There was one kid today who seemed a little bit more clearly disabled than most of them, though. Usually even the special ed kids who won't smile in the group shot look up at me waving my puppets and Dottie exclaiming as I make them sneak up behind her and ruffle her hair, etc., but this one little boy spent the whole time we were setting the kids up facing entirely away from the camera. When the aide finally directed him to turn around for the actual picture he looked acutely worried for a moment, then zoned out entirely, looking of to the sides and up at the sky with an expression of mild interest. Dottie called his name as she snapped pictures, and his aide kept telling him to look at the camera, and sometimes he did, but he never seemed to care at all about our little comedy sketch, or even to really understand what was going on.
When the group shot was done, our parent volunteers lined the kids up for individual pictures. When this one little boy's turn came, he was led up and set on a stool by his aide, then had his arms and legs put into the proper position by Dottie. This latter is actually pretty normal for the younger kids, who have a hard time understanding and following Dottie's instructions fast enough--photo poses turn out to be fairly complex and unnatural, and even the grownups tend to need a lot of directing before they are arranged to Dottie's satisfaction. However, when the little boy was set into position he quickly sagged out of it and had to be reposed and asked to stay still a couple of times. When this was done, he looked up at the camera with an expression completely devoid of emotion as Dottie and I went through the default monkey puppet routine ("I hope the monkey won't kiss me. Ohhh! Gross! He kissed me!"). When the monkey didn't work, I dug through the puppet bag and eventually decided on a bunny hand puppet that can pop out of an attached black top hat. A lot of times the surprise of the rabbit out of the hat makes kids smile, and if that isn't what does it, the cuteness of the little rabbit is.
So I put on the puppet and popped the bunny out of the hat behind Dottie's ear. And the kid reacted, after a fashion.
"It's a bunny," he said. "I like it." That was all he said for the whole few minutes we were shooting him, even though Dottie and his aide spent the entire time talking to him and asking him questions and doing anything they could to get him involved. And it seemed to me that he really did like the bunny. Except, though he sounded pleased in some way that even felt strangely important, his face didn't register anything at all. Dottie didn't get a picture of him smiling, but that happens often enough--her way of thinking is that it's better to let a kid look serious but not forced or grouchy, so she lets a lot of them do that and the pictures look nice anyway. She may not even have gotten a good shot of him looking at the camera, though I think she did. The point of all this, though, is how interesting it is to spend all day trying to rush through class after class cranking out pretty pictures of the kids, only to stop and spend a few extra minutes on a picture that won't be especially good. I think it's a great sign of Dottie's devotion to doing the best she can with each kid, which is something that impresses me every time I work with her. And aside from that, it made me feel really nice. I like kids a lot, in general, but I feel like more and more of them are spoiled to bits or phony or deceitful--they will be so preoccupied with being cool or rebellious that they will waste our time posing for photos of their grumpy or overposed faces. The youngest kids and, yes, the disabled kids are a nice break from that. This one kid was great because I knew he meant what he said, and that he liked what we were doing even if he didn't show it.