Personal Blogs

Hopefully at some point of your life you'll fall in with a bunch of people who seem like they will be able to change the world for the better, for someone. It's always a group that changes the world for the better. It's all to easy for an individual to make it worse.

For me it was a certain primary school and a senior management team who were confident enough to allow me to use my off-normal-sequence skills to their best advantage.

Specifically I was to deal with the difficult kids in a way that they didn't expect adults to. Nothing was ever said of course.

We had one particular wee lost soul who caused us many problems. When he came to us the damage had been done but we tried. There was an unspoken agreement amongst us that however often we failed we would never abandon him. As long as the other kids were, and felt, safe. That was my job.

I knew that he was trouble the first time that I clocked him, the first time that I touched him was when I scooped him away from punching a wee girl, the look of horror and surprise on his face said it all, "nobody can stop me!". I let him punch me for a while and then just extended my arm, which he punched until he started crying.

School is about your friends rubbing the corners off your selfishness. This wasn't going to be the case in this case.

I spent a lot of my thoughts on this problem, starting after-school clubs so that he could interact with his peers in a different way. The clubs were a success (Warhammer, Chess, Pokemon, games right!)] they helped others but he always went mad and had to be exiled. All I ever had was a hold over him, a rather wobbly one, but I could make him behave. Which held him for other people too.

Then came regime change.

The day that the world changed was when he threw a plate at another kid, something that he knew was unacceptable. I was in the room at the time, I remember seeing his face as I started baring down on him; there wasn't fright on his face, he just knew that a trouble that he didn't like was coming.

An AHT ran into my face. She explained that, "We've decided on a different way of tackling this..."

He punched her in the face about a week later and was excluded. That was when I decided that I was no longer required.

Today I saw him riding on a bike along the canal and from the look upon his face I know that we failed him. That we would be I.