The Slow Digression of My Vocabulary

When Abby took a trip down to Eugene in February, she told me I talked too smart. I had mentioned a “dialogue” I had with a friend and she said, “Rece, you’ve been in academia too long.” It had only been half a year, but I sounded smart. I was happy. It made me feel better. My GRE scores had been abominable. (The fact that I had been accepted to the UO’s JSchool shows that they wanted me for my winning personality and great resume, not my test scores.)

Well, all the greatness that was becoming my vocabulary began to dwindle upon returning to Dayton. These days, I spend at least seven hours a day at my local grade school, working with kids who may have severe communication disabilities. It wouldn’t be far off to say our classroom specializes in autism and all that entails. So basically, all my verbose tendencies and ability to brighten a room with intelligent conversation mean nothing at school.

Here are a few of the new things I’ve learned to say in the past month.

“OK, teacher.” This is the proper response to say when a child tells you “no” and refuses to do what you ask. I learned this the hard way, after allowing a student to shout “no” several times to me. I’d been hesitant to force the child to go to the next station as was over-cautious and unsure of the amount of power I was really supposed to have in a special classroom such as mine. (Basically, I was walking on eggshells around the kids as it was my first experience in a Special Ed setting.)

“Hands down.” I used this my second day in the classroom when was brutally attacked by a student. OK. The truth is that the student was having a bit of “a moment” and that student’s hands were just a part of it, flying about and flapping at and hitting everything in front. These two words come in handy whenever I want to avoid the aggression of an “outburst” and not get new bruises.

“Safe hands.” This goes along with the previous pair of words. It’s what we call a teaching phrase. We want the kids to learn that flapping arms and hands that make contact with others might be unsafe. Safe hands are much gentler and don’t give Teacher Sharece any bruises.

“Evacuation.” This is a new one from today. It came up on our daily reporting sheets for the parents. One of our co-workers at the school translated the form to Spanish for us and she said used, “evacuacion” for “BM.” Yep, I’m talking about poop. From now on, whenever I smell a poopy diaper, I’m going to say, “Ladies, I think it’s time to evacuate” or something equally cheesy or lame.

I’m sure that eventually, Abby and I will get back to our book club and I will start having intellectual conversations again, but for now, I’m all set. I mean hey, it seems that every day brings me something new. How could I complain about that? I can always dialogue with people about my day.