Banana Hands

I’ve wondered how to approach telling about my adventures in special education. Should I do it chronologically or topically? Neither approach seems to make much sense, so I’ll just fire off stories as they come to mind or as they come up in real time.

Stanley was something else. I put this in past tense because he moved away quite a while ago. He was one scary dude—John Coffey scary, if you’ve ever seen the movie, The Green Mile. He stood six foot five and weighed in at a svelte 380 pounds. His hands were as big as any two of yours and mine. Hal Larson (Jack Black) in Shallow Hal makes fun of Tony Robins’ banana hands. I didn’t laugh at that gag in the movie because I lived every working day with a set of big, meaty hands that could come down on you like a load of hay bales without a moment’s notice.

Let me explain.

Stanley came to my class sight unseen. He was registered in July. His old teacher from another district came to Hartvigsen and talked with our lead teachers and the principal. Alex wasn’t there at this meeting. His former teacher raved about how gentle he was and about his amazing memory. Stanley really was a savant. Give him any date in history, and he could tell you what day of the week it fell on without fail in about one second. Staff members even pulled out perpetual calendars to check him out. He was, indeed, amazing.

“You’ll love him. He’s just a big Teddy Bear,” she gushed, “We’re really going to miss Stanley.”

Conveniently, she left out the part about his dangerous fits of rage.

“Oh, he’s a bright young man,” our committee of teachers concurred. “Sounds like he’ll fit right in with . . . Tom’s class.”

I think secretly none of them wanted to get anywhere near John Coffey, er, Stanley as his file–holding teacher. By default they had first refusal rights, so to speak, and they took them. You see, fits of rage or no, Stanley has autism, and that is a hard sell under the best of circumstances. If I had a choice clearly handed to me to take a student with autism or pass, I’d pass, thank you very much.

For the first day or two of school, Stanley was pretty quiet and got along. On the third day of school, I was off campus with some fellow teachers checking out a vending machine we wanted to buy for the school. I had left my class in the capable hands of my four para-educators. Then I got an urgent call from our behavior specialist, Cheryl, the same teacher who rescued me from Todd on my first day at Hartvigsen. She told me Stanley had gone off on some poor kid, slamming him head first into the tiled wall in the boys bathroom, and how it took six big, male staff members to negotiate Stanley into one of our floor-to-ceiling carpeted quiet rooms.

I flew back to school. When I got there, he was still in the quiet room, crying his eyes out. Cheryl was standing at the secretary’s desk going through Stanley’s just-arrived student file. Sure enough, there was a big notation about his aggressive behaviors: hitting, biting, slamming people around, head butting, trashing classrooms. Yikes!

After a while, Stanley calmed down.

“Am I in trouble?”

(I wish I could convey in writing how he talked. He spoke in short, staccato bursts in an even, high-pitched monotone voice that rose briefly at the end of each sentence, making them sound like questions. When he was really excited about something, when he actually was in a Teddy Bear mood, his words came out in one long slur.)

“No, we’re just waiting for you to settle down a bit. Are you ready to come out?”

“Are you going to call my mom?”

“Not necessarily. Do you want us to?

“No. Are you going to call the group home?”

About three weeks before school started, Stanley was placed in a group home. Some students with disabilities qualify to receive funding from the State of Utah so they can receive group home services and live in an apartment away from home. He qualified as an emergency case. It turns out that he was becoming very aggressive toward his parents and siblings. Understand, folks with autism do not tolerate change very well. Stanley was struggling with at least two huge changes: he was away from home for the first time ever, and he was in a totally strange school. Unfortunately, he had been set up for problems. That should never have happened.

“Yes, we’ve already done that.”

“Are they coming to get me?”

“Yes, we can’t have you on the bus this afternoon. Can you tell me why you were upset?”

“That one boy was screaming.”

"Which boy?"

"That one that I pushed his head."

Word had it that the boy in question was merely making some odd vocal sounds, the kind no one took any notice to at Hartvigsen—except for a kid with autism.

“This is going to be a long year,” I thought, as I rubbed both temples with my fore fingers.

It was.