Every day, like an annoying alarm, Jimmy walked by my room, stood in the doorway, and asked, “Do I have speech today?”. He had no sense of time, no idea of yesterday and tomorrow.
Jimmy came to my classroom twice a week for thirty minutes at a time, and we worked on speech sounds and language concepts. Sometimes, when I felt he’d had enough of those, we worked on his letters. One particular day, his clothes reeked of stale urine, and leftovers from lunch splayed across his face. His shirt showed stains and signs of wear, holes in worn areas. I kept coming back to the smell, the odors fighting to fill up my nose. I did my best to breathe through my mouth, which is hard when talking. Jimmy always took the weight of the world on his shoulders when it came to answering questions, pressed himself too hard. His mind worked slower, like a big tow-truck with three flat tires, full of power, but not fixed to work properly. They have identified him as intellectually disabled; however, his sweetness always penetrated any mental defaults he possessed.
I had had Jimmy in speech for a couple of months before I knew he couldn’t read. One day, the special education teacher told me of this lacking concept in his intellect. She told me he couldn’t identify letters or numbers. Jimmy was in the first grade. Not able to read, I thought to myself. No way. But I soon found out this teacher was right.
Before Jimmy’s next speech session, I made flashcards of letters, capital and lowercase, and flashcards of numbers, thinking that I would bring this boy around to the light. I would show him how to read.
When he next came to speech, we began by working on a few articulation sounds. /V/ sounds in all positions of words, “vacuum, lever, cave”; /l/ sounds in all positions of words, “light, umbrella, bowl.” As we practiced these various words, I realized that a majority of Jimmy’s speech articulation errors probably stemmed from his inability to identify letters and their sounds, to associate letters with sounds. I could tell Jimmy to make the /v/ sound, but unless I showed him how to make the sound, giving him the name of the letter that made it was pointless.
After we worked on sounds for a few minutes, we moved on to letters. Okay, I thought to myself. This is it. I’m going to teach this boy how to read.
On the kidney-shaped table between Jimmy and me, I laid out three flashcards, Aa, Bb, Cc. Surely, he knows these, I thought.
“We’re going to practice the names of the letters. Okay?” I asked him.
Jimmy nodded his head, looking skeptical. “I think I know some of these,” he said.
“Just do your best. What is this letter?” I asked, pointing to the Aa card.
“That one’s ‘H’,” he said. My guess was that he had mixed up the two letters due to their similarity in shape.
“No, not ‘H’,” I replied. “Can you think of what else it might be?” I prodded, pointing at the Aa flashcard again.
“I know this one. I do. I really do,” he said, confident.
Then, his hopeful smile fell, reality sinking in that he had forgotten the name of the letter.
“I guess I don’t remember,” he said gloomily, sad dark blue eyes raising up to look at me, almost waiting for condemnation or punishment.
“That’s okay, Jimmy. That letter is ‘A’,” I told him.
“That’s right!” he exclaimed, a smile revealing two missing front teeth. “‘A’! I knew it. I really did.”
“I believe you,” I assured him.
We repeated the same process with Bb, him almost positive he knew the name of the letter, but again, coming up with nothing.
“This letter is ‘B’, Jimmy,” I explained. “Remember, ‘B’ for bumps. See the two bumps on the ‘B’?” I asked.
“Yes, I see them. Bumps for ‘B’. Okay,” he said, shaking his blonde head up and down.
I pulled the flashcard of Cc over to join Aa and Bb.
“Oh, I know this one. I really do. It’s ‘C’,” he said, standing up with excitement. He smiled so wide, as if someone had a hold of his grin from each side of his mouth, pulling it wider.
I must have looked surprised, because he said, “See, I told ya.”
“Yes, you did, Jimmy,” I applauded. “I’m so proud of you.”
I wish all of our letter-learning lessons had proceeded as smoothly. The only other letters Jimmy “really” knew were ‘J’ and ‘X’. Within five minutes of working on letters with Jimmy that day, I realized that despite my superwoman efforts, this child’s learning to read would take more; it would require the dedication of everyone who came in contact with him.
This reality of a first grader not knowing how to read puzzled me greatly when I first had to deal with Jimmy’s disability. My teacher training revolves around working with high school students, writing, reading fiction and nonfiction, and studying elements of language. All of my preparation for teaching was contingent on my students being able to read. Personally, my dad taught me how to read when I was four. So working with a student who couldn’t tell me the name of the letter ‘A’ boggled my mind.
Later in the year, Jimmy and his younger brother Alex came to school in clothes they had wet the bed in the previous night. The special education teacher came to my room and told me the situation, that she, the school nurse, and the principal were going to hotline DFS due to the severity of the incident.
The school nurse had removed the boys from their classes, and they sat at a table in her office, coloring. The smell in her office matched that of a dingy nursing home, the pungent stench of ammonia and urine flooded over me. I barely lasted thirty seconds in her office.
The special education teacher asked the boys why they didn’t change clothes before they came to school.
“If we tell our mom we wet the bed, she spanks us,” Jimmy said, matter-of-factly, as if this topic of conversation was part of his everyday routine. “So we changed our shirts, but we didn’t have any other pants to put on.”
The principal ended up taking the boys home, making the mother bathe and put clean clothes on her children, and then the principal brought them back to school. Their mother couldn’t, or wouldn’t, come get her children.
I returned to my classroom, turned off the lights, sat down at my desk, and cried. I cried for these boys, for the care, love, and proper nourishment they do not receive. I cried for their mother, for the state of her mind, that she tells herself it’s okay not to take responsibility for her boys. I cried for my ability to do nothing, for yearning to take them home with me, to feed them and read to them, to love them.
I still question this past year of teaching, why I was stuck in the position of speech implementer. But stories like Jimmy’s remind me why. That for students like him, whose parents found better things to do than love their children, I could love those children. God granted me a sliver of insight, a sneak peek into what it takes to raise a child, what it means to care for a child, physically, intellectually, emotionally. While I didn’t learn a lot about teaching English this year, I did learn a lot about life. I learned a lot about living beyond me. When Jimmy would come to my room for speech, I understood, by a fraction, what it meant to view the world through his eyes.