Quiet hands
He was born with ants in his pants. Maybe not just ants; think spiders, crocodiles, lions, tigers — they must be crawling all over his little body, his little mind, his big imagination. This boy can’t sit still, can’t stop talking, can’t quiet down. He is my son.
On the first week of classes the first time he went to school at the age of three, he punched a classmate who wouldn’t give him the toy he wanted. He ran up and down the classroom, went up the table and under the chair, talked non-stop delighted by the sudden swarm of people and the newness of things.
The walls were painted light pink, yellow, blue, pale green. He couldn’t get enough of the ‘wow.’ His delight was contagious, but he was obviously the odd man out. He was standing when everybody was sitting. He was sitting when everybody was standing. He was washing his handkerchief in the basin and mopping the floor while his classmates were trying to learn a song or trace lines and curves on a paper.
It wasn’t just first-day of school ‘fun’ that got extended for days or weeks. By the end of the fifth month, we knew we needed help — professional help. Before he can even start learning to read and write, he needs to calm down and learn to sit.
The school introduced us to this concept of ‘play’ therapy where hyperactive kids learn to do things with other kids in small groups (without killing each other) under the guidance of a therapist. There were one-on-one sessions as well as group sessions. We understood immediately what he needs.
Playmates. He doesn’t have playmates. Those rowdy kids in the neighborhood who play rough and tumble or hide and seek with you after school hours, the big boys who stole your bike and punched you in the nose, the little ones who got dirty hands and feet playing in the rain and mud, the little mean girls in pigtails with their little dolls and dollhouses who can scream like no other. They were in everybody’s neighborhood, except in ours.
We used to live in a building and what we had was a rooftop playground with a swimming pool, but very few children. We had a corner of the house full of toys (some from 20 years ago when our eldest son was a newborn), but no kids. We have books, computers and tablets, kiddie movies and games, but no one to share them with. We began to understand that it must have been a lonely and a different kind world.
We also understood for the first time that our little boy may be a candidate for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD); that it isn’t just simple ‘ants in the pants’ but could be a lifelong behavioral disorder that could affect his chances of succeeding in school. As a writer and educator, I cannot imagine any of my children not succeeding in school. We opted for early intervention and behavior modification. Four years and three schools later, he was in a regular school and thriving.
Quiet hands
Our boy’s first therapist introduced us to the concept of ‘quiet hands.’ Before the start of a session, a lesson or any activity, a meal, he needs to clasp his hands, close his eyes and count for 20 seconds. It was a stopper and meant to calm him down. It’s supposed to give him pause, stillness, and a sense of balance. When he gets rowdy, noisy, excited or simply out of league, he also needs to do ‘quiet hands.’
I tried doing it myself and 20 seconds felt a very long time. To keep still and quiet for those 20 long seconds is like it’s never going to end.
On his fourth birthday and three months into therapy, he had a party in school and he sat on the birthday boy’s chair while his classmates sang the happy birthday song. They played the clown, sang songs, played games and ate spaghetti. No screaming, running, or hiding under the table. No tears, tantrums, or swears.
In another three months, we were not doing quiet hands quite that often anymore. We were bracing for better days ahead. But it looks like I was the one who need the quiet hands exercise. At that point in my life, I was doing three websites, writing articles like I was working in a word factory, and cramming every second of an eight-hour workday to finish as much work as possible. It has come to a point when I was too exhausted at the end of the day, I couldn’t turn off the adrenalin and finds it very difficult to sleep.
I long for quiet time and quiet hands. I had to learn, like my son, to calm down, to breathe before taking action, to pause before typing away to oblivion. I figured I needed more than 20 seconds. In between writing long pieces, I took naps — long ones that lasted a couple of hours, I played games on my mobile phone, watched TV. With no boss looking over my shoulders, I had great fears of slacking off, but surprisingly these wonderful gaps resulted in greater productivity. I was happier with my work, I felt less harassed, and I was actually working faster.
In 15 minutes
On my son’s second year in his first school, the administration refused to accept him for enrolment unless we can get a full psychological evaluation from a developmental pediatrician and a certification that he was not a candidate for ADHD.
That’s the dreaded word: ADHD. Kids with ‘ants in the pants’ are problematic for teachers. They have short attention spans, can’t sit all the time, cannot always follow rules, are disruptive in class and usually have mood swings and tantrums that disrupt classroom learning.
We were furious. What if our son would truly grow up to have ADHD, what does a medical certificate change? Can the school handle my son better? How much psychology do you really need to deal with a hyperactive four-year-old? We had doubts. If a school cannot handle kids who don’t fall within the range of “normal” behavior and can’t figure out what to do without a psychological evaluation, then we are probably better off in another school with teachers who understand kids better. We’d like to deal with a school that would accept our son as he is: ADHD or not.
My mother was a public school teacher herself. She taught for 27 years in an impoverished remote rural community. Some kids come to school barefoot, their school things wrapped in a plastic bag. Some do not have much to eat and have to walk for miles to go to school. Some cannot even read properly by third grade or had severe health problems that impede learning. My mom accepted all kinds of students (and not only because she had no choice), always saying that it was her job to teach these kids something that they can remember through life. Who knows it may be the last time that they will ever be in school? (This was the ’70s and public school dropout rate was much higher). Reading that letter again from my son’s private school, I got even more furious.
Our son’s second school didn’t ask a lot of questions nor required a medical certificate. They said they “understand” that kids come in different packages. A couple of months into the new school year, we had a letter from the guidance counsellor inviting us for a “talk.” This time, the counsellor didn’t give us a long lecture of what we already knew, instead she asked permission to modify our son’s classroom activities.
There were only seven kids in his class, and they thought it’s manageable, but he was rowdy (as expected), refused to sit down and listen and spent his time mostly inside the life-sized toy bus outside the classroom or anywhere else except in his seat. The plan was to break down our son’s activities into 15-minute segments. This means doing reading stuff for 15 minutes, then moving on to counting lessons, music lessons and other stuff that kindergarten pupils do in class. At the end of the three-hour class, he would have covered all subjects for the day without fuss, without tantrums.
The planned worked perfectly fine as the counsellor had predicted. By the end of the second grading period, the little boy was in the honors list, the supreme achievement of his young life.
Two years later, I went back to the university to teach after a two-year hiatus. I got the class list only an hour before the start of the first class meeting. I had 40 students in a class. The subject: Introduction to Print journalism. I stared at the faces of each of my students in a jam-packed classroom full of young people perhaps no different from my son. I wondered how I was going to get them interested in newspapers, much more to sustain the attention of this members of the so-called millennial generation who grew up in the digital world.
After getting to know each one, I re-worked my syllabus, introducing the 15-minute rule. Because they were already in college, I surmised I can stretch it out to 30 minutes. Each segment has a different flavor, a different feel. By the end of the three-hour class, we would have covered everything we needed to learn for the day. We played games, watched videos, read in class, and other stuff that young people like to do packaged as “lessons.” I enjoyed the class much more than I did with my previous classes.
Mainstreaming
At the end of my son’s second year in school, we agonized over the fact that we may have to transfer him yet again to another school. His teachers were fantastic, the school simply good at handling kids considered “different” but we do not want our son to grow up in a manufactured environment where everything is tailor-fit for his needs. We wanted him to grow up surrounded by kids, lots of them, not just a handful. We don’t want him to receive special attention, special activities, special treatment. We want him to tow the line, to learn to obey rules and live harmoniously with others and to understand that the world doesn’t revolve around him.
To survive in a class with 30 or 40 other kids, to learn to get what he wants without getting into a fight, to bear the noise and the chaos and thrive in the rough and tumble world of a classroom playground — that is what we want, because that is what the real world looks like. We had fears, but it was a leap we needed to take.
Three years into the third school, we were never called to the guidance office even once. On moving up ceremony of his kindergarten class, he sat for over an hour in a chair just like everyone, marched on stage to receive his certificate without a fuss. When he saw his photo with his teacher, he exclaimed: “Wow, I look like I’m looking at a whole new world.” And indeed he was.
In the coming year, he is turning 10. There are still rough edges — he doesn’t always finish his school work on time because he’s always busy talking; he loses pens and crayons almost every day because they slip in his hands, his desk, his pockets; his handwriting is still poor because he doesn’t have the patience to make the lines or the curves perfect; he gets zeros and very low scores sometimes because he says the “brain” simply didn’t work.
I was his exact opposite in school — the poster girl for deportment that every teacher dreams about. Yet, I envy my son in a lot of ways. While I struggled all my life to assert what I want, to overcome my shyness and fear of crowds and people in childhood, he is a natural-born talker, outrageously outspoken and perfectly comfortable with who he is. He knows he isn’t perfect, but he is proud of what he can do, what he is good at: talking. He can be very pushy at times, a kind of confidence bred by an overwhelming curiosity to discover the unknown and test the boundaries.
How do you move a mountain? You can count on the little boy to have some answers no matter how absurd. I will struggle to even think of the concept of a movable mountain, unless of course I’m doing it in Adobe Photoshop.
