Today is not Jay's birthday or, indeed, a day that means any more to her than does any other day.
But every day of knowing Jay is special. And as you'll come to see, the meaning is twofold.
Her name was Jay, and you could tell right off the bat who'd had her before, because they walked into class, hugged her and said, "Jay, how are you?"
And she was fantastic and happy to see them and all that energetic jazz, and I did not understand what was happening.
College professors were Dr. or Mr. (or Ms. or Mrs.) whatever.
And she was just Jay. Jay Donahue, per the syllabus, but Jay.
And Jay taught introduction to special education, which was three classes and at least two intensive therapy sessions all jammed into one three-hour block of Wednesday night each week for 15 weeks.
And in 45 hours, I learned two things above all others:
- The book was meaningless; people would teach you what you needed to know.
- Some kids could teach their parents a thing or two about being adults.
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Jay had apparently gotten into special education because she was shoehorned into a special ed class when she broke her leg when she was 12.
And she got put in a classroom clearly not designed to hold a class. And there was a student with a visual impairment. And a student who used a wheelchair. And two of the kids had been diagnosed with autism -- or would have been, these days.
And they were all being taught in the same way by a teacher who never faced the class unless she had to.
I had encountered the "I don't care about my students" attitude before (seriously? You can't just go work at a funeral home, where nobody is alive to find out how much you hate people?), but this "visual impairment" and "used a wheelchair" stuff was new.
The kid was blind, no? And that other was wheelchair-bound?
No. Not now, at least. Back then, to some teachers -- including the person who was paid by the city to teach special needs kids -- there was a blind kid and a crippled kid. But these days, with people-first language, there was one student who had a visual impairment and another who was a paraplegic and used a wheelchair.
Because they were people first and limited second.
And once upon a time, before Jay and people like her had pushed for people-first language, we'd gotten things like the Education of the Handicapped Act (EHA).
But now, because of Jay and people like her, we had not the Disabled Americans Act but the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Americans first, disabilities second.
And in a world of redheads, education majors and the mass unwashed drunken hordes, that was a culture shock.
But it wasn't an optional language adjustment. If we were going to be working in schools, we were going to be working with children with special needs, and we were going to be talking to them and about them as children [with whatever special need]. Because they were, and because -- as we would later discover -- sometimes their parents needed to be reminded that they were people first and inconvenient second.
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Jay made a point on the first day of class of saying that if she was going to be effective in teaching us, she needed to understand why we wanted to be teachers.
… you know that person in every class who sees the world as her (in this case) validation oyster? The one who is the first to be offended by something or the first to not get what's so offensive about something else? The one who goes on well beyond the point at which anyone was still listening? The one who needs to hear her voice so much that she does theater, even though she's kind of a crap actress, and works lines lots with the lead role because that way she's "really pitching in" and maybe she'll get invited to the after party and she'll get to laugh at all the jokes that she thinks are about theater but are actually about the sex everyone else is having, but she's at the party with the beer, and she's the center of attention in her new miniskirt (and she shaved, because anyone was looking), and then she'll get to say goodbye to her friends Cindy and Joanna, and when she says, "See you around!" she's really sincere about planning to see them ever again?
Jay just let her talk. Nobody ever had before. And after that initial 10-minute validation session, the girl didn't talk in class for but three minutes. For two and a half months. Because someone had finally just let her talk. About her brother and his colored divider strip things and how it was the only thing that had helped him organize his school papers.
(I was tempted to ask this girl if she had taken swim lessons just for the tips on increasing her lung capacity, but that would have been rude.)
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On the first day of class, Jay told us about our semester-long project, which would have us examine ways people with special needs were perceived in the media and in other places. And one of these "other places" was in our lives.
Now, I was not then overly fond of the idea of going and finding some person with special needs to react to, or however one phrases it these days, so I remembered back to when my incredibly mature 12-year-old self noticed a Down's guy in his 30s cleaning the food court at the Baltimore Aquarium.
And so, when the time came for the "react to someone who is different from you" paper, I wrote as my 12-year-old self in italics, then as my 22-year-old self in regular font.
And yes, part of it was to impress my teacher with how far I'd come and how sensitive I could be, but part of it was that I really wanted to exorcise the ever-living prejudice out of myself. And if you're going to expose a demon of your past, you might as well put it out there as far as it'll go and let it all go.
So I did.
And she must have known why I'd done that. Must have known I wanted forgiveness from her -- since the guy I'd had such gruesomely mean thoughts about was thoroughly beyond my ability to find.
And so when she started talking about her reactions to the week's assignments, she talked some about one person's essay, and then she said this:
"I hope some of you will get a chance to read what [iampunha] wrote. He wrote his piece from two perspectives -- himself as a 12-year-old boy and himself now. He --"
And then she saw I had slouched down in my chair.
"I'm sorry, are you OK? Should I not talk about it?"
No, no, it was fine, I was just joking.
And she resumed.
But she … she had clearly rehearsed what she was going to say about my paper, and whatever time she'd spent working out exactly what words she'd wanted to use, she'd been ready -- at a moment's notice -- to drop them all because what she'd thought would tickle me was making me uncomfortable.
Did tickle me. I just don't take compliments well. Never have. I ever get my book published, handling the "I loved your book!" issue is going to be interesting. ("Thanks! I love getting paid to lie!" "…" "… love your sweater … ?" "Thanks! My mama got it for me for Christmas!" "Ah, the tried and true Christmas sweater." "Yup." "So, be seeing you.")
As it happened, one other student had seen substantial chunks of my writing, and she mentioned as much in class. But this teacher's focus wasn't on how inspiring she could be but how inspiring she was being. The real-time results, not the expected results, mattered. (The result, lo these many years later, is that I remember her with a fondness few people have earned.)
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Jay usually came to class fresh off meetings with IEP (individualized education plan) groups, which consisted of the parent or parents, the student, the principal, the teacher, the special ed teacher and probably a few people I'm forgetting.
But one day, she came ready to talk more than usual about how we had to be advocates for these kids.
The parents in these meetings sometimes had taken the notion that their kids had special needs and run with that to the notion that their kids would never be able to do anything beyond learn that eating paste was bad.
Now, this is a toxic environment for a 4-year-old to live in. But the crucial thing is that the parents can be educated and shown how they are incorrect.
The kid in question also can be educated -- on how he (in this case) will never amount to anything and is just generally not worth the time or effort.
The situation, as Jay relayed it to us, was that the kid, who was 12, was in the IEP meeting with the above-mentioned people and was answering the principal's question about what he thought he could achieve in the next school year.
And this kid's mother interrupted him and told him he couldn't do that and he was worthless and he should just give up and ask to be transferred to the local votech.
And it was as if Jay was 12 again and her mother was saying those words to her. You could see it in her eyes, and through hers, this kid's.
But he wasn't going down. Whether of his own strength or borrowed (and I didn't and don't care whose), he stared her down and told her he was more than she would accept and she wasn't going to take opportunities away from him anymore.
Rest of that meeting, the kid's mother didn't speak unless she was spoken to, and she wasn't spoken to.
I'm not a violent person, and I wasn't in that meeting, and I wanted to punch that woman's lights out.
And here was Jay telling us this story as calmly as if she had told us about buying a loaf of bread at the grocery store.
Because you can't let people like that interfere with what's best for the student. This student handled his mother. And if more things presented themselves as needing to be addressed, they'd be addressed. But you weren't to write checks he'd have to cash, and laying into her might make you feel better, but the kid didn't need any more to worry about.
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She gave us the answers to the final exam.
It was a 50-question multiple choice test. Maybe a 100-question test.
It could have been a 500-question test. She gave us the answers because the test meant nothing. It was all straight-forward information anyway. We could have passed it without taking the class, which made it pretty pointless.
The point of the class wasn't the test. The point was understanding people-first language and being an advocate for your kids and understanding how to deal with people.
And a multiple-choice test isn't going to elicit proof of that information anyway. Not usefully, at least. ("When in an IEP meeting, you should/should not tell the parent to stop being unkind to the student." Yeah, totally useful question there.)
So she gave us the answers and we talked some in the teacher education library about the timing of legislation that had changed special education. (Amazingly, it tends to happen during legislative lulls or when politicians are gearing up for re-election.)
And then we had the final exam and I didn't see her until we met at the funeral of a mutual friend and university professor -- Andy Clarkson -- almost two years later.
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Andy and Jay had known each other for years -- co-taught classes -- and been very close. I'd seen them together before and after classes and even during some of them (I'd taken Educational Psychology from him), and I knew they were as close as two people can be without being romantically involved.
So when Andy died, … I was … how do you … she had to have known he was sick. (She had, of course, as I later found out.) But what the hell do you say?
Fortunately, this nonconformist has long recognized that sometimes one does one's best to color inside the lines, so I fired off a brief e-mail once I could see again -- tears being nature's way of advising one to sit down and wait until the physical pain of bumping into a wall nose-first is more alarming than the emotional pain of I just found out my friend died -- and said the things one says.
(As I haven't gotten over Blake's death, I haven't gotten over Andy's death. Not interested in doing either.)
Got to the memorial service, said hello to some folks I recognized from classes and then saw Jay.
Now, in retrospect, I don't know why I thought she might look tired or distraught. This woman would look radiant in a garbage bag after an unfortunate encounter with a human-sized blender.
And my lord was she holding court with 17 people while dealing with the death of a man who had been her other for more than a decade. I would later find out she'd held his hand through lung cancer (heavy smoker, and he loved his pipes) and everything that entails when you're trying to teach the cancer why it picked the wrong guy to mess with.
You know those stories where then narrator says it was like everyone in the room stopped existing for a minute or however long?
That didn't happen.
Instead, soon as I got there to hug her, she became the consoling one, and anyone she had been talking to sort of got the hint that this was one of her kids.
One of her however many hundreds of kids she'd had.
In all her years of teaching and leading workshops at every level for which one has those sorts of things.
Everything stopped
for one.
Every conversation she was having with whoever
stopped
And "Of course I remember you, Patrick."
(In that e-mail, I'd invited her to not remember who I was because of the great enormous tremendous pile of students she'd had. I also tend to assume people won't remember me, but Jay isn't people. She's Jay. And in her response to my e-mail and at the memorial, she made clear that she remembered me.)
I think if a fire had broken out underfoot, she would have been as calm as she was then. She would have let me know something was burning and it wasn't me, and we would have moved away from the melting carpet and resumed our catharsis.
A gentle tenacious, that woman.
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I once heard someone say that in college, there are two kinds of professors: teachers who research and researchers who teach.
Anyone who believes that -- actually, anyone at all, regardless of university belief system -- needs to meet Jay, the third kind of professor.
The kind you ought to meet at least one of in your life because she will never forget you and you will do anything to keep her alive.