Miles To Go Before I Sleep (32 page)

We shook hands and I left. I didn't expect to hear back.

Later that evening, the phone rang at our house. It was the principal calling to say the job was mine!

It felt great to be back in the classroom. I quickly established a special rapport with a tough group of kids: learning disabled boys in grades four through six, the kind with a lot of behavioral problems. They were wonderful. I could really relate to them, because I was one of them.

I had a hard time reading. I knew how hard it is to be thought of as lazy because our brains don't allow us to focus. I knew what it was like to feel as though you can't keep up with what people are saying. I felt the frustration of looking normal and having people get mad at me because I didn't experience the world the same way they did.

The new job gave me the chance to share what I knew and was learning about learning disabilities.

It was a perfect fit for me in other ways too. It allowed me to ease my way back into the worlds of work and teaching. The part-time position gave me the time and flexibility I needed to stay focused on my recovery and rehabilitation.

I was excited about going back to work. I'd always had a special place in my heart for kids who had a harder time than the rest.

After my first year of teaching in Baytown, Texas, I'd decided to focus on teaching kids with learning disabilities. Looking back on those years, I remembered the excitement I felt from seeing my first- and second-grade students' progress. There were also frustrations. They often tested my patience. It took a lot of energy, patience, persistence, creativity, determination—and love—to reach these students. I racked my brains to invent specific, concrete ways to teach the kids how to write and say their ABCs.

If we were working on the letter
B
, for example, we'd all make
B
sounds and write the letter
B
in different colored crayons or markers. Together, we'd repeat different words that started with
B.
I'd bring red and black licorice to school and, together, we'd form it into letters. One time, I brought in a box of sand for the students to write their letters in. We'd bake cookies in the shape of
Bs.
We'd all curl our bodies into
B
shapes and pretend we were
Bs.

When we were done, I'd say, “Okay, what's the letter for the day?”

“B! B! B!” the kids sang out in a happy chorus.

Before shifting gears to work on another subject—such as math—I'd tell the kids, “Okay, in about an hour we're going to come back, and I'm going to ask you what this letter is.”

Just to refresh their memories, I'd make the
B
sound again: “Buh”—as in the word
Be
, and the word
Bat
, and the word
Boy.
And they'd say, “B! B! B!” and laugh.

An hour later, we'd come back to our letters and I'd ask the kids, “What's the letter for the day?”

Their faces went completely blank. If I was lucky, one child might hesitatingly say, “B?” Everyone else would chime in and say, “B! B! B!” But the only reason most of them got it was because they heard what the one child had remembered.

“We just
did
this,” I'd say.
“Don't you remember?
We made the cookie in the shape of a
B.
What else did we do with the letter
B
?”

No one remembered what we did with the
B.
No one remembered that we all became Bs by forming our bodies into the shape of a
B.

Why wasn't I getting through to them?

Then it hit me: we've got twenty-four more letters to go!

Sometimes, I took my students' learning problems personally—as if I had failed as a teacher. At those times, I grew frustrated and impatient. “Why aren't you listening?” I'd ask. “Why aren't you paying attention to what I'm saying?”

They hung their heads in shame. They felt terrible about disappointing me.

Parents of my LD students also became frustrated with their kids, because they didn't understand their child's problem. I remember one father who was so frustrated because his little boy couldn't follow simple instructions around the house. “We ask Timmy to go clean up his room and, a few minutes later, he'll come back and say it's clean,” the father reported. “But when we go to check, the place is still a mess. I don't get it. Is he
trying
to drive us crazy?”

I understood his bewilderment. “You have to keep your directions very simple,” I explained. “If you want him to take care of his bedroom, you can't say, ‘Clean up your bedroom and when you're finished with that, I want you to go wash your hands, and then I want you to come down for lunch.' You just can't do that.”

I told parents that their LD kids didn't know what they meant by a “clean bedroom.” It was too abstract. The parents had to show them, in a concrete and specific way, what constituted a “clean bedroom.” To a child, it might mean just putting his or her shoes in the closet.

The parents would have to say just one thing at a time and actually show their children how to do each task—“This is where your gym shoes go. This is where you hang up your jacket. Your socks go in this drawer,” and so on. As parents, or teachers, we couldn't take anything for granted.

I encouraged parents to stay with their children and watch them pick up the room—to make sure they had actually learned. Only then could they be expected to clean their room.

I often wrote down information on learning disabilities and handed it out to parents to help them understand what they were dealing with.

Some children followed a behavior modification program to help them stay focused and responsible at home and school. I suggested that parents make a list of the chores that the kids were supposed to do and put it in a prominent place like the refrigerator. After finishing each task, the kids would then put a sticker or a check mark by the task to show that they had done it. This helped kids see their accomplishments and feel good about them.

Sometimes, the teaching stuck and sometimes it didn't. In the beginning, I wasn't very good at predicting what would work. It was neat to see the progress of my students even though it was always very slow.

At first, speaking publically about the hijacking was a form of therapy for me. It was a way for me to make some sense out of a terrible tragedy, and, hopefully, encourage others to persevere through hard times.

Though I had no public speaking experience before the hijacking, I was discovering a new gift: the ability to hold a crowd in rapt attention. I got a high from seeing people sitting on the edge of their chairs, so interested in what I was saying that they couldn't take their eyes off me. I got excited when people were listening and getting what I had to say, when the room was so quiet you could hear a pin drop.

When I first started speaking, I wrote my speech on thirty-two large note cards. I used a red ink pen, because red was the easiest color for me to read.

In Toastmasters, I learned it was important to use audiovisual materials to illustrate the points I made in my speeches. I started using video news clips from the hijacking.

I was also learning that my speaking style had to come from inside me. Lots of people were giving me advice on what to say, how to say it, how to stand—you name it. I tried to remember what they were all saying, but my memory was too weak. I found that I couldn't listen to what they were saying and stay focused on my speech. I had to find my own voice as a speaker.

Finding my own voice improved my speeches. People were very interested in what I had to say, and were particularly curious about the hijacking. “Do you think they should have stormed the plane?” a man asked me one time.

“I have to be real careful not to be judgmental about things after the fact,” I said. “There were a lot of lives lost during that action….”

Although my speeches centered around my experience in the hijacking, my focus was really on what the hijacking taught me about life, about what's really important, about survival.

During the question and answer period following one speech, I talked about the importance of meditation and getting centered in my life.

A woman in the audience raised her hand. “I feel like God is standing up there in a red dress,” she said.

I was wearing a red dress that day.

She continued, “How do you get that feeling that you're talking about? How do you get to that point?”

“I get into a deep meditative state,” I said. “When I come out, I feel energized. I feel that I'm tapping a power that has always been there. When I reach that, I feel that I'm becoming stronger. Sometimes, I ask questions when I'm in that state. I'm always asking God questions.”

I enjoyed so many touching and sometimes humorous moments with the people I shared my story with. After speaking to a church congregation one time, the pastor announced that, after my speech, coffee and cookies would be served. “This will give Jackie a twenty minute ‘headstart' to get off the highways before the rest of us have to be on the same roads,” he said.

We all laughed.

SHORTLY BEFORE THE 1987–88 SCHOOL YEAR STARTED, I went in to see Dr. Maxwell, my neurosurgeon, for one of my regular checkups. When I first started seeing Dr. Maxwell, I went in once a month. As my condition stabilized, my appointments tapered off to once every six months.

On this particular visit, Dr. Maxwell announced, “I don't think you need to come in anymore. Your condition is pretty good. You should continue to see Dr. Leppik, but I don't think we need to worry about the bone fragments still in your head. There has been no change for the past year, and the scar tissue seems to have developed nicely.”

The news felt good. But I still had a problem—namely, a huge soft spot in my head. “What are we going to do about my caved-in head?” I asked. “It limits me from being able to play softball and ski hard, from doing all the fun things I want to do.”

“Jackie, there's a lot of people in this world running around with caved-in heads,” he said.

“That's fine,” I said, “but I don't want to be one of them anymore. I'm tired of having a hole in my head.”

“Okay,” he said, “then let me tell you about the surgery.”

He explained the risk involved from the anesthesia. Dr. Maxwell would shave my head, lift up the skin covering my brain, then use a drill to attach a plastic mesh to my skull. Then he would take some putty and lay it over the mesh—to hold it in place. Finally, he'd shape the putty to blend in with the rest of my skull. When the putty hardened, the doctors would put the skin flap back over the wound and stitch me back up.

I had the surgery and was still bald when school started that fall. I wore a turban or a scarf over my head. You could tell I didn't have any hair, because a scarf over hair looks different from a scarf over baldness—it lay flat against my head.