With me, it was a case of mostly winging it. If I drew attention to her in class, she would habitually hang her head and look downwards, with the sort of ‘If I can’t see you, you can’t see me’ logic a much younger child would use. She’d blush as well – perhaps part of the reason why it worked, because, anxious not to further stress an already stressed and bullied child, I would ‘let her off’ by moving swiftly on.
But now it was time for some tough love. Not an abrupt about-turn – that really would stress her too much, I judged – just a slow shift towards a more robust strategy. Now, if I called her name in class, I kept the spotlight firmly on her for as long as it took to get some sort of reaction, even if it wasn’t speech itself. It could be a nod or a head shake, an action, such as getting something for me, or passing something to someone else. The main thing was to make her a more dynamic part of the group, so she couldn’t retreat into herself.
And by the Thursday I was already seeing progress. So much so that by the time Friday morning came around I thought I’d try something more radical that I’d read about.
We were doing work on emotions; something that cropped up in the unit often, for obvious reasons. I’d had the children cut out a giant paper firework the previous afternoon, which we were going to use in the exercise this morning. It would be Firework Night before long, after all. That said, this was more about empathy than Guy Fawkes. Unlike the hapless gunpowder plotter, empathy was a perennial.
‘Right,’ I told the children, having pinned up the rocket and grabbed a pen, ‘what I want you to do is tell me words that describe negative emotions, okay? I’ll call out names and I want you to shout out a word, then I’ll write them all on this magnificent rocket, ready for us to whoosh off into space. Got that?’
Heads nodded.
‘Yeah,’ said Ben. ‘But what about the tree?’
I’d also had the children cut out and paint a big tree, plus a pile of apples, all ready to be written on as well. ‘We’re going to do that next, Ben,’ I explained. ‘Once we’ve got rid of all the negative feelings we’re going to accentuate the positive. And “accentuate” means what? Does anybody know?’
‘Make more of it, Miss,’ Shona supplied quietly.
‘Exactly, Shona,’ I said, turning round to face the rocket. This part – facing away from them – was key. ‘Right, then,’ I said, pen poised, ‘um … let me see … Ben. You can start. Let’s have a word, please.’
‘Um, angry, Miss?’ he suggested.
‘Very good, Ben,’ I said. ‘That’s a great word to send off to space.’ I then wrote it down, and remained facing the wall. ‘So … Shona. You can be next. A word, please?’
‘Lonely, Miss,’ Shona supplied.
I wrote that one down too. ‘Henry, next. Can you come up with a word for me, Henry?’
‘I was going to say angry, Miss, but Ben already pinched it.’
‘I didn’t pinch it. I just thought of it!’
‘Yeah, well, fighting, then, Miss,’ he sniffed. ‘My word’s going to be fighting.’
I resisted the urge to turn back round and check that they weren’t actually doing any. ‘You’re on the right lines, Henry,’ I said, ‘but it needs to be a word that describes how you might feel. Not so much do, as feel, you know? Can you think of one like that?’
‘How about scared, Miss?’ he said eventually.
‘Scared is excellent, Henry. Thank you.’ I added it to the rocket. ‘Okay, so now it’s … let me see. Imogen. Yes, Imogen. What’s your word going to be?’
I remained with my pen poised just below Henry’s ‘scared’, knowing that all eyes, bar mine, would be on Imogen. The silence lengthened, but I stayed where I was.
‘D’you mean me, Miss?’ asked Molly eventually. ‘You haven’t had my word yet. My word’s upset. I’d already thinked it.’
‘No, sweetie,’ I said, pretending to go over the lines of the words already up there. I felt sure they were all bewildered by my refusal to turn around. ‘That’s a great word, and we’ll definitely use it, but Imogen was next on my list. Imogen, have you thought of one?’
Again, the silence was deafening. And I came within a whisker of turning round and moving on, when, in the tiniest voice imaginable – a voice that was nothing like the one I’d heard through the front door of her grandparents’ house – I clearly heard the word ‘sad’.
‘What was that, Imogen?’ I said quickly, hoping against hope that it had been her, and not just one of the lads, mucking around. But the silence told me it was her who’d spoken.
‘Sad,’ she said again, ever so slightly more loudly. ‘Sad,’ I repeated. ‘Excellent word, Imogen. Well done.’
I quickly added it and now I did turn around finally. Imogen looked fraught – I could think of no other word to describe it – and as if she might at any time burst into tears. Molly, sitting next to her, was staring at her, open-mouthed, and the other children were looking at each other, all obviously astonished. I would now have to quickly get them back on track before the attention on Imogen became completely unbearable.
‘Right,’ I said. ‘Molly. Remind me what your word was again?’
‘Upset, Miss,’ she said, turning to Imogen. ‘Which is a bit like your word, isn’t it? Isn’t it, Miss?’
I agreed that indeed it was. Similar but slightly different. ‘Now, Gavin,’ I said. ‘My little whizz-kid – what’s your word?’
If the tension hadn’t quite diffused, I knew it soon would. Gavin would, I was sure, come up with something kooky. And he obliged. ‘Badalicious!’ he said, adding a fist-pump for good measure, and having the rest of them collapse into giggles.
‘I’ll take the first bit of that, Gavin,’ I said, adding a smile of my own. ‘As I’m not quite sure “badalicious” has yet made it into the dictionary. No doubt it will eventually, but for now bad will do perfectly. Which means that, now, we can move on to our apples. Though in this case,’ I added, feeling very jaunty about my little breakthrough, ‘I hope there won’t be any “bad” apples.’
Of course, I then had to explain what a ‘bad apple’ was, but, all in all, a good half-morning’s work.
‘It was just incredible!’ I enthused to Kelly and Gary that lunchtime. ‘I couldn’t believe it. I mean, I know the whole point of getting an expert in and devising strategies and so on is because they do work, but, still. It went like clockwork. I couldn’t believe it,’ I said again. ‘And then she did it again – when we were doing the apples – she came out with “love”.’
Kelly was nodding vigorously, clearly as excited as I was, though Gary – longer in the tooth and less inclined to hyperbole – merely grinned. ‘Well, that was definitely one of the items on the to-do list,’ he agreed. ‘One you can now tick off. Good work, Casey. Let’s hope it now continues. I’ll let the other key staff know as well, as this probably needs to be a concerted effort. Do you think it’s worth calling the grandparents, too – let them know we’ve made some progress?’
I shook my head, and mentally reined myself in. It was exciting, yes, but in the big scheme of things not that exciting. Two words did not a conversation make, after all.
‘No,’ I said, finally. ‘I’d rather we hung on a little longer. I’m sure there’s more to come, and when it does we’ll have a chance of getting to the bottom of it, won’t we? And if we say anything now, and they bring it up, it just might put her back, mightn’t