Things that make me smile despite

You know you’re stressed when you feel a headache come on out of nowhere.

There are moments like this at work, and today had one of them.

There are a cou­ple of autis­tic chil­dren who attend the school my busi­ness partner/colleague and I teach at, and I’ve griped before about the prob­lem of main­stream­ing spe­cial needs kids in a pub­lic school with forty kids a class.

Joshua is one of the kids in P1, and his mother accom­pa­nies him at school every day, all day. Joshua spends all day run­ning in and out of classes with his mother fol­low­ing close behind. He sel­dom attends our gym­nas­tics PE classes, and when he does, he’s mostly dis­rup­tive and we have to pay extra atten­tion to make sure he doesn’t run into the other kids, or worse, climb up the funny climb­ing thing that most gov­ern­ment pri­mary schools have in their halls.

Today, we had to move our lessons to the school’s music room because they were hav­ing one of those infer­nal end of year activ­i­ties in the hall. Joshua decided he wanted to join his class­mates for a spot of gym­nas­tics. He burst into the room, with his mother close behind, and promptly charged across three lines of kids doing line drills. Instant headache time.

Me, I went into panic dam­age con­trol mode, charg­ing up and down the room mak­ing sure Joshua wasn’t going to run into things and other kids. Half angry, I told his mother the room was a bit small for us to be han­dling 40 kids and her son.

Then my busi­ness partner/colleague, who is the expert head coach spe­cial needs spe­cial­ist with twenty years’ expe­ri­ence, showed how it was done. He sim­ply picked Joshua up every time the boy tried to get in the way of his class­mates, play­fully swung him upside down, down­side up, placed him down out of harm’s way, and car­ried on instruct­ing the rest of the class. Seamless.

Near the end of the class, Joshua actu­ally attempted a for­ward roll all by him­self, and suc­ceeded. Elated, we tried get­ting him to do another cou­ple of rolls, but he shot off in the oppo­site direc­tion and started jump­ing up and down at the other end of the classroom.

I looked at the back of the class­room and saw his mother beam­ing proudly. When the class was dis­missed, I went and apol­o­gised to her for not being able to give Joshua the extra atten­tion he required. She thanked me instead for being able to let Joshua play. I think Joshua was happy too.

My busi­ness partner/colleague? Just another day’s work for him and his fab skills. I’ve got a lot to learn and I know it’s worth learn­ing, because to make Joshua and his mother act as if some mir­a­cle had just hap­pened is pretty much the ulti­mate reward for a long day’s work.

Soup Restau­rant, DFS