There are special chairs for children who need them, and therapy rooms. Still, even regular schools have students in wheelchairs and nurses and counselling rooms. It is not so different after all.
School dismissal time might be the most surprising to outsiders who expect scenes of abnormality. It is all so familiar – the rush of parents and domestic helpers, children queueing up with their classmates, and teachers waving goodbye to their students on school buses.
When it was time for me to meet Ms Fauziah Ahmad, she came out to greet me in the administration office, then led me to her own.
The 3rd Step
Fauziah invited me to have a seat on the sofa set in her office. She asked about Jan, and I told her he was better. Slightly grumpy and refusing to leave home, but he was happy over the little things. She said she was glad.
I rifled through my notes and began by asking how she started working with special needs.
She thought about it. ‘It was something I had always known I wanted to do. Even back in school, I would go out for lots of volunteer work. I’d wanted to tie in that part of my life to my professional one. So when the time came, I jumped at the chance to apply.’
I wondered aloud if she had had any experiences with special needs in her early life that might have influenced her.
‘Well, no, I guess not really,’ she said, looking as though she were trying to recall something. ‘I do have a story to tell though.’
As a young child Fauziah had an uncle, her mother’s cousin. He played with the rest of the children, but everyone always knew he was different. Scarcely anyone thought about special needs at the time. To them he was just who he was; a little strange, a little different, and that was all. He was never diagnosed. It never even occurred to Fauziah that he was special till she entered the field many years later.
‘I’m not sure how much that affected me when I had learned more and knew better,’ said she, ‘but it might have in some way. It left a mark.’
‘I tell my new teachers all the time. It isn’t about the salary. There is plenty of better-paid work out there. It isn’t even about credit. You honestly hardly get any. It is really about the children, and the want to work with them. Someone has to do it. You have to decide if you are going to be that someone.’
‘You mean having the passion,’ said I, and the good lady nodded.
‘Passion is not an excuse to pass these teachers over for better pay,’ I said. ‘People are being taken advantage of.’
Fauziah smiled and gave a slight rueful shrug. ‘That cannot be argued with. It is something I hope will change.’
I asked her what other advice she gave her teachers.
‘I say to them, you will only know the difference you made when you have experienced it first-hand,’ she replied.
Fauziah told me that teachers get brought in for trials and attachments with the schools. This is to let them find out for themselves if they are really suited for the job.
‘The satisfaction to be had from your successes, no matter how small, is priceless. They would never know it unless they experience it for themselves,’ said she.
‘What happens to these new teachers then?’ I asked.
She explained that the teachers are first brought around the school, and their interactions with the children monitored. Teacher-simulation exercises too are carried out.
More than twenty years ago, she herself was a new, untrained teacher in another special school. The next year, she was offered two places to study in the National Institute of Education – under Education or Special Needs.
She chose Special Needs. Everyone else was telling her to do otherwise. Teaching in a regular school, after all, brings better pay and a lot more benefits. Teachers in regular schools are also regarded highly, and there is status in it. Fauziah said her family was upset with her decision at first.
‘It was challenging to get them to accept the path I had chosen,’ she said. ‘More than once, I had to physically restrain children and went home bruised from the scuffles. My father was so angry. “I’m going to complain to the school!” he said,’ she laughed. ‘And I told him, you can’t really do that. I’m a teacher there, not a student.’
‘It was tough,’ she went on. ‘But I found a way.’
What the excellent lady did was to approach some of her students’ families, and ask for permission to bring the students to visit her home, and let her family members interact with them.
‘The plan worked,’ she said, smiling. ‘My family learned to accept what I was doing, even support it. My father was working near one of the schools I was posted to. He would phone me just to tell me he had seen some of my students.’
‘But do you see?’ she said. ‘My own family had a difficult time at first, accepting the special needs world. What more of the public, who has nothing to do with it at all, and hardly any knowledge of it? It helped me understand why people behave the way they do, sometimes, to special needs children. But there have been some improvements over the years. People are finding out more.’
Fauziah added that she thought it was a matter of empathy rather than sympathy. If one went and saw these children as nothing more than poor little things to be pitied, it gets no one anywhere. What one has to do is empathise with them. But the public rarely shows empathy; it is difficult for them.
‘It is about awareness, is it not?’ I asked. ‘They are not aware.’
‘That is slowly changing,’ she said.
I thought it would be nice if things changed just a little faster. I asked her how she thought we could raise awareness better.
She said,
