The summer after I graduated from high school I had to commit to working at a old warehouse which was used as a sheltered workshop for the developmentally disabled to prove that I was competent enough to have earned a scholarship. An administor put me in charge of a 'classroom' of fifteen people and introduced me to the retarded adults. There was a pallet of die-cut, lithographed cardboard from which we were supposed to assemble point-of-purchase displays to be placed near the cash registers of convenience stores.
"Good morning. Please pay attention," I said in my seventeen-year-old authoritative teacher's voice. I took a sheet of cardboard, put it on one of the long wooden tables and started punching out the different shapes. It was kind of tough and I had to concentrate. I wasn't familiar with the 'insert tab A into slot B' routine but after five minutes I had a kind of wobbly display.
I looked up and everyone had taken a sheet of cardboard and was industriously punching out the shapes. But one guy had taken five pieces of cardboard and punched out all the pieces simultaneously and had five completed displays.
"Hey, everyone! Look at what Simon has done!" Everyone took more cardboard and started applying the mass production technique. After a few hours we had almost finished the pallet and had hundreds of sturdy displays ready for distribution.
The administrator came in to check our progress. "Veronica, that pallet is supposed to last a week."
After that I pretty much put Simon in charge of our workshop activities and we had our work finished by Monday afternoons - Tuesday mornings at the latest - which gave me plenty of free time to 'requisition' materials for special projects like flying kites at the park, potting plants to put in the windows of our classroom or watching movies on rainy days. I think Mary Poppins was the most difficult because the concepts of 'home' and 'parents' and the actors bursting into song from out of the blue were heartbreakingly foreign to many of them as they'd been institutionalized for a long time. Our field trip to McDonald's was kind of a mistake because we held up the lunch line with all the difficult decisions. Should have stuck to Chicken McNuggets and french fries but we had a good time.
No one there seemed to mind what we did as long as I wasn't spending the charitable foundation that funded the workshop's money and no one got hurt. The other teachers were actually teachers. I think they were burned out because they made plans and had goals for their classes. They expected progress. I guess I was too young or I didn't understand the point of making everyone in the class conform to unrealistic expectations that were never going to be met. Actually, the best times occurred spontaneously when things went slightly out of control. Which happened a lot. We were getting our work done and that was what mattered. I looked forward to being in class.
By the end of summer Simon had learned to tell time with an old boyfriend's wristwatch I had given him. He specialized in 2:45 because that is when we
straightened up the classroom to get ready to leave for the day. On meeting him I had originally thought that Simon was such an unfortunate name. You know -
Simple Simon or Simian and all that hurtful teasing stuff - but once he was safe in class away from the nightmares and confusion of real life he was a super
helpful person. Sort of like Simon the disciple. Without him, our class wouldn't have been able to accomplish anywhere near as much monkey business.
By three o'clock everyone had said their good-byes and were loaded into the school buses to be shipped back to their assisted-living facilities or wherever
they went. They taught me a lot that summer.
_
