Where the Abnormal Has Become Normal

Where the Abnormal Has Become Normal

Within the first three years of my teaching experience, I could not escape the fact that many of the students in my classroom were exhibiting behaviors indicating something was drastically wrong with their thinking patterns. From the Bureau of Indian Affairs bureaucrats and national Indian education literature, I was hearing theories of cultural differences and dominant society “white man’s world” impact on our students, but those theories, romantic as they sounded, did not begin to touch on the depth of the problem. Students sight reading as fast as anyone in the class, but unable to comprehend what they were reading, students who would not remember concepts and skills from one day to the next, let alone one hour to the next, students who had physical deformities and medical conditions at a much higher rate than normal, students who would tantrum, students who were impulsively impulsive, students who were exhibiting abnormal sexual deviancy, students who would, at the drop of a hat, become aggressive toward adults and other students, students who would not think anything of spitting in the face of a teacher or taking a big stick and threatening the principal. Their interpersonal behaviors and academic behaviors were years behind, and in many ways, well outside the norm. Yet, but for a couple of the kids, behind their survival mask, they were kind and tender, remorseful and wanting forgiveness, eager to please, and keenly aware that they were not “normal”. And, these students had other ways of showing their feelings, such as native dance and art. In a strange sort of way, they were more accepted in the tribal schools because they became the ‘normal student’ and the usually normal student was the exception. I worked in a place where the abnormal had become normal.

This phenomenon was the same in the second and, in a lesser degree, in the third tribal school I worked in. Good, well-meaning teachers, working in the schools for a long period of time, would begin to have a skewed sense of reality. Students years behind academically would be getting A’s and B’s. Average achieving students would be considered gifted when compared to the entire student population. An essay of questionable quality would be touted as excellent. High stakes testing procedures were compromised by teachers in order to “give the student every chance to succeed”. Curriculum was watered down, minimized, adapted, or completed changed to accommodate the majority of students in the classrooms. These practices, well-meaning as they were, would then create a skewed sense of reality for the ‘normal students’ when he or she, either returned to public school, went out into the work force, or attempted college. The academic abnormal had become normal in attempt to create a feeling of success for the students.

I don’t know how to impress on anyone reading this the depth of the problem in the tribal schools and, to a lesser degree, in the public schools. Our FASD children are victims of a terrible affliction. Remember, it is not that the FASD student is not intelligent, its just his or her brain can’t organize and generalize the information like a normal brain. Just think what it would be like to daily have people shaming you for not remembering what was said or taught yesterday, for accusing you of not acting your age, of threatening you with punishment when you don’t understand why or what the punishment is for, giving you several directions at once when you can only focus on one direction at a time, or looking at you with contempt because you can’t do what others your age can and should be doing. I believe the No Child Left Behind mandates have created a stressful dilemma for our schools. FASD students are at a high risk for failure and the pressure on the classroom teachers puts the teachers at risk to act in a manner that is counterproductive with FASD children.