Teaching Compassion Learning Compassion
The new girl in Portable 4
Lotus, the new girl who visited our class is a couple of feet tall. Her name is Chinese and so is her body, but China runs only in the deep river of her genetic stream that may be dry by now or lost amid her acquired American Culture.
Searching for her lost identity, Lotus came to me in dreams even before I met her in person. She was a disoriented little girl who wandered the hallways of the school, always accompanied by adults with troubled looks. The moment she set foot in the school, she decided to play hide and seek to attract the attention of a whole faculty body. I wondered if perhaps, what she really had in mind, was to trap the imagination of hundreds of kids who would have loved to do what she did best: ESCAPE.
Nobody new at the time that my class was a subsidiary of paradise, with angels flying around, deep sad kids who came for a year or two to recover the old habit of smiling, and other immature beings who decided to remain in the comfort zone of childhood for a while. Lotus believed that my portable was where imbecile and useless children with autism were kept on a leash. The first attempt of her teacher of leaving her with us for a short while, ended up with Lotus, running away to a hidden place somewhere in the school. She did not come back that day, or the next, or the remaining days, and her image and presence was lost among the discovery hours of our educational excursions.
For a couple of days there were no signs of Lotus. No one had told her the real nature of my old white portable: the one last in line and closest to the greenest grass and biggest playground. So, we went about with our business, learning about this world with a magic touch, totally isolated from the worries and tribulations of Standardized Tests, Budget cuts and other school related nightmares. Perhaps my portable was the place where all souls escaped to. Without knowing why, deep inside, Lotus was searching for it all along and had no directions on how to get there. I found out from other teachers fascinating stories about her wandering the hallways, hiding in the gardens, talking to herself and walking by without noticing us, as if we never existed. We were so hidden to the public, that she simply missed us all together.
The day before she finally arrived, I had the urge to buy a little Crayola box full of tiny little colours. As an expecting mother, I had the same premonitions the child in the womb sends her biological mother via cravings, odd smells and a strange sense of anticipation. Perhaps that was what sent Lotus the message that helped her finally find the portable she had always been looking for since she arrived at the school. The fact is that on a Tuesday morning she showed her face behind her teacher. She would not let go of her until I showed her the Crayola box. I told her it was there sitting on my table, waiting for her. “It is a magic Crayola box”, I said. She believed me because the box had Tinker Bell’s picture on it with her magic wand looking at her.
She explored me, she explored the kids, she explored the room, and she decided to give it a try. She stayed with us a whole day, and I gave her the honorary title of “My Helper”. It was a fun day and a difficult one, as she displayed all her conflicting emotions. She stirred our emotions as well and I returned home totally exhausted with a desire to ESCAPE. As a matter of fact, most of the kids had the same urge to do the same. The truly autistic ones just went to their own private universe and those who had already developed some rudimentary identity traits just wanted to go home for the day. I went to my old wish of packing a few belongings and taking my dogs Mango and Cinnamon with me to a distant mountain in the middle of nowhere, with no internet or cell phone. That night, I covered my head under my comforter and restlessly, I tossed my body in a frequently interrupted sleep.
I realized that night, that Lotus was making a space in my insides. It felt like she had come to my habitat and decided to make of my heart her personal space. As in a closet, she moved all my clothes from one place to another to put her own stuff in. I really did not mind much as we all know that Chinese girls are small and have small feet, but she brought with her a heavy emotional suitcase that seemed larger than my house. Persistent as she was, I do not know what she did or how she did it, but when I woke up in the morning I knew the geography of Portable 4 would be changed for ever.
Teaching Compassion – Learning Compassion
Lotus loved to be my helper. It empowered her. It gave her a sense of mission new to her that made her feel important and valued. Every week, I tried to give her something from us. She once received one purple marker with sparking glitter powder inside as a token of our appreciation, and when I gave it to her, I saw a new light in her eyes. She shared her marbles and she was always thinking what of her things my kids would love.
Being my helper was not as easy as it sounds, and she knew that it would take a long time to master it. So, we decided to do it in sessions of one hour a day. The first day she came she did not want to do anything and she looked down upon the kids. She did not see that she was even more uncoordinated than most of them, or that her handwriting was almost unintelligible. She had only eyes for their oddities and imperfections of others and she was totally blind to her own nature.
Normally Lotus would run away from her own P.E classes, but not from our P.E sessions. She was deeply touched by one of my students that despite of being a little overweight and missing one foot, he tried to jump the cord and run in the playground with the kids. One day looking at me he said: “Can I walk instead of running; my leg hurts me today a little bit.” This impressed Lotus a whole lot and this made her throw her resistances and decided she will also stay for P.E with us.
Lotus was used to telling everybody what do but, with my kids she learned soon enough that that was something it would not take her anywhere. “Follow him, make sure he does not fall down and make him feel safe,” I encouraged her, and to my surprise there she went taking care of him with the utmost loving attention. “Lotus, be patient, develop compassion” I told her when she wanted to escape when my kids did not do what she ordered. “Helpers become friends first and have patience” I said. “Try it Lotus and you will see how they will do what you want.”
From taking care of this one kid during P.E, she became a model for all. Good behaviour in the playground, careful handwriting in the class and many sessions of shared reading instruction. She made always sure the small garden we had as our science experiment ran smoothly and prevented the kids from putting more water than necessary in the plastic cups. Like a grown up, she directed and guided them.
She made sure all the pencils were sharp and everybody paid attention to me. Despite her evident short attention span, she helped those who could not pay attention and teamed with those who could. For the first time since she arrived at our school, other teachers saw her playing in harmony with my kids, laughing and forgetting her original mistaken idea that she was better than they were.
I was not there when she was picked up from my class by another teacher, but later I learned how surprised she was to see Lotus sad but obedient packing her markers to go to her class with her. She walked in silence and did not make any trouble. She had internalized that girls in training have to do it one hour at a time but when she arrived at her regular classroom, she said to the teacher: “I still love you, but I do not want to be here anymore.”
She returned to Portable 4 to stay the rest of the year. Next to me, while I was holding her tiny hand on mine, she asked me: “Will they ever become Doctors or Lawyers?” as if she understood what these professions entitled. “Perhaps” I said, “...but what they will be is happy, and that, is the most important and most difficult profession of all to have in life.”
