My Experiences Teaching at Disability Schools
My life is nothing like I imagined it would be. How many
times have you heard that before? In contrast, have you ever heard someone
declare that their life turned out exactly as they thought it would? I would
like to meet that person, and possibly slap them across the face.
I just wanted to finish what I started. I wanted to become
fluent at Japanese, but someone kept raising the bar. To be fluent you have to
study it at university at least. After graduation, you find yourself still
lacking, you have to live in Japan for a least a year to be fluent. Three years
later, and I have finally come to realize that you would have to have lived in
Japan your whole life, possibly a few past lives as well, because this language
is absurd. Well… my expectations are at least.
The easiest way to get into Japan is to be an English
teacher. At some point in my childhood I may have declared that I wanted to be
a teacher. However, I never pursued the thought. I still don’t really. Luckily
Japan has thought of everything, and created the ALT. ALT stands for assistant
language teacher, and is a great way of being lowered into a teaching job that
you are not qualified for in the slightest. At first I was a tape recorder at
junior high school. I was paid to read a textbook aloud, and smile a lot.
Sometimes I let kids touch my hair, and stare deep into my suspected colour-contacts,
aka naturally blue eyes. I then found myself making games and worksheets,
psyching up or calming down a class, and in general just being helpful.
It is not just that my job is not what I expected, I am not
who I expected. I accepted a leadership position after two years, flying to
Tokyo, conducting orientations and giving advice to people who I had only just
met. People tell me things. I make small talk. I have connections and
acquaintances. The teaching changed as well. Teachers come to me for a lesson
plan. I am reliable, but I still feel like I have no idea what I am doing. I
teach at three very different schools, a vocational high school, an academic high
school and a disability school. It is at this point that my life gets way off
the expected track.
The other day I visited a school for children with severe
disabilities. My usual school is for children who have long term illnesses, but
are still well enough to study for the most part. Some of them live in a
hospital that is attached to the school, some of them are in wheelchairs, but
most look just like regular kids. I have also visited schools for kids who are
mentally impaired. I met children who don’t age mentally, who don’t understand
social rules, and who remain beautifully innocent their entire lives. I played
with them and gave them their first ever taste of vegemite. At the end of the
day, I felt like I had made a difference; that I had connected with them in
some way.
This school was different. As I walked into the entrance,
wheelchairs lined either side. My grandfather spent most of my life in a
wheelchair, so I am no stranger to the concept. However, these were not your
everyday wheelchairs. These were specially designed, each and every one, for
seriously ill kids. Some of them were hospital beds with two wheelchair-like
wheels on one end, so the occupant can move the bed themselves. Others were
shaped to hold an entire little body in place.
This school is attached to a hospital as well. Perhaps it is
more accurate to say that it is a hospital, as even the classrooms have that
feel about them. The staff rooms even look like nurses stations. I have never
really liked hospitals. For starters, I feint at the sight of blood. Actually,
to be honest, I feint just listening to people talk about injuring themselves.
I once felt feint in a translation lecture at university where the guest
speaker was describing an MRI. I had to lean forward, discreetly put my head
between my knees, and block out the English translation with the
incomprehensible Japanese to avoid it. This time, I had to look at the ceiling
to stop from feinting, as students were wheeled into the “classroom” one by
one. It is confronting, standing in front of a room full of near life-less
little bodies, unnaturally coloured and fragile. Words can’t describe.
At the end of the day, I cried. I cried because I couldn't
understand the meaning of their lives. Some of them could barely breathe,
barely open their eyes, and had to be fed through an IV at lunch in the lunch
room. I sang, danced, smiled, shook their hands, but there was nothing. No
signs of life. No hint of meaning to their existence, only pain, and a bunch of
carers and teachers pushing empty wheelchairs around the room in dance
formation. I was angry at myself for even thinking these things. Life, of
course, is precious. These children are precious. Their wheelchairs are all
different colours, with cool characters on the wheels and funky designs. They
whisper life. They whisper I am alive. I just wasn't prepared.
My regular school was a shock at first as well, and is
sometimes difficult to work at. It is a small school, so I have gotten to know
the students really well. There is one kid who is so much like me it is scary; we
like all the same things. One day I came to class on a cold winter’s morning to
find huge dark rings around his eyes. It was the first time I had seen him
actually looking sick. I couldn't shake the sinking feeling from my heart for
the rest of the day. I was afraid. I still am afraid that if anything were to
happen to him, or to any of my students, I wouldn't get over it. They are so
beautiful, with passion and dreams that they have shared with me. Every now and
again, I get glimpses of their fragility, and it weighs down on me like a wet
blanket.
I don’t think I am cut out for this job. Someone told me
that to be a teacher, what it means to be a really good teacher, is to care
about your students; to respect and recognize them as individuals, to make them
feel special, and to make them laugh. I don’t think I can do it. I don’t think
my heart can take it, the strain of connecting to little hearts and minds that
may not always be around. But, at the same time, I don’t think I can refuse
this connection either. I don’t think I can walk into the classroom with
anything other than my whole self, my whole heart, opened up to them. So I
walk, across the thin ice, hoping that if I fall I can swim. I am driven
forward by the students. Even if the ice is thin, my life is definitely richer
with them in it.
I visited that other hospital school for the second time a
week later. I played board games, threw peanuts at a picture of an Oni
(monster), and sung Baa Baa Black Sheep 7 times in 45 mins. It was a
challenging day as expected, however, I didn't cry at the end of it. In the
lunch room, after I had finished eating, a pack of students surrounded me, and
escorted me to my next class. I smiled and laughed with them as we walked, and
rolled down the corridor. These are the days that make life meaningful.
When I started studying Japanese I never in my wildest
dreams could have imagined, no one in their wildest dreams could have ever
imagined that I would end up here.
A Christmas poster made by some of the students at my regular disability school. |
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