A girl called, “Ms. Syrovy, look, there’s Kathy!”
Sure enough. There was my most relentlessly challenging student. She had spotted me too, and was shielding her face with her hood, but her silhouette was unmistakable.
I could have called her name, but I didn’t — she would have pretended that she didn’t hear me anyway. I stopped at the office, and told the principal that Kathy was in the house on the corner.
It wasn’t the first time she went there instead of going to school. Mr. Brown called her mother, who said, “I dropped her off in the morning!”
It wasn’t the first time, either, that Kathy’s mother had demonstrated her helplessness. Kathy has severe attention deficit disorder, controllable with a stimulant in the methylphenidate family. She’d been prescribed 40 milligrams a day, but her mother said, “I can’t make her take it — and what am I supposed to do, hold her down and cram it down her throat?”
No. But we all thought (but didn’t say) that she can take away phone calls, and movies, and video games, and privileges.
And who can blame Kathy for skipping? Some of her fellow students had actually put out a petition to get her out of our school. We stopped it, but no doubt she knows of its existence. In every class, she commands at least half of the teacher’s attention. The students complain that, at lunch, she lies and insults them. Kathy moves or talks constantly, so even a classroom game can be a challenge. It’s so important to her to be noticed, and she has no clue how to do that appropriately.
From the outside, the house on the corner looks like any other small, old house in the neighborhood. But two boys in their late teens live there, and girls, 13 and 14 years old, join them.
“Can’t we call the cops and tell them to raid the place?” I asked Mr. Brown.
“Don’t you think I’ve tried repeatedly?” he replied. “I’ve told them that for sure there are drugs and sex going on with girls under the age of consent, but they tell me they can’t just go break down the door. Social services worry about the babies first, then the little kids. Adolescents are their last concern. They figure if the big kids are abused, they’ll report it themselves.”
Sometimes they will. Kathy won’t. She says she’s having fun, doing what she wants to do. She bathes infrequently, sometimes smelling up the classroom. She wears too much makeup and hides in a set smile and flippant movement. No one at our school has ever had a conversation with Kathy that involved real events or feelings. She is alone.
For months, I’ve ranted about her parents’ refusal to force her to take medication. It would certainly make her easier to teach, and it would make it easier for her to learn. She might have less of the ceaseless need for others to pay attention, to acknowledge her. It might make it easier for her to show the skills she possesses, and next year, in high school, open classes to her that she cannot access now, because she can’t do the work.
She skipped school three times one recent week, and spent the other two days suspended as a consequence. Result: a full week with no instruction.
I won’t lie; it was a relief. Her absence made teaching easier. But this seems like education-by-shrug. We can’t teach her if she doesn’t show up; but do I want the lessons she’s learning, nevertheless, to stick?
What can I do? I can thoughtfully set up her learning environment so she always knows where and when to go, and gets regular, lavish recognition and rewards for the accomplishments she manages. But it will take time, planning, structure, lots of starts and stops.
On the other hand, that’s why, we teachers say with an ironic smile, they pay us the big bucks.
Eva Syrovy lives in Colorado Springs.
