Allen.

Allen gets called out of class every morning by the SPED teacher. He is a difficult student to work with a lot of the time because he has ADHD, is unresponsive much of the time, and will just run away every once in a while. Also, you can guess that he's years behind in reading and math.

One morning, the SPED teacher comes to the room, and he leaves with her. A few seconds later she comes back and tells me she'll come back to get Alex later, that she doesn't want him there at the moment because he causes trouble with another student in there. Oh, and he ran off so I need to go chase him. I walked about eight to ten laps around the school, up and down the steps to keep an eye on him (good workout). After a while he stops in the staircase and just stares out the window. I come up next to him and ask him if I can stand there and talk with him. We talk a little about the weather, and what kind of car he wants to drive one day, and then I ask him why he ran away again.

"She's wasting my time, telling me to come outside and then go back inside," he says.

I'm not sure what he's talking about, but I realize that on this particular morning, when the SPED teacher came to our door, he had automatically gotten up to go with her, even though she had only asked for another one of my students (this is kind of a big deal because the week before he wouldn't go with her even if she asked). When he got outside, she told him she doesn't want him in the class right now and to go back inside. That's when he took off.

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Allen's mother died randomly in the middle of the day a year or two ago. He went to school in the morning and had a family. He got home and he didn't anymore. His mother was gone, and his father ended up sending his sisters away because he couldn't take care of them all. The mother had been the glue holding the family together, and now he didn't have someone to take care of him and tell him that she wanted him around since he seemed to get into a lot of trouble at school. So, even though he said the teacher was wasting his time, what really bothered him was hearing, "I don't want you right now." It doesn't seem like anyone ever did, ever does, or ever will.

After talking about not running away, controlling yourself, making good choices, and now wasting more time by running away, I told him something my dad once told me. He had said that you can tell how smart someone is by how bright their eyes are. Allen has the brightest blue eyes I have ever seen, and I told him that. We went back into the classroom, and it was writing time. I told him that before we started writing we would come up with a list. The list was titled, "Things People Should Know About Me." In the first one, I wrote: I am smart.

When I came back, his list looked like this:

Things People Should Know About Me

1. I am smart.
2. I like reading.
3. I like math.
4. I like to lirn.

I added #5: I can be great.

We then moved on to writing about memories since that was what everyone else was doing.

"Let's write about the happiest day you've ever had. What's the happiest memory you have?"

"I want to write about the last time I saw my mom."

So he did.