DISAPPEARING HUMANS

I was driving to the YMCA. It was a Saturday afternoon. I got off the ramp to take a left. There was a man standing on the corner. Like all the men standing on corners, this one was holding up cardboard sign. The words were written in pen, scribbled over several times so you could read them from a distance. The man was having trouble holding up the sign. The wind was blowing. He was trying to smoke a cigarette. One of his arms didn’t work just right. He had trouble standing. 

My first reaction was to turn away. Make the man disappear. We do that. We say the spell, “Disappear you. I have things to do. You made bad choices.” You say the spell, then you do not look at him. 

Presto – The man disappears. Just like that. Magic. He was never there. He doesn’t even exist. You disappeared him forever. He will never appear in your movie ever again.

That’s what we do. That’s what I tried to do. I saw him there and then tried to make him disappear. 

But he must have been magic, because as I turned the corner, he was still there. I could feel his presence. 

I had just cashed a royalty check. I had money in my wallet. But I was hoarding it. Last week I had spent $150 on a pair of running shoes – and this guy was hungry. Who did I think I was?

I parked the car in the high school parking lot and ran back about 200 yards. I gave him money. I put my arm around him. I looked at him. I looked at him and he began to fill in. He had grey, curly hair. Blue eyes. His name was David. He wore a blue coat. White, dirty tennis shoes. His face was surprisingly wrinkle-free. I held his hand. He started to cry a bit. We talked. He said something about needing to give a woman money so he could stay someplace … and that he stopped taking the pills for the pain … and he sometimes he drank to make the pain go away. 

“I understand” I said. 

He had trouble standing. I helped him across the street so that he could rest.

As I walked back to the parking lot, I saw a young couple, putting their baby in a stroller. They were going for a walk on the Red Jacket trail. Their child, what was most precious in the world to them, was lovingly put in the stroller. The man on the corner was somebody’s precious child once upon a time. He was taken for walks in a stroller. He was lovingly touched. But something went wrong in his movie.

By writing this, I am making him appear in my movie. He has a role. Every time I read this to a class, the man will reappear – and maybe the countless other men standing on corners that people have disappeared, will reappear my students’ movies…

Our schools try to make students disappear. We give them numbers and then we say the spell, “Go to the special ed room you. You are just a number.” We disappear them.

In the special education rooms, we give them more numbers. We do functional behavioral assessments. We target behaviors. And then we leverage them like mice in a Skinner box so they can replicate behaviors we think are important. They press the bar when the light appears and we say, “Good job.”

We train them instead of teaching them.