“Take a deep breath.” Kent the risk manager was trying to calm me down. “Put your hands on the handlebar — right there — and push the skids down the steps. You won’t lose grip of the chair. Collect yourself!”
I’ve worked with people with disabilities for over two decades, but this year, I have a student who absolutely cannot get down from the upper floor, if there is a fire or another emergency, without the use of a device called an Evac-Chair, a folding piece of equipment, which the adult in charge will have to push down two flights of steps and out the door.
During training, I needed to make sure I didn’t spill our assistant principal out of the chair. I wasn’t handling it well. I was red-faced, sweating and giggling nervously as I negotiated the cement stairs.
In short, I was panicking. Which I do a lot. Studies show that people who tend to panic fare poorly in situations like lifeboats with limited resources. I’ve always thought I’d be the first to die.
I panic if my boyfriend doesn’t call or e-mail me back; if my students don’t learn a skill quickly enough; if I think I’ll miss my workout; if I see a sixth-grader who reminds me of my son and isn’t happy; when my sailor son gets deployed, and when he doesn’t (do they not think he’s good enough?); if I forget to notify someone about a meeting; if I forget a crucial signature; if I don’t hear often enough from a friend; and if I don’t quickly find a parking spot at DIA.
In my field, special education, opportunities to panic are manifold. I am, after all, dealing with kids who have demonstrated repeated failure in regular education. Often, by the time they get to middle school, they are reluctant, as well as challenged, learners, and they take it out on any well-meaning adult who approaches them in the wrong way at the wrong time.
Sometimes it’s easier for a student to create a crisis situation to get out of the frustration of learning hard stuff. Sometimes, kids just aren’t able to learn until you’ve figured out how to teach them, and that takes time, patience, and a calmness of spirit I can’t always muster.
The struggles that define my job remind me, these days, of our national spirit. The national debt, public and private, is soaring, and we seem to have little will to lessen it, we can’t decide any more than the Roman Empire could how to deal with natives of other lands trying to take advantage of our comparative prosperity, and our manufacturing base withers, prey to the reach of Adam Smith’s invisible hand across the globe. Above all, the chickens of the excesses of the ’90s and the oughts have come to roost.
We’re in trouble. And, led by the Tea Party, we’re panicking, just like I do when a particularly obstreperous student resists my efforts. We don’t want the cerebral solutions of economists like Paul Krugman and his fellow neo-Keynesians in the Obama administration. Elitists, we call them. Give us good old-fashioned self-reliance, we say. It worked for great-grandpa, didn’t it?
Like the student who would rather guess at a word based on its first letter instead of sounding it out, our panic sends us running to the solutions that had worked, or seemed to work, in the past. Never mind that great-grandpa’s vaunted self-reliance was based on an economy that took place within a 20-mile radius, and that his economic comfort, if any, depended on large numbers of people living in abject economic misery.
Just as a panicky teacher with an unruly class might decide that these kids are just bad and there’s nothing to be done, the adherents of Tea Party politics blame all our economic problems as a nation on a lack by some of gumption and responsibility. In both cases, the solutions are simple, punitive and ineffective.
Let’s collect ourselves, and stop panicking.
Eva Syrovy (evasyrov@) of Colorado Springs is a special education teacher at the middle school level.
