Working with these kids takes so much out of you. It’s a constant struggle — physical but espcially mental — to keep the kids on-task, to keep them calm, to maintain a semblance of order and progress in the room. One day they can be going off like popcorn. The slightest thing can set them off.

This one runs around the room, evading all efforts to stop her, gradually getting more and more angry until the rage hits, and the screaming, kicking, biting. That one sits at his seat, sarcastically chanting his mantra of defiance. Leave him alone and he’ll continue ad infinitum; try verbally or even physically to get him back on task and he’ll be running around the room too. Another sits, watching, cheering the eruption on. “Kick him! Kick him!” is the cry. I’m trying to calm one and the other’s cat-calling us both.

Sometimes you feel as if you’ve been thrown into a lake with bound hands and wearing jeans–it’s a struggle just to survive.

Take nothing personally. That’s critical in all teaching, but especially when working with children cursed with autism. The biter might be a hugger in fifteen minutes. No, scratch that. In fifteen seconds. “I hate you! Get away from me, stupid teacher,” from the mouth of a nine-year-old who later says, “I really love you. You’re awesome.”

All your angry adult reactions sometimes build up, though, and in a flash, you see yourself screaming back at the child yelling at you, giving them exactly, word for word, what they give you. But not only does the cruel unreasonableness of this idea force the image out of your mind, but you also really don’t have time to indulge in such perverse pressure-releasing fantasies, for you see that as soon as you get this situation under control, there’s bound to be another explosion. You see it coming. He’s reaching for her pencil. She’s forcing an apology on an irritated student. They’re arguing over the finer details of an episode of _Star Wars_. And even if all’s calm except for the child you’re struggling with, you know that in a flash it can all disappear.

And yet. And yet there’s the hope that you can make the cliché difference. “If I’m just this much more patient, this much more ingenious, this much more educated about the condition,” you think.

The trick is to see the child and not the condition. The autism perverts the child’s real personality, adding hatred where there is none, confusion where clarity is simple, and fear where there should be none. When you see the real child, not the child whose face is smeared into a scream by a condition he has no control over, all the frustration and anger disappear and your heart is both soothed and broken.