What I Learned Playing Sports With My Students
They had an emotional disability diagnosis
It was the kind of job you take out of college because, well, you couldn’t find a better one.
One that my English major degree made me perfectly suited for since I didn’t know what else I could do with my literature knowledge.
So I became an instructional aide for a year at a Los Angeles County program for students diagnosed with an Emotional Disturbance (ED).
I assisted a teacher slightly older than me who quit after four months and was replaced by a rotating cast of substitutes the rest of the year.
I sometimes felt like I was assisting Bozo the Clown (the clueless teacher) and empathized with the students in several touchy situations.
One day a student got angry when the teacher snapped at him for something he said. I told the student privately I understood how he felt because the teacher didn’t have a lesson plan.
He was shocked I saw it from his perspective, and his conduct wasn’t seen as inappropriate.
Small gestures like these helped me build a strong relationship with my students, and playing sports at recess became our refuge from the challenges of a typical day at school.
My students were fidgety and struggled to sit still inside our cramped classroom, battling neurological disorders like ADHD and autism on top of their emotional disability diagnosis.
But outside on the blacktop, my students could run recklessly and live out their sports dreams by beating their man to snag a touchdown pass.
Outside, they were a totally different person.
As the all-time quarterback in football, I would diagram passing plays on the palm of my hand and loft passes to my formerly fidgety students.
With only six students — five boys and a girl — we usually played two on two with the biggest guy serving as my all-time offensive lineman and a younger student as the all-time rusher.
The teacher questioned before Randy, my pass protector, was enrolled whether he should be placed into our class since he was expelled for bringing a knife to his former middle school.
“We’re the last resort,” I reminded him.
Randy was a nice kid and an incredible pass protector at close to 200 pounds against a sixth-grader in the class next door about half his size.
Nick was the Alpa male of the group. He was a natural-born athlete. I nicknamed him Randy Moss after the NFL wide receiver because he’d catch almost every single pass I tossed his way.
Everyone was shocked since he rarely dropped a pass. He was just as good at talking smack as playing football. A can’t-miss football player in high school… if he could stay out of trouble.
On the other end of the athletic and intellectual spectrum was my favorite student, Frank, who picked his nose incessantly in the classroom.
He ran with a hitch in his stride and wasn’t the most coordinated kid. But he had a beautiful smile whenever he got a whiff of the endzone.
Frank had a dual diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Intellectual Developmental Disability (IDD). I never figured out why he was in our ED class since he was gentle as a puppy.
Moises and Juan were the two other regulars. They were from the area’s Latino cholo culture and already street-savvy at thirteen. They wore oversized khaki pants and long white t-shirts.
They reminded me of Cheech and Chong.
Like the 1970s and 80s comedy duo, they had a unique Cholo-brand of humor and salted their conversation with “homey” in every sentence.
“Homey, I’m going to school you,” Juan would say to whoever guarded him playing football.
Juan and Moises were just kids on the blacktop, although when Nick trash-talked with them I feared that it could escalate into an altercation.
But they were just messing around and smack talk was a part of the game like salsa and chips, cookies and milk, or French fries and ketchup.
The one thing that I’ll always remember is my students’ celebrations after a touchdown. It wasn’t just points added to their team’s score.
Each student had a different celebration that reflected their personality and made us laugh.
We had a different recess time than the rest of the school, and everyone felt free to celebrate with no concerns other students might laugh.
Nick was a traditionalist, preferring to spike the ball with force into the pavement and then shimmy his shoulders just a little with a smile.
Moises or Juan pretended to hit a piñata or did their “Big Momma” dance with swift-moving feet and gyrating hips like Martin Lawrence’s undercover FBI agent in “Big Momma’s House.”
Frank favored the moonwalk for celebrations, sliding backward on the balls of his sneakers that would’ve made Michael Jackson proud.
Gloria, the lone girl, had purple-dyed hair and wore a black leather jacket with metal studs. I got her to play basketball with us a few times.
But recess was her time to do her make-up meticulously, and she didn’t want to run around and get sweaty like her classmates on hot days.
While each student left an impression on me, Frank is the student I remember most fondly because he was the ultimate underdog.
He was a five-foot-one, a one-hundred-pound Rudy Ruettiger, with hardly a speck of athletic ability, but made up for it with determination.
Like the titular character in the movie “Rudy,” he always did his best with the hand he was dealt, running routes I diagrammed for him.
Catching the ball Throwing it back Collecting a high-five
That was our unspoken agreement. I gave him a high-five after every time he caught the ball.
You couldn’t help but pull for Frank. It was like watching “Rudy” or “Hoosiers” at every recess.
Day after day, you wanted to see him succeed.
In the classroom, I sat beside him, helped him as he struggled with math problems, and joked with him whenever he dug into his nose.
“Man, how many buggers you got in there,” I’d say. “I thought you got them all out yesterday.”
On the blacktop, he dragged his football as he ran and his glasses fogged up. This made me more eager to deliver the ball into his hands.
I saw his confidence grew during the school year, and I sensed he needed the brotherhood with his classmates more than everyone else.
It felt like he got to be on a team for the first time in his life at school during recess, and he cherished being given the opportunity to play.
Looking back on my year as a classroom aide, my students taught me what I needed to learn as a future teacher, and they were supposed to be deficient in relationships with other people.
According to the Individuals With a Disability Act (IDEA), an inability to build or maintain satisfactory interpersonal relationships with peers and teachers is one of the five criteria for receiving an emotional disturbance diagnosis.
Nevertheless, my students taught me to have empathy and to see a situation from their perspective, and not just the teacher’s view.
Having empathy helped me to see how bored they were in class … to sense if they needed a break … or a moment to laugh at something Moises said…and realize everything will pass.
They helped me to see what stories to pick out for them. I asked my students what they would like to read and created lessons since the subs gave worksheet after worksheet for classwork.
Seeing them complete the worksheets easily, I realized they deserved a lot more challenging curriculum than they received during that year.
They had academic deficits, but their brain was fine to think about content and they enjoyed reading, having class discussions, and writing about the subjects they had suggested to me.
The thing I remember the most from my year as an instructional aide is a compliment Frank’s mom gave me at his triennial IEP before she asked me to give my input about his placement.
“I want Scot to share his thoughts,” she told the IEP team of specialists sitting around a table. “He has been like a teacher, father, brother, uncle, counselor, friend, and a coach to him.”
This sums up what I learned from my students: the importance of getting to know my students better and developing a relationship with them.
And it’s served me well as a high school teacher for the last 18 years.
Thanks for reading my story.
