 I had this one kid that I loved- a Firebug, a troubled kid. By eight, he was running wild on the streets. By nine, he'd spent six months in juvie. By ten, he was known to every police officer and social worker in his neighborhood. In first grade, he wasn't in my class and wasn't reading. In second grade, he still wasn't reading and he (with three friends) threw desks out the window of his classroom, aiming so they landed on the hood of his teacher's brand new car. Since she wouldn't return to school with them in her class, they assigned all four to me--temporarily. Second grade- and he didn't know the letters in his name, couldn't count to 30, and was redoing the same kindergarten series for the third time. My Social Worker begged me to keep him out of trouble until they found a better placement- only a few weeks, she promised, I just had to keep him and three of his chair throwing companions in my special needs kindergarten class until they found an appropriate placement. If I hadn't owed the Social Worker for bending the rules to get a little autistic kid into a specialized environment when the school district didn't want to pay for it, I would have rejected them from the beginning. The Fearsome Foursome knew they were in big trouble, but that didn't keep Firebug from swaggering into my room and knocking over the waiting desks. I waited until I cooled down and then I picked up the offending desks and set them in the hall. "I ain't sitting with the drooling idiot," he said, pointing at Dalton. Dalton grinned a drooling smile and offered him a soggy, half-chewed paper. "Not sure you're sitting anywhere since I just put your desk and chair in the hallway," I replied a little sharply as I picked up the scattered school supplies before calling the rest of the class to the rug. We did important stuff at the rug every morning. We read our names, we counted to 100, we named colors, we read stories and sang songs. We laughed and told silly jokes no one got. We had fun. It was important to me that everyone start the day having fun because our days were so unpredictable. My four little demons walked around the room, ignoring us and I ignored them. I made rug time go a long time that morning. Then I gave everyone their morning assignments and pulled together my first reading group. I was working on sight words borrowing a technique I'd read about from Sylvia Aston-Warner in her book Teacher. Every day they got a new RED printed word. It was a big deal. They told me their word. I wrote it. We spelled it. We talked about the meaning. They drew a picture on the back- and then, we read their word cards. Any card they knew, they kept. If they didn't know it, I threw it away. Milton was zooming through his list when he stopped on the word, "hat". He looked at the picture and shrugged. I tore it into quarters and threw it away. (The theory was that only the words that had meaning would be remembered and that I couldn't force a word to have meaning. For some of my kids, I wrote the same word every day and threw it away the next until it finally meant something to them.). A ball of anger stepped between Milton and me, and we both looked up, surprised. "Why you do that?" my little firebug demanded. I didn't know what he was talking about. Milton didn't know what he was talking about. "Do what?" I asked stupidly as he frantically dug through the trash to find the pieces of card stock. "You threw away his word!" "He didn't want it," I explained softly as he tried to fit the pieces back together. This kid who didn't know the alphabet and couldn't write his name, painstakingly reconstructed the index card by the torn shapes. "Do you want a word," I finally asked as he bit back tears of frustration. He stopped and stared up at me from the floor. "A word," I said. "Do you want a word?" He nodded. "Ok, but here are the rules for keeping your word. If you know it tomorrow, it stays in your box, but if you don't know it, then that tells me that it's not important to you and that you don't need it. You only get to keep the important words- the ones so important that you will know it wherever you see. Deal?" He stood up, wiped his hand on his pants, and held it out for me to shake. Solemnly, we shook hands as the rest of his little gang gathered around me. "What word do you want?" It was the most important question someone had asked him. He thought a long time as his crew offered suggestions. I wrote each of them their own word and gave them their word box while he thought. "What's his words," he asked pointing at Milton. Milton pulled out his sticky stack of cards and began reading them. "Apple, bunny, frog, truck, Poppy, Mommy, stuck," Milton read every word proudly and my demon child was taken back. "He can read?" "Everyone but Dalton can read," I said, "And Dalton is learning to read his name." That was an outright lie. Dalton had much more important things to do- like find bugs on the floor to eat or ripping pages of books into tiny pieces before he ate them. Dalton's brain wasn't wired for speech and reading and he didn't like pictures as a form of communication either. He was fine with smiling when he was happy and letting his big dark eyes fill with tears when he was sad. But the rest of the class that everyone thought would only learn to read street signs was reading simple sentences and asking me for words like "the" and "and" and "like" so they could lay their cards on the floor to create sentences that read things like "Poppy likes the bunny" or "Robbie is a boy". "What's your word?" "Fire," he said. Why wasn't I surprised? I wrote the word twice- once with lower-case letters and once in all caps. f-i-r-e and F-I-R-E. "Why did you write it twice?" he asked. "This word is so important that it is in this room in several places. Can you find it." The great word hunt took off while I called my next group of kids up. "It's here," he yelled loudly. "I found it!" My paraprofessional joined him and his little group. "Where did you find it?" "On the fire extinguisher." She nodded. "It's hiding other places as well." I might as well not tried to teach the rest of the class for the next 20 minutes as they scoured the room: finding it on the posted Fire Drill instructions, the red fire truck in the block section, the fire fighter's hat in the play area, the books about fire safety on the window. "I ain't ne'ber forgettin' this word," he said carefully storing it in his word box at the end of the day.  The next day when I began Word Play, he leaned over the back of my chair while I reviewed Milton's words. He mouthed each one and asked to see them. Milton shared happily. He didn't move during the whole session, and repeated his action the rest of the week. On Monday, his mother brought him school with a box of the dollar brownies from the dollar store.
"Mz. M," she started before she started crying. I handed her the box of tissues, put the brownies up out of Ricksi's reach, and waited for her to begin again. "You taught him to read." "I wouldn't say that," I started. Knowing five words doesn't make you a reader. "I told the Social Worker that the best place for him was your class," she finished proudly. Did she know my class make-up? These were the kids that went to special special schools before the district decided to hire me and save a small fortune. These were the kids that weren't toilet-trained, barely spoke, and had IQ's of 40 or less. They couldn't hold normal pencils, tie their shoes, or zip their coats. The kids in my class were the definition of "special" needs kids and while they were a handful, they weren't emotionally disturbed, desk throwing, fire bug demons who had anger control issues. In fact, legally, I wasn't sure the state would let the Fearsome Foursome stay more than twenty days (which was a bit of a relief to me). I was fairly sure that we didn't want them to stay more than twenty days. While I was talking to his mother, the little brat had gotten into everyone's sacred word boxes and had all the words sorted by beginning letter. "Ms. M," he called, a bit disturbed. "They don't match." I joined him on the floor. "Look," he said. "That's Robbie's word snake, and that's Ricksi's word snow. They sound the same, but they're broken." "They sound the same where?" I asked, more than a bit surprised. Not only did he learn everyone's words in a week, he was identifying beginning and ending sounds. He made the "sn-" sound and then pointed to the two words again. "Sn- ake! Sn-ow!" he repeated. We were lost in a lesson on how letters form words and words form meanings while his mother snuck out of the room. My Social Worker stopped by later that day. "Heard the oddest thing from Firebug's mother," she started. "Gonna' take a ton of work to keep him in here. You sure you want to keep him?" I had a choice? I didn't have a choice since the day we discovered how important words were. Firebug learned to read that year. He was still behind grade levels because he had three years of learning to catch up on. He was still one angry little kid who liked to start fires. He still went to juvie and stayed longer each time. He still threw things when he was mad, but he loved words. I saw him once after he left us. I was reading and he entered my room quietly, his shaggy hair shaved, his dark eyes dancing, he leaned against the back of my chair like he did so often that first year and listened to the story. Joan held in her "OH!" as I read! His long arms crept around my neck and he smelled like cigarettes and fall leaves. My class giggled and I knew he made a silly face at them. I finished the book and Joan took the kids to lunch after she claimed her hug. He was fifteen and had been out six months. "I wanted to say hi," he said. "I get sentenced tomorrow and the judge says I won't be out for a long time." "Thought you would know that fire hurts people by now, Firebug," I scolded. He shrugged, smiled a sad smile. "I know- but you know?" Yeah, I know. I know lots of things. I know that in your backpack is a thick novel and that you'll spend the next three years reading every book they have in that place. I know that you'll be of legal age when you come out and that next time it'll be the big jailhouse. I know that no matter how hard I tried that I never figured out how to get you to control your temper. I know that I had never been able to teach you the important things. He waved as he walked away and I bit back tears. In the scheme of things I wondered if I had wasted my time. "That was nice," Joan said from behind me. "Goin' back to juvie," I said through the tears. "Some kids have to learn the hard way. Firebug- he's one of those kids, and you know it." "Don't have to like it though." She laughed and handed me a tissue. "You know that evil little kid in Robert's class? The one that can make a nun cry in 30 seconds?" I nodded my head. Everyone knew him from the minute his tiny feet hit the front door. Joan grinned. "Can you tell that Social Worker heading this way NO for a change? Practice it. NOOO! NO! Just this once? Ok?" The Social Worker waved and Joan and I ducked into Room #108. "I'll say No," I promised as the Social Worker opened the door. "It's just temporary," she started.... | 
