The empty baby book - dealing with troubled students

Instructor, April, 1994 by Evelyn Jackson

How one teacher fills in her troubled students' childhood memories

The notation is over 18 years old, but it still makes me smile--May 1973: "A, B, 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 11, 12, 19--that's the whole alphabet." Laura was not yet three when I recorded her first sentence in her baby book. Her baby book is filled with such entries. Most of us keep similar records for our children. If we don't have a baby book we have a photo album, a drawer of best schoolwork, or family videotapes. Our babies are central to our lives and we record their days and their histories to show ourselves and them that they are precious.

As a reading teacher of emotionally disturbed 11-year-olds in an inner-city school, I did not expect that my class of 12 boys would have similar baby books. They had moved from home to home all their lives--from foster homes to grandmothers' apartments, perhaps in with an aunt, then out again. I thought that if I shared a page from Laura's baby book with them, I might trigger some early memories that they had of themselves.

I was prepared for some confusion or grumbling when I asked them to write a story from their early years in their class journal--but I was not prepared for their anger. Jermaine was unwilling to even put the date on the page. Rodney yelled that he didn't know what to do and had nothing to say. Johnny just dropped his pencil. I quickly realized that I was losing them.

Suddenly, I thought that I might find the information in their school files. Quickly scanning the files, I was able to come back to the classroom with sentences for two of the children. I promised that by the next day I would have written out for each boy at least one good thing from the files for them to copy into their journals.

For most of the children, finding those few promised sentences was a challenge. The files were filled with devastating reminders--like the note that Johnny was abandoned in the hospital when he was three days old. But I persisted, and by the next day we had our list.

* Jermaine was born healthy and weighed six pounds, eight ounces.

* Rodney walked when he was one year old.

* Johnny crawled at seven months.

When early medical history was not available we took a positive notation from an evaluator's comments, like "Jorge has good visual-motor skills."

It was heartbreaking the next day to discover how much those few sentences meant to the boys. Each child wanted to read his page to the others.

Now that each child had a start, they needed no more encouragement. They chose brightly colored pieces of felt for the covers and glued on pictures I had taken. They always pasted down the meaning of their names, which I easily found in a how-to-name-your-baby book.

Each boy's baby book contained four pages. On the first page was the sentence I found in the files. The second page was a positive observation I made about his behavior. The third page had an equally positive endorsement from his classroom teacher. And on the fourth page I asked each boy to complete this sentence: "When I am a father..." Jorge wrote: "When I am a father, I will keep this baby book so I can tell my baby about me. When my child grows up, him or her will not be a hoodlum because I will not be won |one~."

As teachers, we need to understand that there is a growing generation of children in America who have come of age without a "baby book." These children have no visible roots and, as a result, have little self-esteem. We should be helping these children to find their histories. There is a connection between feeling rooted in our past and feeling we have a stake in the future.

EVELYN JACKSON is a Chapter 1 reading teacher in the Bronx, New York, an adjunct teacher of writing at Mercy College, and a freelance writer.