31 May, 2010
Memorial Day
My uncle is a Vietnam vet. The way he ended up in Vietnam is actually ironic. He was stationed by the Air Force in Las Vegas, and had applied to leave the country (because he was bored) thinking they would send him to Germany or Italy. The Air Force HAD NEVER sent second-year dentists to Vietnam before. He and a friend were the first two to go. He worked in a MASH unit behind the front lines.
23 May, 2010
25 April, 2010
I am not grateful enough.
I am not grateful enough for my beautiful cats, friends and the good fortune that I have had despite myself.
10 April, 2010
Today's opera photos
It was a well-sung Magic Flute, except for the Queen and Sarastro. The boys found it romantic, but silly, hence their poses. Half way through, they went birdwatching in the kitchen window. They could still hear the broadcast, but it didn't command them the way AIDA did. Larry is Papageno, here and Bernie in his best, serious ROMANTIC Tamino.
07 April, 2010
02 April, 2010
A Passover and Easter Prayer
During this time in which we remember the sufferings of the past, let us look to alleviate the pain and eliminate the discrimination which people face at this moment in all parts of the globe. Next year, let there be no martyrs in Jerusalem, Beijing, Sierra Leone or in any great city or tiny hamlet this world over. In the names of the millions of people of all races and creeds who have died for what they have believed in over the centuries.
28 March, 2010
Emergency Room Holiday
I spent my first vacation day in the Emergency Room at Maimonedes Hospital. My stomach felt as if someone had stuck a balloon inside it and was blowing it up at will, and nothing was working (not water, not pepto, no food going down), so I found myself moaning in a bed next to a man who couldn't breathe, at about 12:30pm. The doctors were pretty swift with me and decided pretty early that I had one of the many viruses going around, and once my bloodwork proved mostly normal (my white count was up, of course), I was handed an elixir of phenobarbytol and maalox which knocked out the pain and sent me a-slumbering for about an hour. When I awoke, the guy next to me sounded like he was breathing under-water, and the amazing nurse who was working on him noticed quickly that there was no suction device near his bed. She called for one and a chaotic group of nurses and doctors surrounded her while the device was set up (no more than an ordinary suction bag and a plastic jar). She had to ask the guy questions and get him to move while she did some of this -- and I heard her call out, "Not yet!" Then a voice behind her said, "He's got a DNR." The nurse said crisply, "I don't think we're at that point," and proceeded to suction out fluid from the guy's lungs. Fifteen minutes later, he was talking to his teenage son.
When I was preparing to leave, about 45 minutes later, the doctors -- most of the respiratory team available on a Saturday -- were deciding how to replace the man's trachial tube -- what size to use, what to do about a blood clot which seemed to be at the bottom of the one he was currently using, and questions were repeated over and over by each group that was added to the case. "Did we put this in? Has he been x-rayed?" In a lot of the questions, you could hear the underlying wonder of how much should be done. I wanted the people with questions to go away and simply let the smart-mouthed, but excellent respiratory doctor who was at the center of the circle and now testing a smaller sized tube, do his work. He was explaining everything non-chalantly and then deciding what size to go with. "I understand," he said to the man as he worked on him, "It feels like the tumor is bumping up against the tube." The doctor didn't say if it was or wasn't -- I don't think he knew. He was certain about the clot. He continued to work. I couldn't see him, but I felt as if I could picture what he was doing. "You see, I just put this [smaller tube] down and he says he feels better so we must've moved the clot or whatever was at the base of the other one." "This is a size..." His words became muffled by the movement -- he was getting ready to replace the tube and he swiftly left the circle to get what he needed.
My nurse took my blood pressure just before I signed my paperwork, and it was 139/90 -- higher than it had ever been in my life, but we took this to be from my involvement in the drama next to me. I was telling her about how frustrating it was to hear the same questions repeated while this guy is getting uncomfortable and that I wished people would let the respiratory doctor work. She said, "You're going home today. This is a good day." Then she left. I grabbed my prescription for pain medicine from the cheerful doctor who had worked on me seemingly obliviously to the pain of the man next to me (She wasn't on his team, at all. No one who worked with me was.)
And I went home.
When I was preparing to leave, about 45 minutes later, the doctors -- most of the respiratory team available on a Saturday -- were deciding how to replace the man's trachial tube -- what size to use, what to do about a blood clot which seemed to be at the bottom of the one he was currently using, and questions were repeated over and over by each group that was added to the case. "Did we put this in? Has he been x-rayed?" In a lot of the questions, you could hear the underlying wonder of how much should be done. I wanted the people with questions to go away and simply let the smart-mouthed, but excellent respiratory doctor who was at the center of the circle and now testing a smaller sized tube, do his work. He was explaining everything non-chalantly and then deciding what size to go with. "I understand," he said to the man as he worked on him, "It feels like the tumor is bumping up against the tube." The doctor didn't say if it was or wasn't -- I don't think he knew. He was certain about the clot. He continued to work. I couldn't see him, but I felt as if I could picture what he was doing. "You see, I just put this [smaller tube] down and he says he feels better so we must've moved the clot or whatever was at the base of the other one." "This is a size..." His words became muffled by the movement -- he was getting ready to replace the tube and he swiftly left the circle to get what he needed.
My nurse took my blood pressure just before I signed my paperwork, and it was 139/90 -- higher than it had ever been in my life, but we took this to be from my involvement in the drama next to me. I was telling her about how frustrating it was to hear the same questions repeated while this guy is getting uncomfortable and that I wished people would let the respiratory doctor work. She said, "You're going home today. This is a good day." Then she left. I grabbed my prescription for pain medicine from the cheerful doctor who had worked on me seemingly obliviously to the pain of the man next to me (She wasn't on his team, at all. No one who worked with me was.)
And I went home.
27 March, 2010
There is JUSTICE in our courts and our UFT.
http://www.uft.org/news/judge_voids_city_school_closings/
It's a beginning and I think one of a long road of victories to come.
It's a beginning and I think one of a long road of victories to come.
22 March, 2010
An old essay topic
For years, I used to give my students the question, "Does punishment work?" as an essay topic. Usually, I got about a 50/50 response, with it coming down to, "it depends on the kid." Most often, they gave examples of how punishments worked on their younger siblings. Whether they were being honest or not, my students usually felt that punishments had stopped working on them -- not because they didn't feel the pain they caused, but because their actions were decisions based on what they thought were rational ideas. Since I've spent the majority of my career working with the overage and under-credited, I'm biased in favor of the latter set of arguments. I've met students who didn't succeed in school because they were busy trying to survive on a much more fundamental level. Yes, I know, there have been homeless kids who get perfect SAT scores. I'd argue that those kids are very talented to begin with. Having gone to Stuyvesant High School, I can also tell you that a lot of very talented kids have trouble succeeding academically when their basic needs are not being met. Exceptions never prove rules.
I think the same formula can be used for adults.
Call me a child of the 70's, but I believe the only way people learn is through forgiveness. Yes, I think wrong behavior should be addressed. But, no teacher or student wants to do harm or to fail. People make mistakes out of frustration, whether they are very young or not so young.
I put this note out there for everyone to consider. You don't need to write five paragraphs in response. Just let me know what you think.
I think the same formula can be used for adults.
Call me a child of the 70's, but I believe the only way people learn is through forgiveness. Yes, I think wrong behavior should be addressed. But, no teacher or student wants to do harm or to fail. People make mistakes out of frustration, whether they are very young or not so young.
I put this note out there for everyone to consider. You don't need to write five paragraphs in response. Just let me know what you think.
13 March, 2010
Teacher Isolation
At the end of the day, for about five minutes, I sat with a colleague while he played Pink Floyd's The Wall on his personal laptop. We talked about it -- the themes, where we were when it came out -- I was graduating from 8th grade, he saw the movie with a group of friends. The movie had gotten to me later, in high school, along with Tommy. I always want to go right home after school, which is a new feeling for me. I used to sit with kids for hours or just work with a colleague. But now I wondered why I wasn't right out the door. I needed those five minutes. And then I pushed myself out the door.
Last week someone stole my cell phone and I lost all of my contacts -- it's easy to erase your identity when a person has your handset. There are so many people whom I will never see again, whose phone numbers kept me connected to them. It gave me the semblance of a community. Now, I'm a pushy person. There are colleagues I know who have probably never asked for the phone numbers of colleagues with whom they have worked for years. While people worked closely together, they were much more conscious of their privacy in the generations before me. There was no Facebook to casually sign up on, and they probably wouldn't have, anyway. Perhaps they might have shared their "Linked-In" pages. I doubt it. A recent study of new teachers found that many of them are leaving the profession because they feel isolated, too -- although mentoring programs have helped to reduce some attrition. (How Mentoring Programs Can Reduce Teacher Isolation http://cie.asu.edu/volume8/number14/) There's been a lot of writing on the plight of new teachers, on the need for teachers to collaborate, to communicate with the outside world -- but little on what is happening to the school community itself which makes these, and just connecting with long-time colleagues, near impossible.
With all the closings of schools and the shiftings of personnel, there must be scores of teachers who have lost their communities, and some of their only long-term friends. Working together means you talk to each other every day. But without that ritual, you don't have a way to continue the intimacy. Some people will call each other for a while, perhaps. Juxtaposing the feelings you have for the colleagues with whom you were close and trusting and that of terror which has come with this new era of instability makes it harder to talk to anyone, though. You don't know if your friends have changed. Are they still for real? Are you for real?
In the coming weeks I want to look at studies on teacher loneliness and see if anyone is looking at what is happening to the population of teachers in NYC who are being continually displaced. Are they socializing anywhere? Are they eating alone? Sure a lot of teachers have joined the blogosphere. What about those who haven't. What does it mean to all of us that we have lost direct human contact with so many, so instantly.
Anyone who wants to write in, please do.
Last week someone stole my cell phone and I lost all of my contacts -- it's easy to erase your identity when a person has your handset. There are so many people whom I will never see again, whose phone numbers kept me connected to them. It gave me the semblance of a community. Now, I'm a pushy person. There are colleagues I know who have probably never asked for the phone numbers of colleagues with whom they have worked for years. While people worked closely together, they were much more conscious of their privacy in the generations before me. There was no Facebook to casually sign up on, and they probably wouldn't have, anyway. Perhaps they might have shared their "Linked-In" pages. I doubt it. A recent study of new teachers found that many of them are leaving the profession because they feel isolated, too -- although mentoring programs have helped to reduce some attrition. (How Mentoring Programs Can Reduce Teacher Isolation http://cie.asu.edu/volume8/number14/) There's been a lot of writing on the plight of new teachers, on the need for teachers to collaborate, to communicate with the outside world -- but little on what is happening to the school community itself which makes these, and just connecting with long-time colleagues, near impossible.
With all the closings of schools and the shiftings of personnel, there must be scores of teachers who have lost their communities, and some of their only long-term friends. Working together means you talk to each other every day. But without that ritual, you don't have a way to continue the intimacy. Some people will call each other for a while, perhaps. Juxtaposing the feelings you have for the colleagues with whom you were close and trusting and that of terror which has come with this new era of instability makes it harder to talk to anyone, though. You don't know if your friends have changed. Are they still for real? Are you for real?
In the coming weeks I want to look at studies on teacher loneliness and see if anyone is looking at what is happening to the population of teachers in NYC who are being continually displaced. Are they socializing anywhere? Are they eating alone? Sure a lot of teachers have joined the blogosphere. What about those who haven't. What does it mean to all of us that we have lost direct human contact with so many, so instantly.
Anyone who wants to write in, please do.
04 March, 2010
Being Positive
I was on the phone with a former student, now a mother of two in her thirties. She kept telling me to "be positive." I explained that being positive scares me. To me, it implies that there's no concrete evidence of the possibility of success.
...When my mother was in college, her Intro to Psychology professor told his class to "Feel free to ask any questions." My mother raised her hand and said that she no longer felt free because his invitation had made her feel self-conscious. If she were really free, why would anyone need to mention it.
So often, palliative phrases reveal the problems beneath the surface.
...When my mother was in college, her Intro to Psychology professor told his class to "Feel free to ask any questions." My mother raised her hand and said that she no longer felt free because his invitation had made her feel self-conscious. If she were really free, why would anyone need to mention it.
So often, palliative phrases reveal the problems beneath the surface.
02 March, 2010
Re-invention
Practically every night, before I finally make the climb up to my cave in Bensonhurst (in Brooklyn, caves have staircases), I stop at the local supermarket to pick up groceries. Once upon a time, I was organized and bought a month's worth of groceries on a Sunday and had everything delivered. Now, I plan my meals in a pay-as-you-go fashion.
My supermarket is staffed by a steady crew of male and female teenagers and middle-aged women, all of whom are thoughtful and smarter than their jobs. I wish I were better at easy conversation and that my life weren't constantly paper-clipped with explanations. It's too difficult to keep explaining, so I don't anymore. We still say, "Hello," but there's not much eye contact.
Tonight, I took a deep breath and mentioned I was tired. The very polite young woman who is one of the few left who still tries to tease a smile from my jowls, answered, rather darkly, "at least you're working."
This is technically my 18th year of teaching. And I'm very tired. I'm in a situation to which I am totally unaccustomed and which keeps adding new variables. Yesterday, during a faculty meeting, we watched the short video, "Shift Happens," which makes projections about computers who will be able to outsmart all humans by 2049 and my students needing to work 14 different jobs in their lifetimes. It also talks about the need for students to problem solve. Of late, I've found students unwilling to take on that challenge. Whereas they once seemed interested in being involved in their community, they've grown apathetic. Some of that has to do with being 10-12 and not really knowing how to begin. They still ask how they should begin their essays, sometimes.
When I was their age, I already took ownership of my writing and you COULDN'T tell me how to begin an essay. Yet, I can be as dumbfounded as they are when it comes to problem solving in my own life. At 42, our economy, American greed and Puritanism be damned, is asking me to re-think how to think about myself. I'm not the kind of person to respond well to books about the subject and I intuitively loathe the genre of self-help. I've always found it amusing that Tony Roberts discovered his calling as a guru in that field after failing in others. What I'd rather do is imagine bringing a case to the Supreme Court proving that we are denying our children equal protection of the law by not equalizing the funding of education throughout the country. Do I go to law school? My track record for winning battles is very poor. I can create the argument, but I can't speak it. More often than not, I can't speak, these days.
My own trepidation and my exhaustion necessitates a process of re-invention that is careful and which can be done with some solitude. Of course, my biggest enemy is time.
My supermarket is staffed by a steady crew of male and female teenagers and middle-aged women, all of whom are thoughtful and smarter than their jobs. I wish I were better at easy conversation and that my life weren't constantly paper-clipped with explanations. It's too difficult to keep explaining, so I don't anymore. We still say, "Hello," but there's not much eye contact.
Tonight, I took a deep breath and mentioned I was tired. The very polite young woman who is one of the few left who still tries to tease a smile from my jowls, answered, rather darkly, "at least you're working."
This is technically my 18th year of teaching. And I'm very tired. I'm in a situation to which I am totally unaccustomed and which keeps adding new variables. Yesterday, during a faculty meeting, we watched the short video, "Shift Happens," which makes projections about computers who will be able to outsmart all humans by 2049 and my students needing to work 14 different jobs in their lifetimes. It also talks about the need for students to problem solve. Of late, I've found students unwilling to take on that challenge. Whereas they once seemed interested in being involved in their community, they've grown apathetic. Some of that has to do with being 10-12 and not really knowing how to begin. They still ask how they should begin their essays, sometimes.
When I was their age, I already took ownership of my writing and you COULDN'T tell me how to begin an essay. Yet, I can be as dumbfounded as they are when it comes to problem solving in my own life. At 42, our economy, American greed and Puritanism be damned, is asking me to re-think how to think about myself. I'm not the kind of person to respond well to books about the subject and I intuitively loathe the genre of self-help. I've always found it amusing that Tony Roberts discovered his calling as a guru in that field after failing in others. What I'd rather do is imagine bringing a case to the Supreme Court proving that we are denying our children equal protection of the law by not equalizing the funding of education throughout the country. Do I go to law school? My track record for winning battles is very poor. I can create the argument, but I can't speak it. More often than not, I can't speak, these days.
My own trepidation and my exhaustion necessitates a process of re-invention that is careful and which can be done with some solitude. Of course, my biggest enemy is time.
18 February, 2010
Don't just stand there, listen!
It was a pleasant lunch of rubbery spaghetti and lightly bruised steamed vegetables. "I can't believe the educational system has gone down so much. I see kids coming to school and they don't look like they want to go." I chewed steadily. "Where is the money going?" I nodded. "And how can you be paying for materials?" "What do you mean you have no books?" My eyes widen. "I know you're telling the truth. What do the other teachers do?" I make a rolling motion with my hands. "You all do this?" I cough. "I thought you were going to the doctor." I cross my eyebrows. "I know it's been a busy week." "Did you take a cab here, by the way?" My face doesn't move. "Why can't you walk?" My eyebrows lower and my skin feels yellow. "I know you're in pain. I know you're out of shape. You're letting yourself fall apart." "For what? I mean you collect a salary, but you spend most of it on the job." I drink my water. "It never changes. But, it's got to change if you're going to go on with your life. Can't you just explain your situation: it's too far, they need too much..." I press my hand down lightly on the table. "You're telling me they don't care. Doesn't the UFT care?" I shrug my shoulders and put my palms up. "It's not their decision, I know." (Pause)
"Let's get the check."
I thanked him for lunch.
"Let's get the check."
I thanked him for lunch.
13 February, 2010
Larry Wondering
In the middle of his birthday catnip feast, Larry takes a moment to wonder. What's he thinking about?
07 February, 2010
Larry turns seven tomorrow.
Here he is dreaming of all the catnip...a lot of which he got tonight....
The only comfort I take in more school closings
There really is no comfort to be taken in school closings. All I can think, however, is that will leave so many, many more ATR's that it will be impossible for them to be fired -- the sheer number of people and the tactic would make the union busting of the Bloomberg administration obvious. Why they think they will get away with displacing all these people and then trying to fire them is beyond me. It's not good politics. It would show off too obviously how bad off the middle class of the city is. I don't think he can even open new schools fast enough to absorb all the kids who are going to need them -- at some point this ponzi scheme has to fall in on him. There will be no place for the kids to go. He doesn't get that this isn't like a re-org in business. The fall-out is much greater per school and per person. Eventually, there have to be whole sectors in which kids are not being served at all. I'm sure it's happening already. Someone has to find a good hard luck story -- a family with no place to send their kids in the fall which can service their kids properly. When Tilden closes, for example, there probably won't be enough high schools in the area to absorb the ELL population. This has to be happening in more places across the city.
06 February, 2010
Time
Time is a funny thing. She was. But it IS still her birthday. My love for her is still very much alive. He IS. It will soon be his birthday. My love for him is dead because it can never be realized. Yet, I dream about him constantly of late. And her, too.
31 January, 2010
This is only a test. If this were a real emergency, we'd never be taking all of this lying down.
A student's face popped up on Facebook. "I don't say 'Hey' to you enough," appeared next to the picture. It was sweet, and immediately jarring; either I'd forgotten that people did live on after Brooklyn Comprehensive died or I'd temporarily forgotten that I no longer worked there.
The student is graduating from SUNY Purchase. For him, the time which had gone by was very sweet and untarnished by the closing of schools. I'm so glad it is, and find it heartening to imagine that there are people out there for whom the last four years have not been shattering. This is not a complaint against where I am teaching now. It's just a recognition of the fact that a world I miss is entirely gone. So is the world in which we once laughed at the Regents Exams as jokes -- when they were much harder, and I was in high school. Now we pretend they are something serious and grandiose that set "Standards." But, I digress. The point has been made by the many community colleges who find themselves filled with students who have passed Regents exams and are not functional in the subjects in which they were tested. I don't really care about the quality of the exams students face except that they've supplanted our ideas of what a real education is or could be. We've also truncated our belief in the possibilities of our children. We have done a lot of shifting around.
Three schools in which I have worked have been closed down. One major influence, dead. Two colleagues retired. The others scattered among schools living inside schools -- let's just say they all work at some "Formerly-Known-As-Academy-Campus High School." Many of them are working with overage and under-credited students who will age out with no place to go to next. And there are people who think that's okay. Last year, I encountered many teachers who felt students were being given too many chances. I understand. They wanted the failing grade they gave the kids to stand for something. It does. It stands for the fact that students are arriving at high school unprepared, ovewhelmed and desensitized to the possibilities that an education might offer them. I don't care whose fault it is, honestly. It doesn't matter. What matters is that, under better circumstances, some of these students could go on to graduate from competitive colleges.
Smaller budgets, fewer offerings and less and less compassion are not those circumstances.
But, this is only a test, right? We wouldn't really let over 100,000 kids drop out, unable to contribute to our economy and at the mercy of others to defend their rights? That would be boorish. Like the fact that we don't have national healthcare -- even China has national healthcare.
Oh.
The student is graduating from SUNY Purchase. For him, the time which had gone by was very sweet and untarnished by the closing of schools. I'm so glad it is, and find it heartening to imagine that there are people out there for whom the last four years have not been shattering. This is not a complaint against where I am teaching now. It's just a recognition of the fact that a world I miss is entirely gone. So is the world in which we once laughed at the Regents Exams as jokes -- when they were much harder, and I was in high school. Now we pretend they are something serious and grandiose that set "Standards." But, I digress. The point has been made by the many community colleges who find themselves filled with students who have passed Regents exams and are not functional in the subjects in which they were tested. I don't really care about the quality of the exams students face except that they've supplanted our ideas of what a real education is or could be. We've also truncated our belief in the possibilities of our children. We have done a lot of shifting around.
Three schools in which I have worked have been closed down. One major influence, dead. Two colleagues retired. The others scattered among schools living inside schools -- let's just say they all work at some "Formerly-Known-As-Academy-Campus High School." Many of them are working with overage and under-credited students who will age out with no place to go to next. And there are people who think that's okay. Last year, I encountered many teachers who felt students were being given too many chances. I understand. They wanted the failing grade they gave the kids to stand for something. It does. It stands for the fact that students are arriving at high school unprepared, ovewhelmed and desensitized to the possibilities that an education might offer them. I don't care whose fault it is, honestly. It doesn't matter. What matters is that, under better circumstances, some of these students could go on to graduate from competitive colleges.
Smaller budgets, fewer offerings and less and less compassion are not those circumstances.
But, this is only a test, right? We wouldn't really let over 100,000 kids drop out, unable to contribute to our economy and at the mercy of others to defend their rights? That would be boorish. Like the fact that we don't have national healthcare -- even China has national healthcare.
Oh.
13 January, 2010
Please, if you have students with Aspergers Syndrome, read this.
NOTE THE SCHOOL DISCOURAGING THIS STUDENT FROM GOING TO A SCHOOL THAT CAN PROVIDE SERVICES HE NEEDS.
Runaway Spent 11 Days in the Subways
By KIRK SEMPLE
Published: November 23, 2009 The New York Times
Day after day, night after night, Francisco Hernandez Jr. rode the subway. He had a MetroCard, $10 in his pocket and a book bag on his lap. As the human tide flowed and ebbed around him, he sat impassively, a gangly 13-year-old boy in glasses and a red hoodie, speaking to no one.
After getting in trouble in class in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and fearing another scolding at home, he had sought refuge in the subway system. He removed the battery from his cellphone. “I didn’t want anyone to scream at me,” he said.
All told, Francisco disappeared for 11 days last month — a stretch he spent entirely in subway stations and on trains, he says, hurtling through four boroughs. And somehow he went undetected, despite a round-the-clock search by his panicked parents, relatives and family friends, the police and the Mexican Consulate.
Since Oct. 26, when a transit police officer found him in a Coney Island subway station, no one has been able to fully explain how a boy could vanish for so long in a busy train system dotted with surveillance cameras and fliers bearing his photograph.
But this was not a typical missing-person search. Francisco has Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism that often causes difficulty with social interaction, and can lead to seemingly eccentric behavior and isolation. His parents are Mexican immigrants, who say they felt the police were slow to make the case a priority.
“Maybe because you might not understand how to manage the situation, because you don’t speak English very well, because of your legal status, they don’t pay you a lot of attention,” said Francisco’s mother, Marisela GarcÃa, 38, a housecleaner who immigrated in 1994 and has struggled to find ways to help her son.
The police, however, say they took the case seriously from the start, interviewing school officials and classmates, canvassing neighborhoods and leafleting all over the city.
Francisco says his odyssey wound through three subway lines: the D, F and No. 1. He would ride a train until its last stop, then wait for the next one, wherever it was headed. He says he subsisted on the little he could afford at subway newsstands: potato chips, croissants, jelly rolls, neatly folding the wrappers and saving them in the backpack. He drank bottled water. He used the bathroom in the Stillwell Avenue station in Coney Island.
Otherwise, he says, he slipped into a kind of stupor, sleeping much of the time, his head on his book bag. “At some point I just stopped feeling anything,” he recalled.
Though the boy’s recollections are incomplete, and neither the police nor his family can retrace his movements in detail, the authorities say that he was clearly missing for 11 days and that they have no evidence he was anywhere but the subway.
For his parents, the memories of those 11 frantic days — the dubious sightings, the dashed hopes and no sleep — remain vivid. “It’s the most terrible thing,” his mother said in Spanish.
Just what propelled Francisco to take flight on Oct. 15 is unclear. Administrators at his school, Intermediate School 281, would not comment. But Francisco said he had failed to complete an assignment for an eighth-grade class, and was scolded for not concentrating.
After school, he phoned his mother to say he was heading home. She told him the school had called and she wanted a serious talk with him.
His first impulse was to flee. He walked eight blocks to the Bay Parkway station and boarded a D train. It seemed a safe place to hide, he said.
When he did not arrive home, his mother started to panic. In January, after another problem at school, Francisco had left home and ridden the subway, but returned after five hours. “We thought this time it would be the same,” Ms. GarcÃa said. “But unfortunately it wasn’t.”
Her husband, also named Francisco Hernandez, went to the nearest subway station and waited for several hours while she stayed at home on Bay 25th Street with their 9-year-old daughter, Jessica. After midnight, the couple called the police, and two officers from the 62nd Precinct visited their apartment.
The next morning, Mr. Hernandez, 32, a construction laborer, borrowed a bicycle and scoured Bensonhurst. He and his wife separately explored the subway from Coney Island to Midtown Manhattan.
They had been trying to help their son for years. Born in Brooklyn, Francisco grew up a normal child in many ways, his mother said, earning mostly passing grades and enjoying drawing and video games. But he had no friends outside school, and found it difficult to express emotions. A gentle, polite boy, he spoke — when he did speak — in a soft monotone.
Francisco lived out of his bookbag.
In 2006, his parents had him evaluated at a developmental disabilities research clinic on Staten Island, where his Asperger’s was diagnosed. The clinic’s chief neuropsychologist concluded that Francisco struggled in situations that demanded a “verbal or social response.”
“His anxiety level can elevate, and he freezes in confusion because he does not know what to do or say,” the doctor wrote.
After he disappeared, his parents printed more than 2,000 color leaflets with a photo of Francisco wearing the same red hoodie; friends and relatives helped post them in shops, on the street and throughout the subway in Brooklyn. The family hand-lettered fluorescent-colored signs.
“Franky come home,” one pleaded in Spanish. “I’m your mother I beg you I love you my little boy.”
Francisco said he never saw the signs. He lost sense of time. He was prepared, he said, to remain in the subway system forever.
No one spoke to him. Asked if he saw any larger meaning in that, he said, “Nobody really cares about the world and about people.”
Sightings were reported. An image of a boy resembling Francisco had been captured by a video game store’s security camera, but he turned out to be someone else, the police said. A stranger called Mr. Hernandez to say he had spotted Francisco with some boys at a movie theater in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. A search turned up nothing.
Ms. GarcÃa said one detective told her the boy was probably hiding out with a friend. She replied that her son had no friends to hide out with. Frustrated, the parents sought help from the Mexican Consulate. Officials there contacted the Spanish-language news media, which ran brief newspaper and television reports about Francisco, and called the police — “to use the weight that we have to encourage them, to tell them that we have an emergency,” a consular spokesman said.
Six days after Francisco’s disappearance, on Oct. 21, the case shifted from the police precinct to the Missing Persons Squad, and the search intensified. A police spokeswoman explained that a precinct must complete its preliminary investigation before the squad takes over.
The squad’s lead investigator on the case, Detective Michael Bonanno, said he turned the focus to the subway. He and his colleagues blanketed the system with their own signs, rode trains and briefed station attendants.
About 6 a.m. on Oct. 26, the police said, a transit officer stood on the D train platform at the Stillwell Avenue station studying a sign with Francisco’s photo. He turned and spotted a dirty, emaciated boy sitting in a stopped train. “He asked me if I was Francisco,” the boy recalled. “I said yes.”
Asked later how it felt to hear about the work that had gone into finding him, Francisco said he was not sure. “Sometimes I don’t know how I feel,” he said. “I don’t know how I express myself sometimes.”
Apart from leg cramps, he was all right physically, and returned to school a week later. But Ms. GarcÃa said she was still trying to learn how to manage her son’s condition. Though doctors had recommended that Francisco be placed in a small school for children with learning disorders, she said, officials at his school told her he was testing fine and did not need to be transferred.
“I tell him: ‘Talk to me. Tell me what you need. If I ever make a mistake, tell me,’ ” she said. “I don’t know, as a mother, how to get to his heart, to find out what hurts.”
One of the fluorescent signs hangs on the living room wall. The others are stacked discreetly in a corner, and Ms. GarcÃa said she was not ready to discard them.
“It’s not easy to say it’s over and it won’t happen again,” she said.
Runaway Spent 11 Days in the Subways
By KIRK SEMPLE
Published: November 23, 2009 The New York Times
Day after day, night after night, Francisco Hernandez Jr. rode the subway. He had a MetroCard, $10 in his pocket and a book bag on his lap. As the human tide flowed and ebbed around him, he sat impassively, a gangly 13-year-old boy in glasses and a red hoodie, speaking to no one.
After getting in trouble in class in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and fearing another scolding at home, he had sought refuge in the subway system. He removed the battery from his cellphone. “I didn’t want anyone to scream at me,” he said.
All told, Francisco disappeared for 11 days last month — a stretch he spent entirely in subway stations and on trains, he says, hurtling through four boroughs. And somehow he went undetected, despite a round-the-clock search by his panicked parents, relatives and family friends, the police and the Mexican Consulate.
Since Oct. 26, when a transit police officer found him in a Coney Island subway station, no one has been able to fully explain how a boy could vanish for so long in a busy train system dotted with surveillance cameras and fliers bearing his photograph.
But this was not a typical missing-person search. Francisco has Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism that often causes difficulty with social interaction, and can lead to seemingly eccentric behavior and isolation. His parents are Mexican immigrants, who say they felt the police were slow to make the case a priority.
“Maybe because you might not understand how to manage the situation, because you don’t speak English very well, because of your legal status, they don’t pay you a lot of attention,” said Francisco’s mother, Marisela GarcÃa, 38, a housecleaner who immigrated in 1994 and has struggled to find ways to help her son.
The police, however, say they took the case seriously from the start, interviewing school officials and classmates, canvassing neighborhoods and leafleting all over the city.
Francisco says his odyssey wound through three subway lines: the D, F and No. 1. He would ride a train until its last stop, then wait for the next one, wherever it was headed. He says he subsisted on the little he could afford at subway newsstands: potato chips, croissants, jelly rolls, neatly folding the wrappers and saving them in the backpack. He drank bottled water. He used the bathroom in the Stillwell Avenue station in Coney Island.
Otherwise, he says, he slipped into a kind of stupor, sleeping much of the time, his head on his book bag. “At some point I just stopped feeling anything,” he recalled.
Though the boy’s recollections are incomplete, and neither the police nor his family can retrace his movements in detail, the authorities say that he was clearly missing for 11 days and that they have no evidence he was anywhere but the subway.
For his parents, the memories of those 11 frantic days — the dubious sightings, the dashed hopes and no sleep — remain vivid. “It’s the most terrible thing,” his mother said in Spanish.
Just what propelled Francisco to take flight on Oct. 15 is unclear. Administrators at his school, Intermediate School 281, would not comment. But Francisco said he had failed to complete an assignment for an eighth-grade class, and was scolded for not concentrating.
After school, he phoned his mother to say he was heading home. She told him the school had called and she wanted a serious talk with him.
His first impulse was to flee. He walked eight blocks to the Bay Parkway station and boarded a D train. It seemed a safe place to hide, he said.
When he did not arrive home, his mother started to panic. In January, after another problem at school, Francisco had left home and ridden the subway, but returned after five hours. “We thought this time it would be the same,” Ms. GarcÃa said. “But unfortunately it wasn’t.”
Her husband, also named Francisco Hernandez, went to the nearest subway station and waited for several hours while she stayed at home on Bay 25th Street with their 9-year-old daughter, Jessica. After midnight, the couple called the police, and two officers from the 62nd Precinct visited their apartment.
The next morning, Mr. Hernandez, 32, a construction laborer, borrowed a bicycle and scoured Bensonhurst. He and his wife separately explored the subway from Coney Island to Midtown Manhattan.
They had been trying to help their son for years. Born in Brooklyn, Francisco grew up a normal child in many ways, his mother said, earning mostly passing grades and enjoying drawing and video games. But he had no friends outside school, and found it difficult to express emotions. A gentle, polite boy, he spoke — when he did speak — in a soft monotone.
Francisco lived out of his bookbag.
In 2006, his parents had him evaluated at a developmental disabilities research clinic on Staten Island, where his Asperger’s was diagnosed. The clinic’s chief neuropsychologist concluded that Francisco struggled in situations that demanded a “verbal or social response.”
“His anxiety level can elevate, and he freezes in confusion because he does not know what to do or say,” the doctor wrote.
After he disappeared, his parents printed more than 2,000 color leaflets with a photo of Francisco wearing the same red hoodie; friends and relatives helped post them in shops, on the street and throughout the subway in Brooklyn. The family hand-lettered fluorescent-colored signs.
“Franky come home,” one pleaded in Spanish. “I’m your mother I beg you I love you my little boy.”
Francisco said he never saw the signs. He lost sense of time. He was prepared, he said, to remain in the subway system forever.
No one spoke to him. Asked if he saw any larger meaning in that, he said, “Nobody really cares about the world and about people.”
Sightings were reported. An image of a boy resembling Francisco had been captured by a video game store’s security camera, but he turned out to be someone else, the police said. A stranger called Mr. Hernandez to say he had spotted Francisco with some boys at a movie theater in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. A search turned up nothing.
Ms. GarcÃa said one detective told her the boy was probably hiding out with a friend. She replied that her son had no friends to hide out with. Frustrated, the parents sought help from the Mexican Consulate. Officials there contacted the Spanish-language news media, which ran brief newspaper and television reports about Francisco, and called the police — “to use the weight that we have to encourage them, to tell them that we have an emergency,” a consular spokesman said.
Six days after Francisco’s disappearance, on Oct. 21, the case shifted from the police precinct to the Missing Persons Squad, and the search intensified. A police spokeswoman explained that a precinct must complete its preliminary investigation before the squad takes over.
The squad’s lead investigator on the case, Detective Michael Bonanno, said he turned the focus to the subway. He and his colleagues blanketed the system with their own signs, rode trains and briefed station attendants.
About 6 a.m. on Oct. 26, the police said, a transit officer stood on the D train platform at the Stillwell Avenue station studying a sign with Francisco’s photo. He turned and spotted a dirty, emaciated boy sitting in a stopped train. “He asked me if I was Francisco,” the boy recalled. “I said yes.”
Asked later how it felt to hear about the work that had gone into finding him, Francisco said he was not sure. “Sometimes I don’t know how I feel,” he said. “I don’t know how I express myself sometimes.”
Apart from leg cramps, he was all right physically, and returned to school a week later. But Ms. GarcÃa said she was still trying to learn how to manage her son’s condition. Though doctors had recommended that Francisco be placed in a small school for children with learning disorders, she said, officials at his school told her he was testing fine and did not need to be transferred.
“I tell him: ‘Talk to me. Tell me what you need. If I ever make a mistake, tell me,’ ” she said. “I don’t know, as a mother, how to get to his heart, to find out what hurts.”
One of the fluorescent signs hangs on the living room wall. The others are stacked discreetly in a corner, and Ms. GarcÃa said she was not ready to discard them.
“It’s not easy to say it’s over and it won’t happen again,” she said.
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