Special needs – Nastasya Parker

Never Said That Before

This Week’s Bit of String: Another Year 11 group flies the nest

“Miss, what are you going to do without us, when we’re on study leave?” It’s the last English lesson with bottom-set Year 11s, and a particularly loquacious boy is curious.

I assure him the Year 10s will keep me busy, and he nods sagely, “More grey hairs for you, then.”

I had worked hard with this little fellow, insisting he can absolutely pass, if he focuses. Many times per lesson, redirecting him toward tasks he’s somehow oblivious to, reminding him to face front and stop making silly faces for attention. I joked last week I’ve named a couple of my grey hairs after him, and I guess that made him proud.

*Some unique and sometimes broken pieces*

“Will you sign my shirt on leaving day? And write about the grey hairs?” he asks.

Sure, kiddo. So long, and thanks for all the grey hairs.

We have another seven hot and tiring weeks of school left after the half-term, but the Year 11 low-set English class I’ve supported for the last two years will only be in for exams, and a couple of revision sessions.

It’s been a journey. There’s still a way to go before most of them reach a destination, but progress comes in many forms. And they are who they are, each with very distinct personalities, strengths, and stresses. The exam results won’t be stellar, but hopefully they’ll take some encouragement with them and I’ll certainly take some tales with me.

At the beginning of their Year 10, I had to request of one boy: “Please don’t stick my highlighter up your nose.”

Note the personal pronoun here. He had refused to produce his own equipment, I loaned him some of mine, and he treated it like a preschooler might.

However, during our final English classes in Year 11, several students used borrowed highlighters and pens and classroom glue sticks to build towers and balance them. This was while the teachers were imparting strategies for taking exam papers, but hey. Personal growth!

This is the class with the Trio of Fortitude. One member of the Trio came into school every day but one this term, while up till now he averaged two days off per week. Again: progress.

Breaking Records

One of my dad’s most famous sayings is “I’ve never said that before.” He relishes using it to mark life’s many unexpected encounters.

To me, this is a fun way to notice stories. It can denote unusual occurrences, or different ways of looking at the everyday.

*It was a particularly stressful term in various respects. Here’s some medicinal purple I found.*

Each year group I work with spawns plenty of things I’ve never had to say before. It can be exhausting, but on the bright side it means my job continues to be interesting. It’s 11 years now since I was helping a group revise for GCSEs and had to dispel a 16-year-old’s notion by saying, “Women don’t get pregnant from dildos.”

In one of my revision groups just this past week, I worked with our semi-reformed partial attender from the Trio of Fortitude. He’s a clever but uninspired boy, all scrawny angles and tattered uniform and imperious glances. Also in the group was a mischievous, elfin, blue-haired girl who has been a selective mute for her entire school career.

They kept kicking at a chair between them until she managed to trap his legs against the table with it. He complained of having his bones crushed, so I wrote on the whiteboard: No bone-crushing allowed.

“It’s official now. You’ll have to stop.”

She let the chair go with a disappointed sigh. The boy said, “What if she amputates my leg next?”

So I added to the board: And no nonconsensual amputations. I’d never said that before. Hurrah for some more special memories.

Progress is as Progress Does

For one of the very last lessons on Friday, the teacher brought the group out to the field to play rounders. I sat in the shade with a few others, including a particularly childish fellow who didn’t want to play sport, but was clearly bored.

He complained about the dewy grass. “Miss, my bum’s wet. My bum’s wet, Miss. Miss—”

*I do believe they’ll all find their path eventually.*

“I heard you the first time. Thank you for keeping us informed.”

Maybe there should be a category of “I never wanted to hear about that” to go with “I never said that before.”

Less than ten minutes before the lesson ended, on his last day of secondary school, this same 16-year-old came out with: “I should probably learn to tie my shoes.”

There was something I might help with. I spent 2 years trying to help his class remember themes from Lord of The Flies and identify personification, and remember the Poor Law of 1834 which motivated Dickens to write A Christmas Carol… The whole time we worked on that, this boy and a few others could still barely construct sentences. Standardised exams leave no time to teach basics.

But on the damp grass while others hollered over rounders hits, I helped him with his laces and he did seem to get the hang of the first knot.

They know they’ve annoyed me sometimes, but that I always try to help, and in that way perhaps we’ve both achieved something. They learn to open up a little, and I am reminded to count small signs of progress.

What are some ways you’ve made progress lately? Have you had occasion to say something you never said before?

Carried Along

This Week’s Bit of String: A wide range of accounts

Only one exam left. I’m happy for our students that they won’t have to sit through them anymore, but disappointed that it’s the only accepted measure for how they’ve done in secondary school.

My role in exams this year, in addition to reading and scribing for a 16-year-old with special needs, is also to act as language modifier for him. This is a rarely-granted access arrangement, for those with hearing and/ or processing disabilities, as well as reading difficulties.

It means I can assist with clarifying a question, but of course it’s quite restricted. I can’t define or ‘modify’ any subject-specific terminology, and it’s best to leave the engine of the question, command words, untouched (explain, analyse, evaluate, the whole Bloom’s Taxonomy lot). I can help with “carrier language,” the words that form the framework of the question.

Here’s an example. In the first History paper, one of the questions was: “Give an account of how the Korean conflict ended in military stalemate.”

The student asked me what “account” meant. “Like Instagram or Facebook?”

I rephrased it as “Tell the story of how the Korean conflict ended in military stalemate.”

This gave him a clearer idea. While the concession of having a language modifier is rare, I wonder how many students unshakably associate the word account with social media, just as an example. For students who are neurodiverse, a word they’re unsure about can be very hard to see past.

Staying Flexible

Adults have this issue as well. There’s a new writer to the writing feedback group I’m in, and both times I’ve sent her my writing, she comments negatively because she’s made an assumption early on and then the story doesn’t comply with it. In a short story where the protagonist was looking after her grandmother, the reader decided that Nan was the name of one of the protagonist’s children, criticised me for mentioning a “grandmother” because that was adding too many characters, and continued to complain that the character didn’t interact with Nan in a manner suitable for a young child.

Revising our assumptions as we go along is a vital skill. Certainly, it’s more innate to some than others. I try to reserve judgment as I’m reading, and when something doesn’t make sense I go back and work out what I may have misinterpreted. I don’t often read book blurbs anymore because they sometimes distort the significance of plot aspects and lead you to expect something different.

This comes from when I read Jojo Moyes’s Me Before You. The back of the book talked about how the heroine “knows how many footsteps there are between the bus stop and home,” and said “knowing what’s coming keeps her sane.” For perhaps my own personal reasons, I concluded the protagonist was neurodivergent, maybe on the autism spectrum. I was baffled and a bit annoyed when she wasn’t.

My frustration was my own fault and based on my assumptions, so I decided not to read book blurbs anymore. I want to get swept up when I read, not anchored down by my potentially outmoded notions. When we read fiction or poetry, all language is carrier language. It’s all taking us somewhere.

Letting Characters Carry

During the last couple of weeks, I started writing my new novel. It feels as if, in a way, most of the language in the first draft is carrier language. That’s what I’m reminding myself anyway. It’s clunky because mainly, I’m seeing how the characters develop the plot. When I go back and edit, I can polish the voice and streamline the form. Many revisions from now it will travel, it will fly, rather than get shoved along.

*I love these roots at an old canal mill site, but for now I can’t get too attached.*

I’ve done a lot of planning and character research, and I feel I’ve honed my craft in terms of focusing the story structure and understanding the direction, kicking off with inciting incidents and such. But I won’t get super attached to anything just yet. I scribbled many notes on my characters’ backgrounds, considering their needs versus their wants, so I feel I know about them, but I can’t presume I know them deeply. I must remain open to what they do, because they could alter my planned plot.

A few pages in, I’m trying to stop thinking about how to rewrite with improved style. It doesn’t matter yet. My characters are more important. This absolves me for now from having to write beautifully or cleverly, which is great since I’m tired and not ready for that yet.

Stories carried by characters engage me more than stories dragged through certain plot points, and I think that’s true for many readers. However, we don’t want the plot to trudge as characters wield the burden of their thoughts too heavily. Later, I’ll correct the balance.

How do you stay flexible? What carries you when you start a project?

Balancing the Dark

This Week’s Bit of String: Planet Buoy

On a rainy Saturday morning in St Ives, I’m shepherding 7 teens on a 2-mile walk with a seasoned photographer. We are nearing the end of our school Art residential; I’ve spent half my half-term supporting 3 very different students with autism.

The youngest one is only 14 and prefers to draw comic stories or animals in pencil, so through most activities, he’s put his headphones on and played games on his phone. That’s what he did through the photographer’s introductory talk.

The photographer has worked here in St Ives for 45 years. He says its popularity with artists comes from the “pure, North light.” Standing on a beach he tells me, “The sand in St Ives has a sheerness, and reflects that light.”

Just then, the youngest fellow patters over murmuring, “Miss, I took pictures of the beach.” With his iPhone, he’s captured the effect the photographer talked about. The reflections of the squished-together buildings across the bay appear over the sand in his photo. I compliment him heartily, and he’s off.

He creeps toward gulls, grinning, asking, “Scuse me, can I take your picture?” He aims his phone camera through holes in stone walls that no one else has noticed, sticks it into pier crevices to capture puddle reflections. One of my older students, herself a photographer with autism, is inspired by what he’s finding and so am I.

He finds a buoy, pulled up and stashed on top of lobster cages. I join him to capture its weathering with my iPhone. It’s like a planet, with rust crops and barnacle mountains. This young artist is showing what I’ve always found, that once we start looking around with a photographer’s eye, we pick up on so much more.

Balance

It’s like that with stories sometimes too. If we get into ideas mode, we find them everywhere. When I’m out and about, I take pictures partly to remind myself of strands of description for my journal later. Waves blooming around boulders, rust-fall streaming down the lighthouse, Planet Buoy.

*Pure light: View toward Chapel of St Nicholas*

The photographer we worked with, Chris Webber, makes me contemplate other similarities or counterpoints between the arts of photography and writing. He tells the students: “Your camera has a lot of dials and buttons, but at its heart, photography is about balancing the light. Don’t be intimidated by the camera. You control it. You decide what to shoot.”

It’s a mixed blessing to remember that amid the vast structures of a story, with so many interplaying elements we’re meant to orchestrate—we are the ones who control the pen (or keyboard). It is, ultimately, up to us.

I also wonder if a story, at its heart, might be as simple as balancing certain elements. Except that a story is balancing the dark. As storytellers we wield light and seek to not obliterate dark (because then a story might be dull or saccharine), but to balance it.

Letting in the Light

I read more about story structure and trajectory before my latest novel edits. John Yorke in Into the Woods frames this as a trajectory of knowledge (which suits my creation story retelling, since Eve allegedly plunged us all into sin by gaining knowledge). A protagonist is awakened to something, they experience doubt, they reluctantly accept, they experiment, it backfires, until ultimately there is a reconciliation of the new knowledge: a reawakening and a total mastery.

*Weaving: lobster nets on Smeatons Pier*

None of this happens without light, and the light would be ineffective if dark didn’t precede it. Presumably, God would never have said, “Let there be light,” if They’d already had all the light They wanted. As creators, we first shine light into a character’s situation so they have to recognise the dark they’re living in. They may react by being overwhelmed; they’re not used to this illumination. Ultimately, we mould the light into hope.

*Wishing you a torrent of creativity this week.*

Depending on the story, we’ll allow a pinpoint or a whole widening arc of light/ hope. Also, depending on the type of writing, we’ll show the whole landscape or do a macro shot. Chris Webber does dawn photo shoots and landscapes but also food shoots, for catering outlets. He showed my students a picture he took of a sorbet scoop: “Sometimes you don’t want your viewer to paddle, you want them to dive in.”

I’ll definitely keep that in mind while editing. Which bits are especially important for readers to plunge into? How do we direct the light while also bringing out the exciting details?

Making Links

This Week’s Bit of String: Snakes and the sublime

“I held a snake!”

A Year 11 student greeted me with this after Christmas, while his classmates discussed gifts and excursions. This student’s family didn’t have money for those. But he found out how snakeskin feels: smooth, cool, strong.

I was supporting the student in his English class, and as an introduction to Wordsworth’s “Prelude,” the teacher sought examples of the sublime.

“What’s the most awe-inspiring place you’ve visited?” she asked the class.

With his classmates describing Alpine ski trips, island volcano walks, or seaside visits, my student felt sidelined. He told me again, “I held a snake!”

*A formidable power: Vermont floodline summer 2023. See how the water swept through halfway up the trees?*

After every contribution of wondrous landscapes from the other students, the teacher asked, “Did it scare you?” She established the connection between excitement and fear, the sublime power of nature.

I asked my student if he felt a bit scared holding the snake, and I said his mixed feelings reminded me of the class discussion. The boy’s face lit up and we decided he ought to share his story with the teacher. A snake is part of nature, right?

He held his hand up for several minutes while other students were called on. Reluctantly, the teacher let him speak just as she was closing the topic.

“I held a snake!” he said.

The whole class laughed. “That’s not what we’re talking about right now,” snapped the teacher.

My student was devastated. He kept asking me, “Why did you say I should tell her?”

Finally I murmured, “Because I would have responded differently.” I don’t like disagreeing with a colleague around a student, but taking the kiddo’s side in this somewhat subtle way calmed him down.

Essential Bonds

And I was angry, actually. This student can be quite challenging but his Educational Health Care Plan outlines the traumas he’s been through, the difficulties he has with learning, and strategies to help him access the curriculum. Even if a hardworking teacher doesn’t have time to check the documents again and again, surely making children feel included is just common sense.

*Haven’t got any snake photos, but the pattern on these fritilleries is awesome too*

It takes barely a second to say, “Interesting. Thanks for sharing.”

After all, the English curriculum assesses students on their ability to make connections. Follow literary clues from an extract to deduce the writer’s motivations. Compare how poems show similar themes in different ways. How hard is it to connect the snake, a potentially deadly predator, with formidable but impressive landscapes?

Some connections will be firmer than others. We all make far-fetched ones sometimes, in our natural human tendency to see grand designs behind the events of our lives, hoping to place ourselves in the centre. But the ability to draw these links sets us apart as a species.

When It All Comes Together

One thing I love about writing is teasing out the connections. My first published story took place in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. In my research I learned the Creole word for earthquake shared its root with the mudpies eaten by the most impoverished people: Tè, like terre, for earth.

This term linked vast struggles of poverty and disaster with resourcefulness and survival too, and chained them up into a more manageable bundle. But it wouldn’t have worked if I hadn’t looked into the native language, and if I hadn’t already felt a connection to the country, following stories about mudpies and Cite Soleil and the Creole language long before.

*Keeping the sides connected: Houston’s famous Be Someone bridge*

Sometimes my threads linking a character’s motivation to their actions aren’t strong enough. Or maybe they’re too coarse and unsophisticatedly blatant. Honing those connections is vital, and enhanced by cultivating connections in our everyday lives–by taking those moments to invite other people to share. Even if they just tell us they got to hold a snake that one time.

My latest story is on the wonderful Funny Pearls website. It takes the perspective of a girl with autism as she considers what connections to make, and how to do so. From building a bridge with Knex to practising facial expressions in the mirror and developing a felicity with the subtle burn, read how Sylvie makes links in “The Late, Great Jimmy Stewart’s Video Guide to Emotions.”

As with any force of nature (or predatory reptile), connecting with others and recognising our many links to the world can be quite frightening. It may mess with our pre-established plans to consider someone else’s challenges and let them in, but the consequences can be pretty awe-inspiring all around, too.

How do you build connections in your work and in your life? And does it sometimes scare you?