Poise and Patience

In my professional life, I'm a special education teacher in a level 5 setting.  Without the lingo, it means I work in a  school exclusively for students with special needs.  My population happens to be emotionally disturbed students.

When you tell people that, they have this immediate reaction of, "Wow.  That must be really tough.  You must have enormous patience."  I'm not going to disagree with them that it takes lots of patience, but in reality, I see my job as fairly easy in most regards.  I teach small classes and a subject I love.  I know my kids well, and they know and respect me because I give it to them straight.  There is a very special and important student-teacher relationship that is formed over time with every one of them.

By contrast, for yesterday's alumni reunion, our alumni organized an event working with KEEN - Kids Enjoying Exercise Now.  These students were much more developmentally disabled -- youth across the age spectrum who in many cases had a mental age less than half their physical one.  Ask me about a challenging job, and this was it.  I worked with two young men over two different sessions.  One was age 20 and spent the better part of an hour easily overwhelmed by his surroundings, and at best, content to watch passing cars outside.  He barely spoke, and would repeat the same series of sounds over and over again.   The other was an 18 year old who behaved much like a 3 year old.  He enjoyed tossing a ball and being pulled on a scooter.  I never heard more than a dozen words in his vocabulary.   These were just two of the many disabled young people who came to KEEN yesterday to get some exercise and enjoy some physical and social interaction.

But to help them there were our HOBY alumni.   And while I won't claim it was our largest reunion ever, it was a wonderful insight into how special it can be to watch one person help another.  Not only did our alumni genuinely go out of their way to be helpful and good "coaches" to their "athletes," they did it with heart, poise, and patience.  As I watched our alumni perform in some cases under some very difficult circumstances, they did it with grace, and they showed why they were the leaders selected from their high schools.  They did it with a kind of patience that I can only sometimes wish to have in my day job.  And they did it wearing their HOBY t-shirts with pride, representing all the good that can come from just a little volunteerism.