18 January 2003: Gristle and Gold

Home doing homework, reading my film class textbook.  You know a class is going to be good when it's got Duck Amok in the syllabus.

Dragon Lady is at the big peace march in San Francisco today; she called me on her cell phone just now to tell me that there were people carrying copies of my "War Is Not the Answer" poster (see the Gallery section).

Although most of my time at work is spent tutoring, my official title is "Assessment Manager."  Our students are periodically given a battery of tests to assess their progress.  I administer the assessments, and then I write up a report, analyzing and interpreting the results. 

It was my report-writing skills that first got me promoted to this position.  Parents love my reports.  Most parents of children with coginitive differences have had their kids assessed by "learning specialists" at one time or another, or sometimes at many times.  But anyone who calls themself a "learning specialist," or an "educational therapist" or something along those lines has probably been exposed to enough college to render them entirely incapable of percieving concrete, practical realities, much less discussing them in plain English.  Not me.  I can actually explain to a parent coherently, with no academic doublespeak, how their child's learning process works.  I can say, "has trouble following spoken instructions because she finds them hard to understand," instead of, "negative behavioral issues may be a function of auditory processing issues"  The latter phrase, by the way, actually appeared in a report a confused parent showed me, from an outrageously expensive learning specialist; the former phrase is the translation I provided, much to the parent's gratitude.  According to the parent, the specialist had actually been unable to provide a Standard English translation of her own phrasing, and had reacted with befuddlement and then snide hostility when pressed for one. 

I have come to suspect, over the years, that academia, especially at the graduate level, has at its core a paradigm of language use that is essentially different from the one implicit in my own upbringing.  I use language as a tool for facilitating living, working, and playing with others; in academia, language seems to be a tool for demonstrating one's intelligence (and thus asserting one's place in the academic pecking order). 

But I digress.  I was actually going to talk about the other part of my duties as Assessment Manager.  The part where, once or twice a week, I sit down at a table with a child, a pencil, a tape recorder, and a pile of assessment materials, and do an assessment.  Even though there are only four or five kids at any given time who are lucky enough to have me as a teacher, all the kids get assessed by me sooner or later. 

These are children for whom conventional education has been a nightmare.  These are children who have (in their own perception), been treated like freaks throughout their short lives, because the educational system, public and private, in this country and all the others, is designed to run children through a meat grinder, mold them into neat little squares of dull grey meat, and put them in boxes, and these children don't grind or mold the same way the rest of them do.  They stick in the machine like gristle, and the machine routes them to special auxiliary industrial-strength grinders that designed to break down the gristle so it will fit in the little boxes with the rest of the meat. 

Fucking stupid machine can't tell the difference between gristle and gold.

To these kids, anything remotely like a test is terrifying.  A test is another certain failure, another opportunity to be humiliated, another opportunity to be singled out as broken.  These are not kids who pass tests.  These are kids for whom the words test and failure have become synonymous, redundant.  Most of them have given up trying.  About a third of them have been so traumatized by previous experiences with testing that they completely shut down, they won't say anything at all, they behave like prisoners of war in the hands of the enemy.  Because, in school, they are prisoners of war in the hands of the enemy, and anyone who thinks that that's overstating the case is probably one of the enemy.

My job, on paper, is to administer the assessment.  But my real job is to get past all the trauma the machine has inflicted, get the kid to trust me enough to participate in the assessment, get the kid to enjoy the assessment, and get the kid - no matter how he or she scored on the assessment - to come away from a test, for the first time in her life, feeling better about herself than she did when she came in.

And you know what?  I'm great at it.  Kids with histories of curling up into little balls, hyperventilating, or going into agonized screaming fits in the face of tests will uncomplainingly tackle an hour-long assessment for me, and come away smiling like they hit the winning run in a Little League championship.  Kids never shut down or flip out on me - not even the ones who do so at the slightest difficulty in their regular lessons with kind teachers who they're used to working with.

Whatever it is in me that allows me to set a cripplingly shy and traumatized seven-year-old at ease in a potentially intimidating situation is a side of myself I've just started getting to know in the past year.  And it's a side that my friends don't generally get to see, though I think a few of them (like dear, wonderful Moly) might have long suspected its presence.

How do I do it?  I don't know.  I think the kids just recognize me as one of their own.  Which I am.  Plus, I let them play with the tape recorder.