The week with Phantom Tollbooth is officially halfway over, and I'm amazed how quickly it's gone by. We're creating our own script from the novel, not using the already existing stage adaptation, so we've been working incredibly hard to get this 200-something page book packed with wordplay and life lessons on its feet. It's exhausting, but the kids are working really hard, and all the interns in the room are taking on a lot of responsibility to make it happen.
Nancy, the teaching artist, is my favorite that I've worked with so far (we also worked together on The Lottery). She's so intuitive and really understands what the group needs in order to be productive. Because we have a huge group of kids (23!) and four interns in the room, she's been splitting the group up into smaller groups to stage individual scenes. I love how much she trusts the interns in the room, and I think working with her has really allowed me to grow not only as a teacher but as a director (who knew?!). It's been really rewarding to make choices about how to best tell the story with this specific group of kids, and more than any previous week, I think I'm connecting and communicating with them in a very exciting way.
One of the girls in our group has a fairly severe form of Asperger's, a disorder on the autism spectrum. Although I know kids on the spectrum, I've only worked with one before, and his case was far more mild than this girl's - let's call her Megan. Megan really loves this story, and cares so much about telling it accurately and fully, which has been a little difficult, since we have to cut and adapt a lot of the story so it fits in our 45-minute sharing time. For the most part, though, she's been doing well, and her father has told us she's having a great time at camp. We ran into a few problems with her the first day, when she would wander away from her group to make faces at herself in the mirror. Though the other kids in the class have been great about including her, the other interns and I noticed a few snickers at her slightly odd behavior and weren't sure how to handle Megan's wandering or the kids' reactions. We brought it up with Debra at our morning meeting on Tuesday, and, as usual, Debra had really illuminating thoughts about Megan.
The second we mentioned that Megan was wandering away from her group, Debra asked us why we thought she was doing that. It's such an important question that often people (myself included) don't think to ask when there's a diagnosis handy. Megan doesn't wander away from her group because she's on the spectrum, she wanders away from her group because she's uncomfortable in groups. Reminding myself of that has made working with her so much easier, because instead of chalking her behavior up to Asperger's, I'm just observing. And it's true: not all kids with Asperger's wander away from groups, so Megan's behavior belongs entirely to her, and not to her diagnosis. As far as the other kids' reactions go, Debra wasn't concerned. She told us to be conscious of how Megan reacted to their behavior, but as long as it wasn't bothering her, talking to the kids and explaining that Megan acts the way she does because she has a disability would just alienate her even more from the group. They don't need to know that she has Asperger's, and really, neither did we. If nothing else, I think often diagnoses like Asperger's or even ADD make it easier to make excuses for behavior, rather than really observing and getting to know the kid for who they are, not for their diagnosis.
On an entirely different note, I had a really fascinating experience yesterday when a few of the interns and I went out for dinner after work at a restaurant near CTC. As Nick Drake played in the background and I waited for my organic grilled three-cheese sandwich (I wasn't feeling too adventurous), we saw a man get arrested outside. The two policemen handcuffed him, patted him down, emptied his pockets, and then realized they forgot to remove his backpack. They held him still while they un-cuffed him, took his backpack off, and cuffed him again. After about ten minutes of searching through his belongings and walky-talky-ing, they released the man and left.
I don't know why witnessing that affected me as much as it did, but the juxtaposition of Nick Drake and organic food with an arrest (okay, they let him go, but still) was really jarring. It's always amazing to me that I can be having a perfectly normal day while twenty feet away from me, some man is having what I can only assume is one of the worst days of his life. It's something I've always been aware of, but I've never seen it manifested so concretely right in front of my eyes. And what's more, that man and I will probably never speak, even though I witnessed a huge, emotional moment in his life.
I think I'm going to dedicate my yoga practice to that man tonight. I hope his week gets better.
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