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Three memoirs from the special education teacher who specializes in emotionally disturbed children and elective mutism. Two of these books follow Hayden’s usual school year format (it’s like Harry Potter, only with autism, learning disabilities, and child abuse), while Twilight Children recounts part of her time working in a hospital children’s psychiatric unit. They are blunt, painful, gorgeous books which, despite all advertising and jacketing efforts of her publisher to ruin them, have no obnoxious political or emotional agenda other than to just tell a story. Hayden writes about a nine-year-old raped so many times her personality has fractured, a six-year-old with brain lesions which leave her IQ in tact but completely destroy her ability to recognize written symbols, a twelve-year-old pregnant Catholic school refugee shoved into Hayden’s class because there just isn’t anywhere else for her. She writes about kids who don’t talk, kids who can’t learn, kids who are violent, kids who got better and kids who never would and kids who could have, but no one got there in time.
I think the most telling thing is that these books are so very fitting. Hayden is pragmatic in everything she does. That’s the definition of good special education – “if it works, do it, and to hell with how it’s supposed to look.” She is creative and thoughtful as a teacher, and she brings some of that quality to her writing. It lends these books a beauty probably not unlike what Hayden sees in her students and patients – it’s not there to teach us a lesson and it’s not there to have a moral, it just is. I particularly recommend Somebody Else’s Kids, which confronts some of the unforeseen repercussions of the big mainstreaming law without zealotry or preaching (very, very rare, let me tell you).
And I just like Hayden herself, her competence, her caring, her obsession. I had someone like her in my life once, someone who recognized that there was more to her job than just ensuring that I got through a public school system which was not at all designed to nurture people like me, but also to help me come out as whole and sane as possible. I’m thinking about this a lot, on the verge of going back for another degree, and being reminded that there are people like Hayden out in the world working with kids a third my age helps.
Plus, they’re just good books.
I think the most telling thing is that these books are so very fitting. Hayden is pragmatic in everything she does. That’s the definition of good special education – “if it works, do it, and to hell with how it’s supposed to look.” She is creative and thoughtful as a teacher, and she brings some of that quality to her writing. It lends these books a beauty probably not unlike what Hayden sees in her students and patients – it’s not there to teach us a lesson and it’s not there to have a moral, it just is. I particularly recommend Somebody Else’s Kids, which confronts some of the unforeseen repercussions of the big mainstreaming law without zealotry or preaching (very, very rare, let me tell you).
And I just like Hayden herself, her competence, her caring, her obsession. I had someone like her in my life once, someone who recognized that there was more to her job than just ensuring that I got through a public school system which was not at all designed to nurture people like me, but also to help me come out as whole and sane as possible. I’m thinking about this a lot, on the verge of going back for another degree, and being reminded that there are people like Hayden out in the world working with kids a third my age helps.
Plus, they’re just good books.
