Racquel

She comes to a class I've actually cancelled.   I kind of expected her, so I came to the eight o'clock classroom, scrubbed clean over the weekend, the chalkboard immaculate and blank.

She sits down and takes out her tablet computer, her constant companion, her only friend so far as I can see, the screen smeared and greasy. 

We are the only two in the classroom.  Everybody else is working on their research papers, or ought to be, preparing for conferences with me.  They got the electronic memo, I guess.

Racquel has Asperger's Syndrome. 

She is far, far behind her peers.  She seems used to that.  We are still laboring just to get her Works Cited page in order.  It takes a half hour before her list of sources is alphabetized with the authors' last names first.

We have a little time when this is done, and I can tell she's exhausted, or bored, with all this.  So I give her a list of questions she needs to answer to finish her research paper, and then we talk about her life. 

Since she's told me she has Aspeger's, I ask her a little about herself. 

She feels it hasn't impacted her schoolwork much, and I know this is not true.  But she says she didn't have friends in high school, and I am sure that probably is true. 

She goes to two churches.  Her parents are divorced with joint custody, she tells me without being asked, so she has two churches also.  No, no friends at church.  Except this one older lady.

What did she like to do when she was younger?  We talk about the old Nintendo GameCube.  She loved Sailor Moon, a gift from her father, who seems to have worked very hard to find a niche for this strange, friendless, awkward child.   I instinctively like the man, project on him my own feelings as a father of an unusual child.  I've no idea if my picture of him is accurate.  But Racquel likes him, trusts him.  He looks after her, takes her to school, picks her up, finds things for her to do that she can do.

She is majoring in computer repair.  I wish I could find somebody who would just teach her to do this, apprentice her to somebody with very thin screwdrivers and no interest in making her do research papers. 

She looks me dead in the eye the whole time we talk.  I can tell this is a learned behavior, the product of therapy, like the fact that she conspicuously struggles to keep her hands still.  When we stop talking her eyes wander the walls, trace patterns in the floor-tiles, and get drawn back over and over again to the computer screen with its disordered URL's and her chaotic attempts to order the weird world of prose into which she has been hurled.

There, she flits through tabs and tabs of sources for her research paper, long technical explanations of Asperger's Syndrome, which is her topic.  But she needs the short articles, tiny paragraphs of barely-adequate answers by unknown people on the web, that army of misinformation and distortion that is her only hope for finding answers to questions she doesn't really have.

At the end of forty minutes, we are done: there is little left to talk about unless I want to invite her into my life, to become my daughter and to let me look after her.  But she has a dad, and a mom, and a brother, and I realize that the impulse to look after people is just the pang of compassion, sympathy.  Both words mean "mutual suffering."  And it's my own suffering I want to ease as she sits there alone in the classroom, and I leave her there as I guess scores of teachers have left her alone, wishing I could hurl magical nickles into the wishing well of her life and make the world different than it is, and knowing that her family stands as good a chance as I have. 

But as I tell her to have a good day and turn my back, I do feel so much smaller than I did before.

Comments

[Kanga]

Otter, this brought tears to my eyes. How I wish all who struggled could find the help they need. Or at the very least have teachers as compassionate as you.

[Otter]

Kanga, thank you. But I can't let that misapprehension stand. Most teachers I know would want to help Racquel as much as I do. But most, like me, would find there's so little we can do.