OCR Text |
Show her progress and gettingher placed in our school, had threatened to quit at spring break. She has since retired to her home and motherhood. Unable to advance due to a lack of the right "education," an out of a disgust for the injustice of Patty's plight. But it was not a "workshop" for me. It was journey into the void from whence Patty had first appeared. It was an exploration of her life, after having seen her fully as a human being. It was the dark cloud hanging over my mind, about to burst with a flood of rain. She was sitting on a soft sofa chair in the living room, her hands tied behind her in the cotton restraint, which she could have easily,.broken if she wished. She was rocking. The television blared full blast with a noontime soap opera over three or four small bodies that lay about in various stages of rocking or soft and gentle head banging on the rug. Others sat limply in chairs. There was an amazing amount of intelligence in those eyes, more than I had expected. The modge-podges of problems were easily identified with labels from texts. And in tiny, subtle ways each was asking to communicate having constructed their own way of doing it, and unable to make their wardens "see" it. Two of the smallest ones were termed "cortically blind," having vision but not knowing how to use it. It is not blindness, but a lack of any need to see. The human mind is capable of many complex compensations for what has been lost. There were ten children in all, three teachers, and one fulltime aide. A ratio of two to one for the whole day program, something many educators are begging for even as I write this. The aide wanted to know what and how to do things. The teachers swept in and out, completing small individual lessons with no continuity for the child's overall program. The supervising teacher had long since given up trying to change things and spent most of her time in the backroom, filling out papers and looking great. Five of the children were under seven years of age. All of them had a great deal of potential. Potential, meaning that which one sees and not that which is defined. Five were teenagers, two of whom had started with only one handicap, blindness. Two were able to talk and comprehend and had nerve diseases that were progressively growing worse. The fifth child was indeed "gone." -23- |