A Small Life Retrieved

A montage from that time.

One of the most satisfying aspects of a long and varied career as a teacher, is remembering the amazing people encountered along the way.

Let me take you back, gentle reader, to the late eighties, when I had the privilege of opening a new special school in North Queensland.

Because it was a new school, it was staffed with graduate (first year) teachers. What they had in common was youth, enthusiasm, and dedication to the students with disabilities enrolled.

These children were predominantly of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage. Itinerant health clinics visiting their communities had identified them as being at risk, and over the years they had been  brought to live in a residential home run in those days by the North Queensland Crippled Children's Association (now Cootharinga). 

There they received excellent care, but they were separated from their homes and families. These days, they would probably be cared for on their own country, but that was not the practice thirty-five years ago. When the new school was opened in 1987, these children, for the first time in their lives, began to share an experience shared with children living at home with family, by attending a school located separately from where they lived. Previously the school was an annexe of the nursing home. In that situation the children ate, slept, and went to school on the one site. It was a pretty restricted environment, and once removed from their communities, they rarely returned. It was institutionalisation writ large. 

One of these children was a seven year-old from Boigu Island, living with just about every sensory disability possible. He was hearing impaired, had low vision, and microcephaly. Of greatest concern was that he was failing to thrive. There were a number of reasons for this, but a major issue was his capacity (or rather incapacity) to chew and swallow. It took literally hours to patiently feed him, much in the same fashion as a baby is fed, and finding the time to do this, both at the nursing home, and at school was a major challenge.

He had to be carefully positioned and supported and his special food presented to him one small spoonful at a time. The nursing staff would attempt this in the morning before he left for school on the bus, but time was severely limited. Much the same was true in the evening, given the staffing at the home, and he was steadily losing weight. The "failure to thrive" diagnosis would have meant a hospital admission, and tube feeding.

His teacher was determined that this would not happen, so she took the whole hour long lunch time at school to set him up and feed him. This meant she had no lunch break herself, and I'll admit turning a blind eye to her continuing to feed him past the end of the designated time, whilst a teacher aide looked after the rest of the class. Conventionally, the feeding task should have been allocated to a teacher aide, but he refused to take food from anyone else.

After a few weeks of this process, he ceased losing weight, but he was scarcely thriving. The teacher had a bright idea, based on what she had learned about him. He had been born and reared within the sound and smell of the sea, so she decided to take him to the beach to feed him. This was straightforward, as we had a bus at school, I had taught most of the teachers to drive it, and she booked it for a weekly trip to Rowes Bay, pretty close to the nursing home. She would put him on the sand, and feed him there. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he seemed keen to eat there, and it became an enjoyable experience, rather than an ordeal. The rest of her class enjoyed the beach, as well.

The teacher's theory was that this little boy's olfactory sense was critically significant to him, and the familiar smell of the sea helped him relax enough to chew and swallow. Based on his weight gain as this protocol continued, it seemed she was correct. Across a period of six months, his weight improved, he became more alert, and he began to respond more often and more clearly to other students and staff. By the time this teacher was transferred away, two years later, his life had been transformed.

Over the years, I've lost track of both teacher and child, although I did encounter the teacher at a principal's conference in 1997. She had done well, and was by that time, a junior principal. That cohort of beginning teachers were high achievers.

Most of them are now in senior positions.