I am lucky and teach at a school with four special education classrooms filled with extraordinary students and extraordinary teachers.
The first thing I do when I get to school in the mornings is go to their tables in the cafeteria and give them fist bumps (both the kids and the adults).
Teaching is a pouring out of your heart, and this fist bumping and ‘good morning’ing helps me fill up my heart at the start of each school day..
I love it.
I love them.
Since the beginning of the year, I have noticed one of my students, Jordyn, sitting beside her brother at his special ed table and helping him eat his breakfast.
He has autism.
He is non-verbal, but he doesn’t have to say a word for me to know how he feels about eating breakfast with his big sister. I teach astronomy as a 4th grade teacher, and I could use the twinkling in his eyes and the smile on his face as a description of the stars and in our night sky and the sun that lights our day on earth.
One of my favorite writers, the Portuguese Nobel laureate Jose Saramago, begins his novel Blindness with a quote from the Book of Exhortations that has become a theme for my life as a writer and a teacher- “If you can see, look. If you can look, observe.”
I saw Jordyn sitting with her little brother. I looked at them. I observed them.
“How extraordinary,” I thought, “That a ten year old would give her time...would share the essence of herself...with her brother and his special ed class at the beginning of each day...and allow them to share the essence of themselves with her.”
So today, with her permission, she became a character in a story I am writing for the class.
We have been snatched by a giant hand through a portal and ended up in the Land of Oz before Dorothy and Toto.
The picture below is of what I wrote today for Jordyn.
The Tin Man can learn everything about finding a heart...from her.
So can I.
It was an extraordinary moment in an ordinary day in public school.
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