room brought over the pumpkin and apple pies with whipped cream.) They played in the gym together—grades six through twelve—and they played board games together. I was amazed: there was no quarreling.
Oh, I’ve had these kids on other days when there were lessons to go through. They can squabble with each other like any other roomful of kids, but it doesn’t last or ever get really nasty.
I admit; I sit here puzzled. The “normal” kids who are going on to colleges or other careers so often seem to hate being in school. They seem so much less happy. They are much cruder and nastier to each other. I rarely if ever enjoy a room with “normal” kids the way I enjoy days with these kids.
Or is it something Christ said two thousand years ago. “Unless you become like a little child you shall in no way enter in.” Are these special needs kids more like little children in ways “normal” people have forgotten to be?
Are they too limited to fully understand that life is meant to be crude and miserable? Are the ones some people call “dummies” too dumb to know that the proper response to adults is either to ignore them or to be as insulting and arch as you possibly dare?
They certainly aren’t perfect, but there is a way the kids I was with today are more alive than many groups I’ve subbed for other days. They haven’t yet shut something down deep in their souls. Their minds may be limited, even very limited, but their spirits are still alive.
That sets them apart from so many “normals”. Sometimes you have to be where I was today to realize how sad the lives of so many “normal” kids are.
In some real way, the horrific diagnoses of these kids was a blessing.