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Monday, December 11, 2006

Making the grade

When Jamie entered kindergarten nine years ago, my wife Janet and I worried that he wouldn’t be ready.  Our concerns were not unusual—but Jamie was: he would be the only child with Down syndrome in Westview Elementary.  He was assigned a paraprofessional and “pullout” sessions for occupational and speech therapy: standard fare, these days, for “special needs” children of all kinds.  But at the age of six, Jamie wasn’t very verbal, and we had no idea how he’d adjust to a real classroom after four years of child care.

Imagine our relief, then, when we went to our first parent-teacher conference in October and were informed that Jamie was “advanced” academically but needed some work with his social skills.  He knew the alphabet and lots of fun facts about animals; he had shown off his amazing memory.  How, we were asked, had he managed to learn so much?

Last fall, our first meeting with Jamie’s seventh-grade teachers was not nearly so cheering.  Despite his math skills—he can do two-digit multiplication with ease—he was failing to grasp the concepts of area and perimeter.  He wasn’t paying attention in science class, where his paraprofessional was doing much of his work for him; and he didn’t seem to get French at all.

We’d asked for Jamie to be included in those three “regular” classrooms, on the grounds that he’s good at math, fascinated with the natural world, and exceptionally curious about languages.  But when we discovered that the next item on the math agenda would be the area of irregular shapes, we agreed to bail out.

We pleaded for French and science, though.  “I know he’s not getting it all,” Janet said to his science teacher.  “But he truly loves learning about the world around him, and we don’t want that world to close in on him . . .  just yet.” His French teacher, unsurprisingly, had never had a child with Down syndrome in her class; she assured us that Jamie did not speak when he was called on and did not understand how to write complete sentences in French.  “He doesn’t write complete sentences in English, either,” I replied.  “And he’s shy about speaking up.  But he already knows the days of the week and the months of the year, and he’s beginning to understand about time.  Now, we don’t want him to slow down the rest of the class.  So if it’s possible for him to take the class pass/fail, we’ll do everything we can to help him.”

I turned out to be wrong about time: Jamie never did understand why the French perversely insist on calling 7:40 eight hours minus twenty, so I eventually agreed with him that sept heures et quarante would get the general idea across even if it was marked “wrong” on the test.  And even though he learned what voyager means, he never remembered that tu voyages has an “s” even though je voyage and il voyage do not.  But he negotiated the hyphens and apostrophes of qu’est-ce que c’est with élan, he mastered the form of est-ce que tu? and he turned out to be a whiz with adverbs—getting them right quelquefois at first, then souvent.  (Though quelquefois remains his favorite.) His pronunciation got better and better, too—no small thing for a child who didn’t learn to read fluently until he was eight.  It was hard enough for him to master English vowels and silent letters the first time around, let alone foreign imponderables like ils aiment and les yeux.

One day when we were walking Lucy, our dog, I told him how proud I was of all his hard work in French.  He was in no mood for kind words: “it’s too hard,” he grumbled.  “I always fail.” He’d said something similar about science as well, when he had trouble keeping track of all the parts of a cell and began to realize that he might not achieve his dream of becoming a marine biologist.  (I told him he could still shoot for the position of marine biologist helper.) Jamie is fifteen years old; he knows he has a disability, he knows that it’s called “Down syndrome,” and he’s very well aware of how hard he struggles just to stay in the same room with “normal” kids a few years younger than he.  He even had an odd moment of illumination in January of this year when the science class turned to the details of human reproduction, and he learned that most of us have 46 chromosomes but that people with Down syndrome have 47.  “Wow, one more,” he said, intrigued and a little bit impressed.  I wonder if he thought to himself, you know, that explains a lot, and whether this was any comfort to him in those rare moments when he thinks of himself as someone who always fails.

But despite his moments of despair, he never failed to remember that étudier and décembre take accents aigus and that mère and père take accents graves.  When we asked him, parle-tu français? he never failed to say je parle français souvent or très bien—even though those answers are not quite true.  And although he failed his science test on rocks, he learned a great deal about living things—which is where his real interests lie, anyway.  When, in response to his query about why one of his Challenger League baseball teammates was bald, I tried to explain to him what cancer is, and how cells could be sick, he replied, “like the cell membrane and the cell nucleus.” When we went through the digestive system on one long homework night, I said “let’s skip the pancreas—I don’t think you know that one,” and he shot back, “Lucy had pancreatitis and cannot eat any spicy food.”

At the end of the year, Jamie’s teachers and caseworkers advised us that eighth-grade science and French would definitely be too much for him.  Perhaps they feared that Jamie’s parents, the double-barreled Ph.D.s, would push their disabled kid until he broke.  “That’s fine with us,” we said, to their palpable relief.  “We just wanted him to get a sense of it all, and to stay in some regular classes for as long as he could.” From this point on, we figure, we’ll hire tutors for him, and they can teach him at his own pace. 

It’s true, he failed quelquefois.  But in eight years of inclusive education, he learned more about the world than we—or, possibly, he—could have hoped for when he started kindergarten.  Now, as Jamie finally leaves the “regular” classroom, all we can hope is that he taught his teachers and classmates a few valuable things about people with 47 chromosomes.  And that they’ll remember the lesson, too.

Posted by Michael on 12/11 at 08:35 AM
Jamie • (48) Comments • Permalink
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