Story of the Day 9/2/2011 #3

Sarah was sitting in the cafeteria in the half of the lunch period that is reserved for eating lunch and not for the ASL class.
She was sitting and eating, and then she realized that everyone, and I do mean everyone, had turned suddenly to stare to her right. Sarah turned and looked and realized that one of the “special needs” students had a bad moment and had thrown his lunch tray against one of the columns. It must have made quite a loud crash, but, of course, Sarah was the only student unable to hear it.

In case you were wondering, this is not a normal, everyday occurrence at her " new" school. At the small school that Sarah used to attend, where the high school had about 100 students, as compared to this school’s 3,500, there would be incidents when students would overturn entire tables. Of course, at Sarah’s previous school there were a number of kids who had major secondary disabilities- some of which were either caused by or contributed to by the fact that they had been left mostly language-less when they were young. As a result, they sometimes had no good ways to express frustration. At any rate, Sarah realized it was just a tray, and no one had been hit or hurt by it, and she went back to eating her apple.

A few minutes later, after her apple was nothing more than a core, she got up to leave.
As she walked out of the cafeteria, her well developed peripheral vision – something that tends to be incredibly well developed in the deaf because they rely on it for many things- told her that now everyone in the cafeteria was staring at her…as she walked out of the room.

She related this to me, after she came home. And she asked, “Why, today, did everyone stare” at her?

Well, I asked, “Had anyone else gotten up in the few minutes since that boy threw his tray?”

Suddenly, Sarah realized that no one had. In a cafeteria that is usually busy and where people are always getting up and down, the incident had shocked people into not doing anything like getting up and walking through the area in which the boy had thrown the tray…only Sarah, out of the 700 students in the cafeteria, had not been affected in this way, and what the kids were staring at was this brave person who was going to be the first person who walk through the “combat zone.”

She’d better be careful or she will develop a reputation as a “tough” kid.