The ordinarily unseen
a 2018 story written for Macquarie Primary School with collaborators Wendy Cave, Denise Cowling, Leanne Platts and Lianne Gyles
1.
So, first of all, let me try to set the scene from three weeks ago.
There I am, Mitchell Barrett, age 23 and in my second year of a primary teaching degree. I’m sitting in a crowded university lecture theatre with more than a hundred other preservice teachers. Misty, the lecturer, is outlining our first assignment, the one we need to hand in a week after our observation days in our assigned school.
‘In no more than 5000 words … [groans from the students … ‘she must be joking’ whispers the student next to me, ‘that’s a fucking novel, excuse my French’] … in no more than 5000 words,’ Misty continues, ‘you must report on something that is ordinarily unseen.’
More murmurs from the students. We have no idea what she’s talking about. The ordinarily unseen?
‘The danger, when you pre-service teachers go out on observation,’ Misty explains, ‘is that you’ll sit comfortably up the back of the classroom, watching the teacher and wondering how you’re going to manage when it’s your turn to take a class. There’s nothing wrong with that, as far as it goes. But I want you to do something much more ambitious, something much more useful. I want you to look out for what is ordinarily unseen. A classroom is full of the ordinarily unseen, and the teacher who continues to be blind to what is ordinarily unseen ends up being a very limited teacher indeed. I want you to train yourselves to see what others don’t see, to be aware of more than what’s on the surface. I want you to develop the ability to see the ordinarily unseen.’
‘You mean seeing what students are actually doing when the teacher’s not looking,’ calls out a voice from the front.
‘That’s one possibility,’ says Misty. ‘But there are others. Many others. Don’t rush to decide what it is that you’ll look out for. Spend a bit of time in the classroom with your eyes open, look out for something or someone who is ordinarily unseen, and then write a report. To be handed in a week after your week’s observation. 5000 words maximum. If you find something that is truly significant, you’ll find the 5000 word limit a real pain. You’ll have heaps to write about. If you find yourself drying up after 1000 words or so, you’ve probably chosen something of little consequence.’
So this is my report.
And Misty was right.
Five thousand words turned out to be way too little.
2.
‘Spend a bit of time in the classroom with your eyes open,’ said Misty. ‘Look out for something or someone who is ordinarily unseen.’
So that’s what I did on my first morning.
It was something of a shock, I can tell you.
I knew I was going into one of Canberra’s most highly regarded primary schools. There have been articles in the press about it, references to it in our lectures at uni. It’s a school with a forward-looking, dynamic, student-centred reputation. It calls itself an ‘inquiry school’, where both students and teachers are encouraged to be asking questions all the time.
So I was looking forward to it. I expected to see smiling faces, lots of focused activity, a kind of satisfying buzz around the classrooms and in the corridors.
The first thing I saw, as I walked from the carpark to the front office, was an adult calling up to a boy in a tree. ‘Get down from there, Declan Adams, this minute. I’m waiting.’ The boy was out of reach and looking upwards into the branches above him, pretending not to hear. The adult - was it a teacher or a parent? - looked frustrated. I hurried on, pretending not to notice.
As I signed my name in at the front desk, the siren for the beginning of school sounded. Most of the kids had already gone into their classrooms, but there was some kind of a disturbance outside the office of the principal, and she was kneeling down next to a distressed child, trying to calm him down. I couldn’t hear what was being said, but it was clear that there’d been an incident, perhaps an argument or a fight.
‘It’s not always like this, believe me,’ said the woman at the reception desk.
Just then the front door opened and the boy who’d been up the tree - Declan - came in with the adult I’d seen earlier close behind. She, the adult, now looked grim and determined.
‘It must be a full moon,’ she said to the receptionist. She noticed me signing myself in. ‘Welcome,’ she said to me ruefully.
‘Is that one of the teachers or a parent?’ I asked as the two of them disappeared into a classroom a little way down the corridor.
‘Neither,’ said the receptionist. ‘That’s Stella, one of our LSAs.’
‘LSA?’ I asked.
‘Learning Support Assistant,’ she said.
‘And the boy?’
‘Declan. He’s in our 5/6 class with Peter Newbury and Angela James. The class you’ve been assigned to.’
3.
Ten minutes later I was sitting up the back of the 5/6 class. Most of the students were sitting on the carpet, though Declan was under a desk at the back of the room with Stella sitting close by. The teachers, Peter and Angela, were sitting on chairs facing the students, but it seemed as though the day hadn’t really got going yet. There was a restlessness amongst the students; some were chatting with each other, others doodling or looking out the window, waiting for something to happen. Angela and Peter were talking with each other, and I got the impression that they were adjusting the morning’s plan in the light of the unsettled beginning to the day.
As I waited, I thought about ‘the ordinarily unseen’.
I was confused, and, to tell the truth, a bit anxious. There was nothing that I’d experienced so far that might help me see the ordinarily unseen. Declan’s tree climbing, the corridor discussion with the Principal, the restless beginning to the day in this Year 5/6 classroom, these were all very visible events.
What kind of thing was Misty meaning?
The momentum started to pick up in the classroom. Students were soon working on their enquiry projects, and Declan emerged from under the table and seemed to be doodling or drawing. Stella didn’t leave his side.
After a while Angela came over to where I was sitting and introduced herself. She talked for a while about what the class was doing and how they’d had to work especially hard this morning to focus the kids. It had been a restless week, she said, though she wasn’t sure why that was.
I asked her about Declan.
‘Declan’s only been with us since February,’ she said. ‘It hasn’t been an easy six months. He’s had a troubled past in a couple of other schools and was something of a nightmare when he first arrived here. He’s starting to settle down though, especially since Stella’s been assigned to him. Stella’s with him pretty much full time.’
She must have seen the surprised look on my face.
‘You should have seen him when he arrived,’ she said. ‘All over the place. Peter, my teacher partner, put a lot of time into helping him, but in the end it was too much, even for Peter. Stella’s been terrific, just there all the time with him. The two of them have formed quite a bond.’
I told Angela what I’d seen as I arrived.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know it must have looked out of control, but it’s happened before. And he comes down. He makes a show of not hearing Stella, but he comes down. Earlier in the year he would have run home, or stayed up in the tree. Stella’s great. She speaks to him much more directly than I would ever dare to. He’s come to respect her. They squabble and tussle at times, but it’s working. You get the sense that, at least most of the time, Declan likes being here.’
Declan needs safe places, Angela went on to say, and there are times when the tree or under the desk feel safe. Apparently Declan and Stella have an agreement about Stella sitting on a particular playground seat at recess and lunchtimes. She sits there for moral support. Declan has chosen the spot and he knows that this is where he’ll find her if he has any concerns. He doesn’t understand emotions all that well, Angela told me, and being quite a big boy he will sometimes scare other kids even when he isn’t meaning to. But things are settling down.
I thought later about what Angela had said. Did the bond between Stella and Declan qualify as being ‘the ordinarily unseen’? Certainly I hadn’t seen it when I first encountered the two of them. But Angela saw it. Presumably most of the school saw it. It was hardly the ‘ordinarily unseen’.
4.
But later in the day, in another part of the school, I saw something that I thought might qualify.
The Principal introduced herself at lunchtime and suggested that I spend the afternoon visiting some of the other classrooms, to get a sense and feel of the bigger picture.
It was fun.
The last class I visited was the preschool. I was introduced there to Lynn, another of the school’s LSAs.
While Lynn and I were chatting, a little boy turned around and, frowning, put his fingers to his lips to indicate that we shouldn’t be speaking so loudly. Lynn beckoned to him, and he approached us, muttering disapprovingly all the way, and then stood silently waiting for Lynn to speak. He was dressed more formally than the other children, almost as though he was about to go to a children’s party.
‘Jusef,’ said Lynn, ‘I’d like you to meet our visitor, Mr Barrett. Mr Barrett will be a teacher himself one day. Like you perhaps.’
‘I have not as yet made up my mind about a career,’ said Jusef.
It was all so adult: his posture, his speech, his clothes. It was all I could do to suppress a smile.
‘I’m pleased to meet you,’ I said, shaking the hand that was offered.
After Jusef rejoined the group, Lynn explained that appearances can be deceiving. (Ah, I thought. The ordinarily unseen perhaps?) Jusef, for all his superficial confidence, spent the first ten minutes of every morning weeping when his mother left, and then wouldn’t let Lynn out of his sight for the rest of the day.
By this time, the kids were all gathered around the teacher. It was the end of the day, and both teacher and Lynn the LSA were looking a little weary. I’d already noticed that the teacher was losing her voice, and now she looked over to Lynn with a cocked eyebrow, as if to say, ‘Well, we’ve got 15 minutes to go and I’ve run out of tricks. What will we do?’ It was clear that the two of them operated pretty much as a team.
‘Who wants to sing a song?’ said Lynn brightly to the class.
Hands shot up immediately, and for the next ten minutes we had ‘Humpty Dumpty’ and then ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ and then ‘Twinkle twinkle, little star’. The familiar songs popped out, one after another.
Jusef, I noticed, was not singing at all, but instead seemed lost in thought. I suspected he was rather disapproving of all this puerile song-singing. Then, to my surprise, he put his hand up.
‘Yes Jusef,’ said Lynn. ‘You’d like to sing something?’ I saw her shoot a disbelieving look in the direction of the flagging teacher.
Jusef nodded.
The class fell silent.
He approached the chair on which the teacher was sitting, and firmly indicated that she should move. Then he put one leg on the chair, clutched an imaginary guitar, and busted out a gutsy rendition of ‘Paradise City … where the grass is green and the girls are pretty’. Word for word. Perfectly.
When he finished there was a momentary stunned silence, and then raucous clapping and back slapping. Jusef bowed stiffly and resumed his seat.
As we left, Lynn said, ‘Well, that was unexpected. Honestly, I’ll look at him differently from this day forward. Who would have known! Who would have known!’
5.
That night, as I read over the notes I’d made about the day, I thought I’d found my ‘ordinarily unseen’. Jusef’s hidden self.
But then, once again, I started to have doubts. I had a niggling feeling that there was something else, something right in front of me that I wasn’t seeing.
I started to list the things I’d encountered on that first day.
A boy up a tree, brought back to the classroom by the LSA.
A boy under a desk, later on to be seen sitting with the LSA and drawing and chatting.
A boy in the playground, knowing that the LSA was sitting in a particular seat just in case she was needed.
An LSA in a kindergarten delighting in a revealed side of a student with whom she had formed a special bond.
There was a common element.
The presence of the LSA.
And, I suddenly realised (with something of a shock) that in all of the many lectures and tutorials I’d sat through at uni, all the assignments we’d done about lesson plans and classroom management and student motivation and enquiry learning and social disadvantage and special learning needs and so forth and so on, there had been not a single mention of the role of the LSA.
It was the LSA who was the ordinarily unseen. By the university, anyway. And certainly, until today, by me.
6.
The following day, after a much more settled morning in Kerri and Peter’s 5/6 classroom, I went out into the sunshine at lunchtime. I saw Lynn and Stella sitting together on a seat near the school oval. They were sitting, I guessed, on the seat assigned to Stella by Declan. Stella looked up as I approached, and then pointed, smiling, to a corner of the playground.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘That’s Declan.’
He was crouched down beside a girl I now knew was called Anila, and the two of them were looking together at an ant’s nest.
‘Not long ago,’ said Stella, ‘Anila’s mother was making complaints that Declan had made her daughter cry. And now look at them.’
‘Long may it last,’ said Lynn.
‘It hasn’t been easy,’ said Stella.
Lynn was nodding.
‘He was only coming from 9 til 10 o’clock, at the beginning of the year,’ Stella continued. ‘It was all he could take really. There were lots of incidents. But gradually we increased that, especially since I’ve been working with him, and now he’s here from 9 to 3.’
‘But he still has his moments,’ said Lynn.
‘Oh he still has his moments alright! You’ve got to constantly keep your eyes on him, because he’ll just wander out of the classroom. He can’t sit for very long. Like today, just before lunch, I was watching him, I was sitting away from him, and the little bugger, I tell you what, he was looking at me, slowly moving to the door, and I just kept signaling to him, you know …’
Stella mimed her stern face, her finger raised in warning, as if to say ‘I’m watching you, Declan Adams! Don’t you dare!’
‘He was smiling?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes! But if I didn’t have eye contact with him and let him know that ‘I’m watching you!’, he would have been gone. Yeah. I underestimate him at times. In lots of different ways. And I’ll be honest about that. Every day is a learning curve.’
‘In what way?’ I asked.
‘Oh, he’s just cluey, you know. He’s good at wrapping you round his little finger. He’s got his mum wrapped around his finger. And his psychiatrist! He can be very conniving. He’s very sneaky. Yeah … But I try to be honest with him.’
‘You’re honest? How do you mean?’
‘Well you saw him up the tree.’
‘I did.’
‘But you didn’t hear the conversation. At first he had all kinds of reasons why he had to be up the tree. At first he tried to fill me with a bit of … you know … lies. But he hasn’t had a great week, and it’s been hard on me as well as others, and so I said to him, ‘Declan, it’s been a hard week. It’s been hard for you, and it’s been hard for me and you’ve probably seen that I’ve been feeling very frustrated this week.’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, you’re different, you’re different to last week’. And then he went quiet, as if he was thinking about things. Then he goes, ‘Maybe my medication’s not working.’ Once before they changed his medication and everything went crazy for a while, and he tells me now that they’ve just changed the medication again. And so he’s thinking, he’s thinking about what’s going on. He’s not just lashing out, he’s thinking. He’s reflecting … like that’s a lot for a child of that age.’
We sit quietly for a few moments before Stella continues.
‘He’s very clever! And he’s full of surprises. Sometimes, when I’m sitting next to him, it’s like he’s just in this other world, and the teacher might be saying something and Declan’s doodling or drawing or something and you wouldn’t even know that he’s listening, he’s just colouring in or something … he’s big on his colouring in at the moment …which is good and …. Anyway, the next minute he can put up his hand and … give an answer or an idea, and it’s so on the ball. It sort of shocks you … There’s so much going on there that you just don’t normally see.’
‘You ordinarily wouldn’t see it,’ I said, feeling not-a-little pleased with myself and how I was going to nail this university assignment.
I described the assignment to Stella and Lynn. ‘I’m guessing you see things from a different perspective than others in the school. So I thought I might write about that for my assignment. I was wondering if maybe we could meet after school sometime, so that you could help me see things through your eyes.’
They were silent for a bit, and looked thoughtful.
‘Yeah,’ said Lynn at last. ‘I think maybe we do see some things a bit differently. Like we’re on a different level … not lower, or anything like that …’
‘Though if you look at what we earn,’ said Stella, ‘that’s definitely on a different level!’
‘So true!,’ said Stella. ‘I think from ten years ago, even, or twenty years ago or whatever, the LSA’s responsibilities have got more and more and more. But the money, or the level, hasn’t got any higher. I think that that in itself says something.’
‘My husband pulls me up there when I say that. He says ‘Life is all about choices Lynn, you’ve made a choice, if you want a teacher’s pay, then you need to go and get a teacher’s degree.’
‘That’s true,’ said Stella. ‘But I also think we do a lot of study as well, and I think that should be recognised. If you do a Cert 3 or a Cert 4 or a Diploma or whatever, I think you should be paid accordingly for your study. I’ve been here for over 10 years now, and it’s the same with a lot of the LSAs, we’ve got a kind of knowledge of the place and of what’s happened in the past that a lot of the other people don’t have.’
‘A teacher can get promoted, or get a higher salary if their excellence is recognised,’ said Lynn. ‘Why do we not have that for LSAs? I’ve put the case before to people who can make decisions. I put it to the Director General one day, my whole case about LSAs and why we’re not looked at the same as teachers. You know, if you just want to do your job and have the holidays and collect the LSA pay, and that’s why you’re there, there’s nothing wrong with that. But what if you want to be really good at your job? And step up and do more and study and do extra PD .’
‘And how did the people who can make decisions respond?’ I asked.
‘They told me I’d given them a lot to think about.’
‘And that’s it?’
‘That’s it. Nothing happened.’
‘And why do you think that was?’
‘I’m not blaming them,’ said Lynn. ‘’Their workload is horrific. But in the big scheme of things, it’s not seen as being so important. They know we’ll continue to do our jobs one hundred percent. It’s just not the priority. It’s down the bottom, it will stay down the bottom. And it doesn’t mean they don’t respect us. I’m just saying …’
‘We’re just saying,’ said Stella, ‘that sometimes it seems that we’re heard but not listened to. It’s a big difference.’
Lynn looked at her phone. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said.
‘Can we meet and talk after school one day?’ I asked.
‘You want to hear more?’ Lynn was smiling.
‘I want to hear more,’ I said.
And so we agreed to meet the following day for coffee.
7.
After school the next day, the three of us were sitting in a local cafe. Stella, who’d been so full of beans the day before, was looking thoughtful, a little preoccupied.
‘Are you OK?’ asked Lynn, frowning. ‘You haven’t said a word since we left school.’
‘I’m fine,’ said Stella.
‘Declan had a bad day?’
‘No, Declan was sick today.’
The coffees arrived and no-one said anything while we took our first sips.
‘No, I’m fine,’ said Stella suddenly. ‘It’s just … well, it’s been a very different kind of day, with Declan not there’.
‘Less full on?’ I asked.
‘I guess,’ she said. ‘But … I don’t know … I didn’t feel as … I’ve had to switch gears. I was put in with another class for the day and I had to … well, … like I didn’t really know the routine or what it was that I was meant to be doing. I hadn’t got a lot of background … like it’s the first time I’ve worked with them this year. So I think that’s … as an LSA, I find that quite frustrating, when we don’t get a lot of background information before we’re thrown … not thrown in, I don’t want to say thrown in … placed in a classroom … so different from working with Declan where it’s very hands on and I know what my role is. I just didn’t feel connected, which isn’t surprising I know because it was my first day in there, but I really felt out of the swing of it. I didn’t have a clue about what’s going on. Like I didn’t have a clear role. So that’s always been a really frustrating thing to me. I don’t know about anybody else. I just feel really bad that I don’t know anybody’s background, I don’t know anybody who needs help …
‘And that’s really important to you, I said.
‘It’s really important to all of us, I think. There’s nothing worse, for me, than going into a classroom and feeling useless. … I could feel myself becoming more and more grumpy, more and more critical. Because I was feeling unconnected, I guess. Anyway, that’s over now. Let’s talk about something else.’
‘But it sounds important,’ I said. ‘It’s important to feel connected. To understand what’s going on. To feel as though you’ve got a part in it all.’
‘I guess that’s what Declan struggles with, or what you’re trying to help him with, isn’t it,’ said Lynn. ‘To learn how to be a part of things. Not to feel on the outside all the time.’
‘I guess that’s what I was feeling today,’ said Stella. ‘That I’d been been pulled out of one socket, the Declan socket, where good things can happen, and then plugged into another one but the switch wasn’t on. I wasn’t adding anything to what was going on.’
Was this, I wondered, another aspect of the ‘ordinarily unseen’? That we all - teachers, LSAs, students - have this fundamental desire to be connected, to be plugged into systems and relationships that seem meaningful? That we all get frustrated or angry or withdrawn when we’re not?
Or was this actually blindingly obvious to everyone all the time?
I was struggling again. Did Misty want me to write about what was ordinarily unseen by me? Or by others as well?
8.
‘Can I change tack for a moment?’ I asked.
They nodded. Stella, I noticed, had lost some of her faraway look. The conversation seemed to have brought her back into the present.
‘I’ve been wondering,’ I said, ‘whether you think LSAs see things that others don’t see.’
‘Do you mean LSAs in general?’
‘Yes. Does an LSA see things differently from, say, a teacher?’
‘Well,’ said Stella, ‘the teachers and the executive, they see things from their level. From their level it looks a bit different to how it looks from our level.’
‘And what does it look like from your level?’
Neither responded immediately. Stella was scraping some of the froth from the rim her empty cup. Lynn was looking lost in thought.
‘It’s like …,’ said Stella slowly. ‘It’s for the teachers it’s all about what the kids are learning. All the curriculum stuff. I think we’re closer to the level which is about … the other stuff. I don’t know how to explain it really.’
‘We are at a different level,’ said Lynn, ‘in the kids’ eyes as well, to what the teachers are. So in some ways they’re probably just a little bit more comfortable with us. I’m not saying that they’re uncomfortable with the teachers …’
‘No no, they’re not, it’s not that,’ said Stella.
‘But for example, I might be in a class and there are a number of teachers in there but even if I am up the other end of the room, often a child on the other side of the room will come over to me to ask to go to the toilet, or to go and have a drink, or … I find that a lot’
‘And why is that?’ I asked.
‘I think we have an emotional connection with them,’ said Lynn. ‘We’re not a friend, but we’re … we’re not a teacher. So with that comfortable level, we’re like … we seem more like … I get called mum … All the time. Or Grandma. Sometimes I get ‘school mama.’
They both laughed.
‘It’s not just the students,’ said Stella. ‘I get a lot of parents that will come to me rather than a teacher. And usually it’s parents from, you know, low socio-economic families, families which possibly had really bad experiences with a teacher in their schooling. But they’ll come to me and they’ll come to me often for … for … advice.’
‘We have different language to teachers … and it makes them feel comfortable,’ said Lynn.
‘Can you give me an example?’ I asked.
‘Well,’ said Stella, ‘recently I’ve had three parents who’ve wanted to talk to me after someone had died within a family. They’ve asked me how do you talk about it in the family, what do you say to a child, what’s appropriate. And all three have come to me, not to the teacher. It’s that different relationship. Maybe it’s that I’m a bit older and have had more life experience, I’m not sure. Anyway, parents seem to want to talk to me about life challenges and family stuff. And to ask advice.’
‘So, I said, ‘it’s almost like the parents, or certain parents, see you as being more … worldly wise, rather than technically, teacherly? … or skilled? These words are not very good.’
‘Yeah, I think so,’ said Stella. ‘The parents can approach the LSA …’
‘… on an emotional level,’ said Lynn. ‘yeah. Does my kid look as though he’s happy? Has he got some friends? Does he behave in class? Is he rude to people? That kind of thing …’
9.
‘Can I tell you a story,’ said Lynn.
‘Go for it,’ I said.
‘There was this little autistic girl we had at preschool last year, and for the first half of the year she would not come near the other children. She was always off on her own, and when the class was gathered together on the mat, she would be in this other room by herself. There was this set of puzzles in the other room, and she really loved the puzzles, the wooden blocks and the colours and the feel of them. She would just sit there putting the blocks into patterns or building little towers, or smelling the blocks, or rubbing them against her cheek. She would do it for hours. Anyway, I said to the teacher one day, ‘Can I move this set of puzzles and plonk it near the mat?’ The teacher was a bit doubtful. ‘It will mean she won’t be able to play with the puzzles when we’re on the mat,’ she said. I said, ‘Just humour me, I’ll move them all again if it doesn’t work’. So the next morning the girl came in, she went to go into her little room when the kids came into the mat, and then she toddled back out and saw the blocks and sat next to them near the mat. She did the same thing with the blocks, and seemed lost in her world, but she was a part of our group … she was a part of our group from that day on.’
‘That’s exactly the kind of little thing we do,’ said Stella. ‘That’s the kind of little adjustments I’m always making with Declan. Or with other kids when they can’t sit still in class or whatever, and we find ways of giving them something to do or somewhere to go where they find it easier to manage. Where they don’t become disruptive or disengaged or whatever.’
‘People don’t always notice these little things we do,’ said Lynn. ‘But I know they help. Teachers do this stuff too, they’re making adjustments all the time. I just think that maybe we have more opportunity somehow. Maybe, from our level, we see little moments when it’s possible. We help to connect things.’
10.
So now I’m back in my room trying to finish this assignment. I’ve already written more than 5000 words so I need to be brief.
For some reason, I find myself thinking about parallel universes. I was listening to the radio last week and I heard this interview with a scientist who was saying that there are many parallel universes but that we are only able see one of them, the everyday one in front of our noses. The others are there, invisible to us, universes as complex and multi-dimensional as the one we can see. It’s just that we don’t see them.
I don’t really understand this idea, but I find myself thinking about it now because it seems to me that I’ve just had a glimpse of a parallel universe.
The university and the media and some educational researchers describe schools as if they were exclusively about lesson plans and classroom behaviour management and learning outcomes and assessment scores and enquiry questions and problem based learning and direct instruction methods, and distributed leadership structures and so on. These very visible aspects of a school then get described, analysed, measured, evaluated, and so on.
This exclusive focus sometimes blinds us to a parallel universe, one that is right in front of our noses but, at least in our university, is ordinarily unseen.
It’s a parallel universe made up of all the moment-by-moment attempts, some successful and some not, to connect and to relate. These are moments full of feeling, feeling which is sometimes expressed and sometimes suppressed, but it is always present.
Declan up a tree and being talked back down.
Declan having Stella sit in a special seat.
Declan sneaking out of the classroom and half-hoping to catch Stella’s eye.
Jusef shooshing the adults before gobsmacking them with his rendition of Paradise.
The parents talking to Lynn about a death in the family.
The autistic girl and her blocks.
These are all moments in a day when attempts are being made to connect and relate and grow. These are all moments invisible to the eye that sees school only in terms of the formal learning.
It’s not as though teachers live in one universe and the LSAs in another. Both live in both.
But seeing the world through the eyes of the LSAs has helped me see the ordinarily unseen a bit more clearly.
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