Unlike most of the country, I recently started working a brand new job.  It came unexpectedly, from a direction in which I wasn’t really looking.  It pays only about ½ of what I once made, but it’s honest, challenging work with some security, and it comes with health and retirement benefits which are worth their weight in gold in today’s economy.  In my little world, the employment situation just improved 100%.

I’ve taken a job working with autistic teenagers and students with acute behavioral problems.  In most cases, they are serious emotional head cases that have been bounced from placement to placement – failing in each – until they have landed here: in a windowless school that is locked down like a prison.  Student are “wanded” for weapons and contraband upon arrival, and partitioned into tiny, well-monitored classrooms.  The student/adult ratio is very high and many of the more demanding students have been assigned one-on-one placement with an adult.   I had been substituting in these classrooms previous to taking a full-time job and therefore had a pretty fair idea of what I was getting myself into.

I work with young people who are very, very angry.  The reasons for this anger are only partially known.  Some of these reasons will never be known – buried as they are in a suffocating overburden of abusive, disinterested parents, bullying peers, and an already bulging resume of bad decisions.  They carry this anger and hate right on their face: a scowling, insolent, who-the-eff-you-lookin’-at sneer that fades quickly into a yawn at the slightest word directed in their direction. They have exhausted all attempts at mainstreaming. 

They have landed in the School Of Last Resort. 

As they have bounced from class to class, these students have been branded as disruptive.  At the core, most of them are mean and simple bullies – angry, resentful and pushed around for the last time.  Around the edges they vary through various shades of autism, attention deficit disorders, hyperactivity, brain damage and hormonal imbalances. But most are just sad, angry children who have learned to break, scream, hurt and destroy to make themselves known… to make themselves heard.

They are students for whom consequences have no consequence… for whom the “future” means only more of the futile same.  And think about that one for a second because it lies at the core of the whole thing: how do you deal with kids for whom consequences have no consequence?  Luckily for me, I can play the “good cop” side of the good cop / bad cop equation.  My job is to enforce the learning, there are other (really big guys) who enforce the behaviors.  So while maintaining strict boundaries and expectations, I try to step away from the brick wall of consequences.  I try to use my own natural curiosity to diffuse the angst that naturally drives a wedge between us.  I acknowledge their anger, I acknowledge that life is not fair.  I bring in a box of fossils and skulls and whirligigs and insects preserved in amber that we can investigate together when they let the anger drop long enough to let their natural curiosity shine through. 

I don’t care how misguided they lead us to believe they are, I don’t care how much hate they hold in reserve for the adults that surround them like sentries.  Once the world stops long enough to let them hold a dinosaur bone or a raccoon skull in their hand, they become the children that they really are.  

If only for just a few minutes.