Last week,
at the park, a boy of about 8 ran up to us, “Hey, remember me?” he asked
breathlessly.
“Yes, I
do,” I replied. He had played with Ben
and Evan the last time we were there.
“I had a
dream about him,” he said, pointing at Evan.
“Really?” I
asked, surprised at this revelation.
“Yeah, I
dreamed that he was all better, that his ears were fixed and he could hear, and
his mouth was fixed and he could talk.”
The boy's brown eyes radiated compassion as he explained his dream.
I smiled at him and thanked him for sharing
that with me. I didn't bother to explain
that Evan was more than perfect as he is, or to illuminate the impossibility of
that happening. The three boys ran off
together to play, and I stood watching, impressed by the heart of a stranger- a
child - who was touched enough by Evan to find himself resolving my son’s challenges in his nocturnal world.
I always
supervise park time actively. Evan is
not mean spirited, but he is likely to be misunderstood. He has a very active imagination, and the
sounds he makes when he is playing can be confusing to other children. I stand close by to assure children when he
grunts and growls, “He is pretending to be an animal, don’t worry about him.”
On this
day, Evan climbed onto one of the playground animals – a yellow duck - affixed
to one of those mammoth springs. Evan
held onto the two bars which protruded from the duck’s head and rocked
vigorously, propelling himself forward and back, hollering and whooping in what
I’m sure, in Evan’s imagination, sounded perhaps like a cowboy riding a wild
bull. Only, it didn't. It sounded like high pitched, ear-drum
shattering shrieks. Evan was attracting
a lot of attention, which he either was oblivious to, or perceived it
as admiration for his over-the-top duck riding skills.
“Hey, you
scream like a girl,” the voice rang out over the playground.
Then, louder, because he assumed his comment was unheard and
he wanted to be sure to correct that: “HEY, YOU SCREAM LIKE A GIRL.”
I turned
and looked in his direction. A bloated,
grey haired, old man sat on the cement ledge where many parents sit while their
children play, yelling insults at my son. I wanted to yell back at him: tell
him he looked like a sack of human waste, a pile of failure, had the jowls of a
walrus….that he was obviously near the end of his useless existence and didn't
he have better things to do with his last days than to sit at a park taking
verbal shots at my child’s self esteem????
Instead, I just calmly said to him, “He can’t hear a word
you’re saying.”
The man put
his head down, sheepishly, and just said, “Oh.”
I turned
away from him and continued to watch Evan’s exuberance on his duck ride. I thought, “Would it have made it somehow
less reprehensible if my child could hear
the insult?? What the hell is wrong with
people?” Sometimes, it is good to be
deaf.
*****
This week I
attended the beginning of the year meeting to discuss Evan’s academic progress
and set goals for him. This meeting was
attended by Evan’s homeroom teacher, Deaf/Hoh teacher, his speech/language
specialist and his ASL interpreter, and the Principal. Evan is now in the first grade. We marveled at how far Evan had come in a
year. We reminisced about our beginning
meeting a year ago, when Evan knew almost no signs, no letters, and had very
poor social skills.
“When Evan
develops more language, he should be tested for gifted,” one of his teachers
asserted. We all agreed. The growth we had seen in a year was
unprecedented.
“He is like
a sponge.”
“Show him
something once, and he has it.”
“A year
ago, he didn’t have the language to answer a yes/no question. Now, he ‘talks’ too much. He wants to tell you a whole story to answer
every question.”
“One of his
goals will be to count to 120,” his Deaf/Hoh teacher explained. “He couldn't do that on our test.”
“Do you
think this is just because he doesn't have the signs for the higher numbers
yet?” I asked. Evan added and subtracted with accuracy
faster than most of his peers in class.
Math was a strong subject for him.
“Oh,
absolutely,” she answered.
“Can he
write them?” I asked.
“Yes, let
me tell you,” she said, “I gave him a blank hundreds chart. He started to work diagonally down the page, and then he filled in some rows across,
then up and down. It was all correct. He
is amazing.” She was in awe.
“Also, we
have to give all first graders the DIBELs test for reading scores. Naturally,
he scores in the red.” (DIBELs tests for
phoneme awareness. What is the first
sound in ‘bat?’ The child has to answer:
/b/. Evan reads by sight, not sound.)
“This is
very frustrating to Evan,” she explained.
I’ll bet, I thought.
His teachers and I know this is absurd, but
this is one of the ludicrous features of the test/data-driven culture that has
permeated education today. They are required to give Evan this particular
test. In fact, not only is this supposed
to be a measure of Evan’s academic ability, but it is supposed to be a measure
of his teachers’ effectiveness for their professional evaluations. We all agreed that petitions would be made to
change this, and a new, appropriate test would have to be put in place. In the meantime, I requested that they not
test him with DIBELs anymore, even if they just had to manually input a ‘fail’
to spare him the experience.
***********
We have
come a long way in every area. Evan is
still a very mischievous little boy. I
awoke in the middle of the night recently with Evan, lollipop hanging from his
lip like a cigarette, trying to gently ease the blanket he preferred off of me,
while he simultaneously replaced it with a less desirable cover. The living room light was already on, TV on
(no sound), and his Halloween bucket was waiting on the tray table. Evan
was preparing to have a candy-munching-midnight- movie-watching good time.
One huge
area of improvement is Evan’s emotional growth.
On October 20th, Evan drew a picture and wrote on it,
unassisted, “I love (heart) you Mom.” I cried.
In true Evanator fashion, he followed that up
with another drawing in which I hung, dripping blood, from a dinosaur’s
mouth. He still wrote, “I love you Mom,”
but he pointed to my unfortunate predicament on paper and laughed.
One day, he
came home from school quite upset. He
signed to me that he was angry.
“Why?” I
asked.
Evan
proceeded to sign to me that a girl had stepped on a caterpillar. He was really upset. One of Evan’s favorite books is, “The Very
Hungry Caterpillar.”
Evan went
to the kitchen and got a plastic container with a lid. He explained to me that he wanted to put a
caterpillar in it and keep it safe so it would turn into a butterfly. He took some paper towel and traced the
bottom of the container. He cut this out
and laid it in the bottom of the container.
Then he cut a small rectangle out of the paper towel, and signed to me
that this would be the caterpillar’s blanket.
He balled up a small wad of paper towel, and signed, “Pillow.” Then, he signed, “Eat??”
Evan didn't
wait for an answer. He went to the
refrigerator and retrieved a boiled peanut.
He put that in the container.
Then he asked if he could bring his caterpillar haven to school so he
could rescue one from the playground?
“Of
course,” I signed back to him. The next
day, I walked Evan to class and told his interpreter that Evan had explained
the entire caterpillar massacre the day before and had set up this
safe-shelter. Would she help him find a
caterpillar?
Without hesitation, because she is awesome and this was all
too stinking cute, she agreed.
At the end
of the day, I was excited to see if Evan had acquired his new pet. He returned to my class room, container in
hand. The boiled peanut was replaced by
a leaf, and he was smiling.
‘Success?’
I wondered.
I didn’t see a caterpillar. Evan held up the container for me to
see. Inside, instead of a “Very Hungry Caterpillar,”
was a “Very Angry Ant.”
I laughed
and signed to Evan. “No caterpillar?”
Evan signed
back. “No, caterpillars turn into butterflies and go away. Bad.”
He pointed at the ant with a big smile and gave a ‘thumbs
up.’
I have said
before, and I will say it again: Children are the teachers, and we are the
students. If you are lucky enough to
spend time with children, listen and watch carefully. Sometimes you think you want a caterpillar,
but what you really need is an ant. Life
gives us a lot of ants. All we need is a
simple shift in mindset. Go ahead, give
those ants a big ‘thumbs up!’
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