All Things Are Connected

"Special education" encompasses many types of students, ranging from those you might never guess are any different from "normal" (whatever that means) to those who are almost non-functional and need another human being taking care of them constantly.  While I was actively teaching almost every day at a local high school, the teacher of a class of high functioning special education students in the 11th grade decided one day to walk out.  She had had enough, and simply quit.  And as she left, she took with her almost everything she had placed on the walls as instructional aids and decoration.

I was asked if I wanted to take over the class.  I was eager to have a long-term assignment.  Never knowing what sort of class one is going to be working with every day involves a certain amount of stress.   Twenty days (at five days a week a full month) in a given school year was supposed to be the legal limit for a substitute teacher to teach any group of special education students.  I accepted the assignment eagerly.

At that point I was walking on crutches, waiting for a hip replacement operation that was still several months away.  After I accepted the assignment, I discovered I had gotten myself into an interesting situation.  For five periods a day, the class population consisted of shifting portions of the same group of about 12 students.  One period there were six students who worked on math.  Each one had different skills, so each one had to have lessons and worksheets and explanations geared specifically to him or her.  But most challenging was the fact that for at least one period a day I had all twelve gathered in the class together, and there had been no textbook they'd been working from.  For this class, I asked the assistant principal who'd given me the assignment what I should be teaching, what book I should use, where my materials were to come from.  I got got three words of guidance:  "Teach 'em science," she told me.  And that was that.

I accepted the assignment at the end of a Friday.  The teaching was to start on Monday.  I had the weekend to get organized, to decide just what it was I was going to teach and how I was going to do it.

In this case one of my greatest weaknesses became a strength: my interest in almost everything.  And I suppose that what many consider to be a failing of old age (I was in my early seventies) also helped.  I was (and still am) a talky old man.  

As an aside, I might add that the reason old folks are so talky is that they have far more hooks upon which to hang experiences on, more ways to relate to experiences, than students.  To a student, an old song may be just an old song.  To someone much older, a song may stir up many associations:  it may have been heard outside an outdoor cafe late at night while bicycling through Southern France just outside some ancient Roman ruins that have been there for two thousand years.  And that, itself, may summon up the wonder of history and the Roman Empire.

It also helped me during this assignment that I have an excellent education.  With my high school diploma from Phillips Exeter Academy (then and now considered to be one of the best secondary schools in America), a B.A. from Dartmouth College, graduate school in English from the University of California at Berkeley, and further graduate school (in writing) at what was then called San Francisco State College, I knew what good teaching was.  And having been in about 18 different countries, lived in three, and speaking three languages fluently and a smattering of a few others, I had had a wide range of experience.  I am not tooting my own horn here, but I am trying to indicate that in watching the videos and explaining them deeply, I had considerable background to draw upon.  

I've often found that coincidence shapes my actions.  In this case I had been watching a fascinating series of videos called "Walking with Dinosaurs."  In a half dozen or more episodes, filmmakers and scientists had created life stories about dinosaur species that had lived millions of years ago.  The depictions were the most realistic I had ever seen.  You would have thought the episodes had been made with the help of a time machine and that real dinosaurs had actually been filmed. 

Is there anyone who doesn't have as fascination with dinosaurs ?  Perhaps a few adults who have become so jaded they're no longer interested in just how strange and wonderful and magnificent these creatures must have been.  If this fascination is something that can be outgrown, then in my early seventies I must still not have outgrown my childhood.  

I'd like to claim that my way of using my dinosaur videos was fully developed from my first day using it.  It wasn't.  But my sense of wonder was.  And in the first few days I worked o\ut a method through which I could communicate my own sense of wonder as well as a great deal about science.  By mid-week I had given each student a notebook which they were to write in during this science class.  The night before each class, I reviewed a section of the video and made notes.  Part of my notes included a list of words -- vocabulary -- to try to teach.  And more of my own jottings contained ideas that flowed from what the students were seeing.

This was not to be the sort of lazy, do-nothing video fest I have seen a few teachers in our system use to duck out of serious academic work.  The videos in this case were to be used to accomplish two things:  1) To stimulate the students' interest; and 2) To introduce serious scientific concepts that could be explained and that they could learn about.  The dinosaurs were bait, excuses to bring up serious subjects every educated adult should know.

We saw different species of dinosaurs.  What is a species ?  What makes one different from another ?  Who was Darwin ?  What idea did he have that shook the world ?  Who was Wallace.  Did species evolve in one place that broke into pieces (Africa and South America) ?  Or were species transported by accident from one place to another and evolved into different species.  What is a carnivore ?  What is an herbivore ?   Look at the map.  What was Pangea ?   What is a fossil (Look, here's one I brought from home) ?  What is DNA ?  How much do we share with chimpanzees ?  How do we know the continents were once together.  What are volcanic, metamorphic and sedimentary rocks ?  What are minerals ?   What are elements ?  What states can a substance be in ?  How are solids, liquids and gases different ?  And so forth, for twenty days.  What is evolution ?  How does it work ?  

And somewhere in there, the most basic question of all, which comes up in discussion over and over and over:  How do we know what we think we know.

This kind of teaching excited me, and I think that most of the time it excited most of the students.  "Write this down," I would say, referring to the subjects and definitions I had put on the board before they viewed another section of the video.

These were special education students.  I had no idea how much the terms and definitions and all the material I was throwing at them and that they were copying into their notebooks would stick.  But at least they were being exposed to it.

During all this, my hip was deteriorating.  My pain was so acute I took a Darvon each day before I went to school.  At the beginning of this month-long assignment, I had had to use a cane to move around in class.  After two weeks, I used crutches.  The last few days I came into the room and sat in an office chair on wheels. I moved around that way, looking at what students were writing.   At that point, when I drove into the school parking lot and parked my car, a student or another teacher would often ask if they could carry my bag while I went to the office and signed in.  I must have looked terrible.

In class I used the Socratic method.  What is "extinct" mean, I would ask one student.  Name some animals that are now extinct, I said to another.  How do we know there were dinosaurs ? I asked still another.   "How do we know what we think we know ?"

On the last day of the last week of my assignment, one of the students came to me and asked, "We saw all these different kinds of dinosaurs.  Where did humans come from ?"

And then I knew I had succeeded.  They wanted to know.

My month-long term of teaching the class drew to an end.  Still no teacher specializing in teaching special education was on the horizon.  On my final day of the month with these students I was informed that since no special education teacher had yet been found, did I want to continue to teach the same students for another month.  Somehow they had gotten around the legal restrictions and I could continue teaching the same students during the coming week. 

I was enjoying the class so much that I didn't hesitate.  "Yes," I said.  "I would love it."

That weekend my hip became worse and worse.  I live on a hill, with thirty steps from my house up to the street where I park my car.  My wife was bed-ridden, and I cooked meals and fed her and took care of her.  On Monday, when I started off to work I found that despite the Darvon, I could not get up the steps to my car without crawling.

I called the school and explained that I was no longer physically able to get to school.  My hip operation was still a month or two away.  The woman I was speaking with over the phone, whom I knew very well and who may have been responsible for my originally getting the assignment, told me she understood.  They would find someone to fill in.  My job then was to get better as quickly as possible.

I put the phone down and cried.