Kids Say the Darnedest Things, Episode 1

A case in point (Most of this story is true):

Two years ago, I was working as an aide in a local middle school, assisting students with learning and cognitive disabilities in their English and math classes.  In March, all students were required to take the ISAT (Illinois Standard Achievement Test), a trying ordeal that takes up at least a week of classes, and has the additional benefit of just stressing everybody out.  (Remind me to give you my take on standardized tests someday.)

Most students with learning disabilities in Illinois also take the ISAT, although the majority of them are allowed certain accommodations, such as having someone read the test to them, being able to take the test in a quiet, isolated room, or having extra time to finish the test.  As an aide, one of my duties during ISAT week was to act as one of these accommodations for students, reading the tests to them and then sometimes writing down the answers. 

So there I was with Ishmael, a 7th grader with a learning disability, as he was working diligently - and if you asked me to describe Ishmael in one word, I would seriously consider "diligent" -  his way through the word problems on his math ISAT section.  Now, one of the trickiest parts of being an "accommodation" is that you can't actually help the student.  This is particularly difficult because, for the other 31 weeks of the school year, that's a big part of your job.  But for the single week of ISATs, the aides had to learn to be as helpful as a rock.  A rock that reads word problems to you.

I can't quite remember, but I think that the word problem was asking Ishmael to identify the volume of an object, and how to calculate volume for an object, and then describe how he came to that conclusion.  He had an inkling of what to do, but he had learned through working with me since September certain strategies for getting the right answer out of me; "Is this right?" he would ask.  "Oh, I know this is right," and then he would look to me for confirmation, like a poker player trying to read a bluff.  "Do you know the answer?"  "You know the answer, don't you?"  Finally, after watching him work and struggle and fight for fifteen or twenty minutes, I couldn't take it any longer: "Yes, I know the answer, but I can't tell you."

He looked at me in incredulity.  "You know the answer." I nodded. "And you won't tell me." I nodded again.  Then, he smiled this odd smile, and then put both his hands on his face, and groaned, and said, in exasperation, "Mister Wright!... You know the answer, but you won't tell me."  I nod.  "I wish, I wish that..." He looks around the classroom for the right words.  "I wish that I had your mind, in me."  I was surprised.  "What?" I said.  "I wish that I had," and here he began gesturing frustratingly with his hands, miming this brain transplant that he had in mind, "your mind... in my head."

Now, I've seen Freaky Friday, and I know that, when you say "mind switch" you mean that the ghost in my machine trades places with the ghost in your machine, and then I get to look out at the world through your eyeballs, and you through mine.  In other words, I get your body and you get mine.  And this would be a surprising thing for Ishmael to wish, because, even though he's a 7th grader, he's still a district champion wrestler, and my body is racked with scoliosis, bad balance, and limited fine motor skills.  So, in my interpretation, I would get my sharp mind in his functioning body, while he would continue to find math difficult and, on top of that, have a crappy sense of balance and bad posture.

But that's not what he meant.  When he said, "I wish that I had your mind..." he was talking about all of my knowledge, my experience.  He would still be himself. His sense of himself was not contingent upon his cogito, that narrow band of his experience that (I think) includes speaking and reading and contemplating.  Instead, Ishmael saw himself as this more dynamic whole person, someone who is funny and good at art and has a few friends but wishes he had more and is bullied sometimes and it's hard to be a black kid with white parents and is good at wrestling but wished that he was a little skinnier; he's not concerned with the philosophical problem of the duality between body and mind.  He just wants my mind - access to my information and experience and, yes, wisdom, so that he could use it for his own benefit.

I think about Ishmael a lot whenever I am trying to be a good teacher.  If I had been a good teacher to him, then he would have had access to that kind of information that he craved; he would not have been frustrated on test day, flailing at the air for the key to that privileged knowledge that was locked up inside me.  But he would still and always be himself.  I have faith that he's being successful now, because he's a hard worker, and skilled, and friendly, even if reading is hard for him.  And something that I learned from him was that not everybody thinks like me, not everybody has the same wants and needs that I do, but that they all want equal access, that I have something of value inside my mind.

If I were a good teacher, I'd figure out how to share that value with my students.  I would figure out how to switch minds.