On Mental Illness/Developmental Disabilities

I almost witnessed a fight today.

It was terrifying.

I have been substitute teaching for almost two years now in a variety of schools, and although I have received attitude from a number of relatively annoying individuals, I have never felt afraid in a classroom. Until today. I was not the target of any aggression, nor was I the sole party working to stop the fight before it began, but throughout the rest of the class period, I couldn’t shake the tension that was assaulting me. My breath was labored, my palms were sweaty, and my equilibrium felt slightly off despite the fact that no actual violence had occurred.

I don’t know how it started. One of the many issues plaguing American education is the increasing volume of class sizes, and when faced with 25-30 kids at a time, it is rather difficult to monitor every morsel of semi-intelligible conversation. My days are often filled with a soft focus wherein I pretend not to hear the kids swearing to each other under their breath (you have to pick your battles), so you can imagine my surprise when I see a kid in the back of the class stand up and challenge his neighbor to hit him. Customarily, this invitation would be spoken with an air of fallacy or comedy, but the student’s voice remained disturbingly vicious throughout his declaration. His eyes were piercing, his body was rigid, and from thirty feet away, I could tell that every muscle in his body was ready to explode the second that his terms were accepted.

“Do it! Fucking do it, man. You ain’t shit. I’m not gonna back down. I’ve already hit you before.”

His words were dripping with malice as he dared his victim to throw the first blow and absolve him of responsibility, and I’ll admit…I hesitated. For a person who stages violence for a living on occasion, I am quite unaccustomed to the actual thing. I know what the body should look like when preparing for an altercation, and I know how to convincingly portray the force necessary to inflict a specific amount of pain, but I had a feeling that these guys weren’t going to stop if I called “Hold!” My toolbox had nothing to equip me for this situation, but in my second of hesitation, another woman stepped between the boys. She immediately began talking the larger boy down and eventually got him out of the room before the seated boy had a chance to retaliate.

She’s a paraprofessional. The seated boy has Asperger’s.

From what I gathered by listening to various conversations after the incident, this was not new information to any of the surrounding students.

“Yeah, his parents used to hit him…”

“He gets like this sometimes…”

“He’s fucking crazy, man…”

I was shocked. Awareness was not the problem. Evidently, the aggressor had a temper problem of his own, and for some reason, today was the day where he wanted to exploit this student’s disability to fulfill his personal well of violence. Thankfully, any physical violence was halted before it could begin, a specialist took the students out of class, and a relative sense of calm swiftly returned to the room…but this incident continues to fester in my gut, because it signals a much larger problem that I haven’t considered in quite a while.

Awareness isn’t enough. When I was in high school, I barely knew what autism was, and I think I may have heard the term “Asperger’s” on a tv show, but I definitely wasn’t educated on the proper way to understand someone with any type of mental disorder. Any type of mental illness or developmental disability was seen as weakness, afflicted students were bullied, and we blissfully continued our lives in ignorance. Nowadays, students are clearly aware that these conditions exist, but as today showed me, they are still far from understanding how to properly address these students with any sort of compassion and empathy.

After the class was over, a fellow teacher and I had a brief discussion about the benefits and downfalls of “mainstreaming” education – the practice of dismissing the need for Special Education classes in favor of a more inclusive strategy with tudents of all backgrounds taking the same courses. Personally, I’m still not sure where I stand on the issue. I would never want to socially or professionally ostracize a group of people in a discriminatory fashion, but I also believe that it is ignorant to assume that the implementation of students with disabilities will have absolutely no adverse effects on the classroom environment as a whole.

Maybe the students this morning were having a legitimate argument that escalated beyond repair, maybe the aggressor knew exactly which buttons to push in order to manipulate this other student into forcing his hand, or maybe this violent flash appeared out of nowhere…like I stated earlier, I will never know. Perhaps his disability was a factor, and perhaps it was inconsequential, but at the end of the day, the paraprofessional and I had to spend the rest of the hour fearful for the safety of the rest of our students, and that is a feeling that I would very much hate to replicate in the future.

Regardless of your stance on mainstreaming education, the events of today proved to me that the discussion needs to continue not only to maximize the effectiveness of each child’s education, but also to create a generation of young adults that are respectful and informed about issues that many of us like to keep in the shadows.