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Listen to this
As a supervisor one so often has the privilege to share in moments of superb practice. Enjoy the insight and creativity from a session this past week.
Tony is eight and a handful. A recent immigrant, having been "shipped" across the ocean to be with one of a pair of deeply divided parents, feeling a bit like a football, not really wanted by either parent and "pleasing" them only by going away, his behaviour is dominated by his feelings of helplessness and rejection. His Second Grade teacher has little patience with his disruptive and over-active behaviour and brings him to Carrie, the school Child and Youth Care worker. "I am just not able to have him in my classroom, I have thirty other children whom I have to teach!"
Tony has come with a cut-out sheet, a writing book and a pair of plastic scissors. He stands in the middle of Carrie’s room, trembling, and starts to slash at the cut-out sheet with the scissors.
Carrie: Let’s not spoil what you have already done in your book. Here are some old magazines which you can cut out ...
Tony kneels down and rips out two or three pages, and tears them into shreds.
Carrie: Those are old magazines, you can tear them into bits. It’s OK.
Tony pauses, and then tears out more pages and this time cuts them up with the scissors, roughly and seemingly aggressively.
The boy still kneels, rigidly and tensely, and doesn’t sit when Carrie herself sits on the carpet near him. He continues to wield the scissors rapidly, pieces of paper falling everywhere.
Carrie sits, her eyes on the scissors and the magazine pages.
Carrie: You’re very quick with the scissors ... (a pause) ...
Carrie: What else are you good at?
Tony: I’m good at dancing ... you want to see me dance?
Carrie: Dancing! Very much, yes please.
For twenty minutes there is the extraordinary ‘dialogue’ of Tony’s frenetic dancing and Carrie’s ‘listening’. He is clearly skilled and has picked up the steps and routines somewhere. Eventually he stops.
Exhausted, he lies on his back on the carpet and laughs.
They talk.
Today in our encounters with anxious and hurting kids we aim to connect rather than reproach, to lift rather than put down, we arrange our space and style so that we can allow rather than suppress, acknowledge rather than reject ... and above all to create climates for activity and exchange. Well done, Carrie.
