Pitted, Cored and Shucked: School’s Dead! Part 2 of 3

The Twice-Exceptional, also known as Gifted and Talented Learning Disabled, are characterized by a wide discrepancy between gift/talent and deficit.  These children develop quickly in some areas of cognition and social-emotional dispositions and struggle in others.  They are highly self-directed, very curious and questioning, extremely creative in their approach to tasks, uninhibited and articulate in expressing their independently developed advanced ideas and opinions, very inventive as a technique to compensate for their disability, divergent thinkers and artistic; they have a wide range of interests, high levels of problem-solving and reasoning skills and penetrating insights. But they also have a specific learning disability, such as Disgraphia, Dyslexia, Dyscalculia, or Attention Deficient Hyperactivity Disorder, or are diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome or auditory and/or visual processing problems.  For sure they are highly empathetic and at the same time highly sensitive to criticism.  

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Our son and his mother grew close over her reading to him just before he went to sleep each night.  This started when he was just over a year old.  He had two favorite pieces of reading material during his fifth year of life:  Ranger Rick and Zoo Books.  And of the Zoo Books he most loved the one on sharks.  He had his mother re-read that over and over and over again.  In the late summer of his sixth year one of his good friends went fishing with his father.  Among the catch they brought back was a sand shark.  Seeing the prize, our overjoyed son asked if he could have it and the father agreed.  He brought the little shark over to the house and he petitioned me to instantly dissect it.  I looked for my college biology dissecting kit, but couldn’t find it.  So, I selected an old, but still shape kitchen knife with which his mother agreed to part and in back of the house on the concrete of the driveway I gently opened the shark to reveal its organs.  Our son not only named each one but told me their functions and how each related to the other, especially the connective tissue we saw between the shark's nose and brain, all the time being amazed at the discoveries right in front of his eyes.

And then he started kindergarten where he was instructed in the alphabet, numbers, colors and shapes.

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Our son should have been found to be Twice-Exceptional and was not.  When a single exceptionality is unacknowledged and ignored the result is emotional disturbance.  When Twice-Exceptionality is unacknowledged and ignored the results are devastating.

Again from the 2009 writing:

While our son was going through his very early grades in the parochial school I was attempting to establish myself in the Communication Arts professorate.  I was working as an Adjunct throughout the 1980's in most of the colleges in and around New York City having a Communication program.  Now, pre-service college teachers are taught to do research not taught how to teach, taught about logic in words and in numbers, not about the affective realms of children.  But, I knew something was wrong when I saw how unhappy our son was most of the time.  He dutifully went to school, but both his mother and I saw the build up of stress and concomitant disturbance.  We kept on talking with his teachers and the school's administrators but got no where.

Our son should have been found Twice Exceptional, gifted with a learning disability-Disgraphia.  I mean, he would drive teachers crazy because they saw his brightness but couldn't understand the reasons for his gigantic emotional upsets.  I had no idea of such things as learning disabilities or that giftedness required very different means of schooling than that provided by this parochial school, but those who should have known didn't either.  More, we were told over and over again in many different ways including out right:  Very bright children do not have problems, therefore he must be lazy!  He was told in many different ways including out right that he was dumb, stupid and lazy!  And for the very sensitive Twice-Exceptional child, to be thus told in so many ways is life threatening, life destroying.

 To demonstrate:

He was puzzled over addition and subtraction at the start of the first grade.  So, since the class was dealing with numbers 1 to 9, I showed him how to get the right answer using his fingers.  He caught on right away and was near giddy time after time getting the right answers.  Then one evening I saw him just stare at his arithmetic work book.  I inquired after his emotional disposition but he said nothing.  However, each night for months he would open his arithmetic work book, stare at the homework page, reluctantly begin, all the while being very sad.  He would complete one or two problems, close the book and go on to something else.  It was only much later, when he was a late teen when he told me that each time he went to use his fingers to do a problem in class his teacher would yell at him for “being such a baby”.   He eventually “got back” at the teacher as each time he did a problem he would give an answer either a plus one above the correct answer or a minus one below the correct answer.  And then if the teacher requested he redo the problem he would provide the opposite in effect bracketing the correct answer.  Yet, the teacher, it appeared from his telling never caught on.

A second example:  He had this gigantic trouble hand-writing.  He would take five or six hours to do his homework, although the amount of work assigned even for one who was not disgraphic would have taken at least three hours.  Anyway, his verbal skills showed he spoke grammatically correct most of the time; so, his composition skills were way beyond his peers.  But, his mind moved too fast for his hand movements.  At home from the early first through the entire third grade he would dictate to his mother and she would write what he said, but at school, his teachers saw no reason for them to allow a scribe for him.  He was just lazy they said and discounted everything done at home while favoring the dismally hand-written in-class work which confirmed to these folks that he was lazy, for how could such a bright boy perform so poorly.  If anyone would have bothered to ask him to verbally recall what he was learning they would have had a great demonstration of his brilliance even in the subjects in which he was not interested, but to this lot only hand written work demonstrated learning.
 
Another example: His sensitivity to criticism developed shyness in reading out loud.  Our son's silent reading comprehension was way beyond grade level once he unlocked the reading code, which he did on his own in the beginning of first grade.  But, because he wanted to avoid being yelled at, since he was constantly being scolded for being who he was by school folks who just couldn't see beyond their mid-19th century training, he fumbled over his words when reading out loud.  Well, the order came down to us from both the first grade teacher and the Principal, our son was to be placed in a remedial reading program where he would be assisted in reading by...a parent (not a trained reading specialist, but a parent)!  Our son would start reading out loud, fumble over a word which would be correctly pronounced by the parent who would have our son sound the word just as the parent had pronounced it and our son would re-read the part where he stumbled, this time speaking the word correctly.  In this lesson our son continued to learn how useless a human he was.

A further example:  He would get bored very easily and often.  Instead of getting up and roaming, talking or otherwise distracting the class, he would find some school work to do.  This incident took place in the first grade, about mid-year.  The teacher had assigned some spelling work which he finished to his satisfaction.  He then took out his math workbook, which was about half done.  He worked on it in pencil until the workbook was complete.  When the teacher discovered what he had done she scolded him in front of the class for doing something that the teacher did not authorize, for going beyond where he was suppose to in the workbook, and for not doing the spelling, which he already had completed.  For his punishment he had to erase each and every completed problem he had solved until he was at the place where the rest of the class had left off.  The many ways school folks can destroy a child is amazing!
 
To say he was mistreated is to say not enough.  I would go so far as to say he was emotionally abused especially by his third grade teacher who “made an example” out of our son at least once, twice sometimes a dozen times a day.  But, our son was silent about all of this, not telling us until he was an adult.  Besides, at the time I was such a good Catholic I just couldn't admit to myself that these good folks were capable of such behavior, until I found our precious boy pounding his head against his bedroom wall one day late in his third grade year.  If that wasn't a wake-up call nothing could be.  We took him out of that school the next day, but that was near four years too late, the damage was done and could never be reversed.

Shortly after starting the local public school for fifth grade a teacher overheard our son saying he was going to kill himself.  By law if a teacher so hears such a remark, action must be taken.  Counseling with the school psychologist followed which morphed into counseling with a private psychologist.  The counseling, in my opinion, saved his life, but it did not, it could not, repair the emotional damage done from the abuse suffered from kindergarten through almost all of third grade.

Among the characteristics of the deeply hurt Twice-Exceptional is low self-esteem.  Some children feeling worthless withdraw into daydreaming and fantasy, become apathetic or adopt disruptive or clowning behaviors.  They, indeed, become angry and more often then not turn that anger inward in massive self-destruction.  Our son to cope with his life filled with a sense of total worthlessness didn't withdraw or be disruptive or clowning.  He become very angry and turned it in on himself.  He began at age 9 self-medicating with copious amounts of food.  At age 10 he added copious amounts of nicotine and caffeine.  Now, pre-adolescents will as a rule wish to play adult with smoking cigarettes and drinking an occasional cup of coffee.  Our son's consumption of both went way beyond what would be expected.  He continued self-medicating at 13 with copious amounts of alcohol, at 14 he added copious amounts of marijuana and at 20 he added cocaine.  He was psychotic by 25.  He has a diagnosis of Paranoid Schizophrenia due to this substance abuse.  He is in treatment and has come a very long way, but to have a life of his own he needs to go a very long way yet. 

Over the years of traversing schools in many districts I have come to see our son’s experience as way too normal.  And thus, to prevent like children, those who are Twice-Exceptional, from going the way of our son, I dedicated myself to developing a school for them.  And now it isn’t going to happen.

In the next and final part of School’s Dead! I will briefly tell the story of the school’s conceptualization.

Pitted, Cored and Shucked: My School’s Dead!

The newly sworn Colonial President demanded to know why the captain of Battlestar Galactica lied to the gathered shocked human survivors of the Cylon attack.  Earlier, Commander Adama had told everyone he knew the location of the legendary home called Earth.  He replied to the President that at a time of such deep despair both individual and collective existence required hope and by providing a commonly known destination he had given an objective for the long and arduous journey ahead, he had give a reason for hope, and hope, as the characters and the audience knew, is the fuel propelling human existence forward.

Two recent events have ripped away my purpose in getting up and moving through the day crashing me back into the pit of depression.  One is the fact that my school isn’t going to happen.  It’s dead!  I am in great need of a destination.  Where is my Adama?

Okay, Bob sighed.  This thing isn’t going to get off the ground:  There is no money!  Philanthropy has dried up, both individual and foundation.  So, taking your school non-profit isn’t going to work.  And taking it for-profit isn’t going to work either.  Venture capitalists want their investment back within five years with at least a twenty-five percent return. 

Non-profit fund raising taps private, individual philanthropy first then foundation, but with both in a deep drought, I was exploring the notion of going for-profit.  I had explained to my good friend with the business acumen I lack I needed five million dollars over four years and a steady enrollment increase in that time to one-hundred-four all paying thirty-thousand per year.  This is an early childhood program through early college meant for the Twice-Exceptional, disabled gifted and talented, as well as those gifted and talented who do not fit into the conventional acceleration and enrichment regime.  As a special private school here in New York City I thought the tuition price point while excluding some would include enough so it could start and expand according to plan.  The initial start-up would be the early childhood program then the elementary, then the secondary education piece and finishing with the early college.  But, I had said, this unique project needs its start-up funding until the tuition takes over, which I figured would be the end of the fourth year when the early childhood and elementary programs were established.  Still, I had continued, the needed expansion to secondary and through early college while able to be sustained by tuition, assuming continued enrollment, would return nothing to investors as every tuition penny would have to be put back into the school until it topped out at just over four hundred, projected to be at the end of year nine.  And after that, with maintenance and replacement as well as other costs I thought there would be very little money left to carry-over which would be “pure-profit”. 

Well then, Bob said, I cannot see anyway by which the needed capital can be gotten from the Venture folks and individual as well as foundation philanthropy is out of the question now.  So, he concluded, the school’s dead. 

Game’s over…but the deep guilt I feel remains.  Our son is the passion for this school, and the guilt I feel over my full culpability in his personal destruction the fuel of the passion.  I thought if only I could help other children like my son, I could purge the dark feeling.  But, now I can’t.  I have to find the means of living with it.  Where is my Adama?  Where is my hope?

I wrote what appears below and in the next blog post in late 2009 and so far they exist as the best explanation as to what happened.

We parents, when we make decisions so much affecting our children’s lives, do not understand what we are doing.   I made some rather bad choices for our son which resulted in his personal destruction.  There were many signs of who are son was but I just could not read them.  And because I was so ignorant, our son’s life so much full of promise is now one full of struggle with mental illness self-induced through substance abuse.

My wife and I were married near seven years before our son’s birth, but we hadn't really a clue about who we were both as separate persons and as a married couple, no less about the big wide world of children.  We certainly did not understand how child behavior spoke to the needs of that child.  In other words we were your regular young married couple excited about our newborn and the glorious prospects for his future. 

As we saw our son as an infant we noticed he would try many things well before his body was yet developed to be successful at them with the concomitant frustration and anger.  For instance, he was no more than maybe, five or six months when we saw him a few times a day over weeks and months place hand over hand on the vertical bars of his crib moving his body upward to a standing position.  Then he would let go and boom, back onto his bottom.  The first three or four times he went boom were fun, but the sixth or seventh were anything but.  He wanted to stand up right then, but his body wasn’t yet physically ready.  There were many other things he wanted to do as he looked at us and wanted to do the same things as we did.  He tried and some attempts were successfully, like holding a small glass to drink from, some not so much, like cutting food with a knife.  And the not so much would not dissuade him from trying again, but with each unsuccessful attempt would come frustration and with recurring frustration anger.

As he grew through his first three years we supported his efforts in growing in his own way and in discharging the resultant frustration as much as we could.  But we really didn’t understand what was going on inside him at all.  Further, we didn’t recognize how this would later manifest in making his way through the world. 

My wife went back to work not too long after our son’s birth and I was working as well, so we needed to place our son with baby-sitters.  Rather than see that the placements would support his explorations and give him an opportunity to cope well with his frustrations, we just placed him with local folks we knew through the parish.  We noted his tell-tale behaviors of upset over his day, when we picked him up, but felt we couldn't do anymore than hug him and give him attention and send him back to the babysitter the next morning.  What he was really saying went well over our heads.

Our son was very energetic, a real “American Boy”, running and jumping into, onto and around everything inside and outside the house, being curious about everything and especially in exploring how the world felt inside him as it he ran quickly through it, jumped onto it and played with it.  I didn’t catch-on to the deeper meaning of it all.  So, when it came time for pre-school, I said:  our son needs to be able to cope with "structure" for him to do well in school; so, we should be looking for a pre-school with structure.  Of course when parents talk about structure they all the time are talking about a heavy dose of external discipline, strict obedience to authority and a high degree of quietude, just the opposite of who are son was and opposite of the kind of pre-school environment he needed. Long story short: the mis-match showed in many little ways but we did not pay it attention as we were, as said, quite ignorant of all this kind of stuff and didn't have it in us to translate his behaviors into statements of need until they became quite obvious cries for help.  Oh, we were attentive, as loving parents usually are, but his little unhappinesses we could not see as his way of saying that this pre-school thing was definitely not working for him at all.

And as to his parochial school which he entered as a kindergartener, as I will relate next, well, I was such a good and dutiful person of faith I just couldn't believe what was happening was happening, believed I could with constant talking with these good people mitigate the troubles and believed all would turn out okay in the end.  As one should have anticipated, it didn't turn out well at all and it took nearly four years of our complicity with that school system before it became crystal clear that we had to act to remove him from it.  But, by that time the awful damage was already done.

All along he was telling us very clearly of who he was, but we just couldn't translate his kid behavior to statements of need and from statements of need to doing well by our most cherished life we so intentionally worked to bring into this world.