In 1983 I worked as a busboy in a local restaurant.  I had a paper route when I was younger, but working in a restaurant more than a day or two a week was my first “real” job.  The older kids at the restaurant were cooks and waiters, and had generally been working there for a few years.  I was in awe of them.  They seemed so old and worldly, and aside from a few words here and there we really didn’t speak.  Mostly they just ordered me around – and I happily complied with their every request..

One guy in particular was fairly nice to me.  His name was Bill, and he had been working at the restaurant for a year or two.  He was a hilarious kid.  He had everyone in the kitchen and dishwashing area cracking up regularly with his imitations of customers or shift managers.  One busy evening I was getting a little lazy with my duties, and the manager, John, was unhappy with me.  Seemed like everything I was doing (or not doing) was making him angry, and at one point he came in behind me after I had picked up a full bin of dishes to run through the washer.  John started yelling at me so loudly that some of the wait staff in the front could hear him and came over to see what was going on.  I was standing there taking it when Bill walked in, listened for a moment, and confronted John.  He told him to back off and give me a break, which only made John more angry.  They started yelling at each other, which was a relief to me as it took the attention off of my performance completely. At this point half the staff had trickled back to watch the spectacle, and at this point Bill was fed up.

He held up his middle finger and yelled, “F*** you !”  John stood there for a second in disbelief, staring.  Right before he could offer some kind of reply, Bill brought up both middle fingers and proclaimed: “No…double f*** you!”  Needless to say John fired him on the spot, and I lived on to bus tables another day.

I remember Bill not only for this act of random kindness, but for the type of kid I observed him to be over the ensuing months.  He was in a punk band, and everyone seemed to know him.  He had that unique combination of danger and approachability that made him likeable.  Not quite popular, but likeable.  He looked out for me, in a way.  I remember another incident several months later when he gave me a ride home from wrestling practice.  I had lost a challenge match to a kid that in my mind should never have been able to beat me, and I was distraught.  He drove up alongside me as I was walking home and asked if I needed a ride.  Within a few minutes I was laughing and had forgotten all about my troubles.

I had a student this past year who reminded me a great deal of Bill.  I guess today’s equivalent of the punk rocker from the 80’s would be the skate rat, and T. definitely fit that description.  I first became aware of him as a scrawny freshman – one of those kids that lingers on the periphery of a teacher’s awareness of what is happening on campus.  He had a hairdo that reminded me of Shaggy from the old Scooby-Doo cartoons, and wore the scraggly, nondescript uniform of nearly every other kid in his particular subgenera.  I would see him skateboarding between classes (not allowed), wearing a shirt with a pot leaves on the pocket (not allowed), or sometimes getting into it with teachers outside of class (allowed – but T. pushed it to not-allowed levels).  I knew he had bounced around in general education classes, but had no conception of what he was like as a student until his senior year.

Actually T. came in once during the end of his junior year, basically to meet me and tell me he would likely be in my Geometry class the following year.  Not knowing him, I didn’t know how to respond, but his actions over the next twenty minutes or so convinced me that if he was indeed in my class it was going to be a long year.  By the time that initial twenty minutes were up, he had: 1) danced in front of me, 2) leaped over nearly every desk in the classroom as if he was a horse in a steeplechase competition, and 3) humped – yes, that’s right, humped – the table at the front of the classroom.  He also managed to writhe on the floor and engage in a short but heated argument with a teacher passing by that made the mistake of casually asking T about his pot-leaf shirt.  When he left the room I was exhausted, and part of me hoped to God that I wouldn’t have him in my class in the Fall.

T. was a difficult student to understand.  There were days when he could be engaged and helpful to other students, followed by days when he could turn the room into a veritable warzone.  He could be respectful and calm one instant, and utter the most awful, hurtful epithets the next.  One minute he would be in his chair, calm and collected, then suddenly he would be up in a great Whoosh and begin parading around the room like a Samurai on LSD.  In fact, I wondered if sometimes he might actually be on LSD.  1-1 he could be reflective and apologetic, but could also be argumentative and defiant.  He had been suspended a number of times for various reasons, most often for being oppositional, and by the time I had him as a student he had definitely burned his bridges with a great many patient educators.  Still, you couldn’t help but like him – which is why he reminded me of Bill so strongly, and gave me a convenient word to use when I talked about him to others.

Simply put, T. was the Anti.

I came to appreciate T. for the kids of person he was, rather than the student I wanted him to be.  As opposed to so many students on campus, T. had only hazy, ill-formed ideas of what he wanted to do with the rest of his life beyond graduation.  He had worked in the past, but never for very long.  Something had always gone wrong – or worse yet, somebody had asked him to work weekends, which clearly were his time.  He knew he was smart, but put the blame for his poor grades on his teachers.  After all, they never bothered to make the content interesting or relevant, and besides he couldn’t be expected to sit for that long anyway.  He received behavior intervention services as per his IEP once a week or every two weeks, but lately things had been getting worse.  As with far too many kids in Special Education, his graduation was in doubt.  Recent incidents in particular did him no favors, as at least three times in a two-week span of time he had: engaged in a heated, insult-laden argument with a teacher (in apparent defense of a fellow classmate), defied the directives of a substitute teacher in my class (which happened to be a well-respected, knowledgeable, and popular teacher on campus), and failed to appear for assigned detentions for the aforementioned outbursts.

The Anti in him could not be put down.  T. would rather be suspended, and potentially not graduate, rather than be subjugated.  Still, his case manager and teachers knew that at the very least we needed to do something to help him.  Behavior plans and current supports were not helping, so what was there to do?

We are often confronted with this exact situation in Special Education.  Despite our best laid plans and our beautiful IEP’s, the kid is not progressing.  As an 18-year old senior in high school, maybe it’s time to finally say, “We’ve done all we can  -it’s up to him now.”  We’ve “led the horse to water” so to speak, and it’s not our fault that he’s not taking advantage of the opportunity he’s been given.  What then with the kid who willingly subverts the help he is purportedly receiving, as in the case of the Anti?  Having a label such as ED, or Oppositional/Defiant, or OHI do absolutely no good in giving Special Educators a course of action for how to proceed.  Do we give up or go to work?  I think you already know the answer.

You meet again as a team, and strategize.  What about this?  How about that?  What are we trying to do?  Do we need to make T. comply completely with every request, or is there a certain amount of the Anti we can handle?  With T. in particular, I found that he often said awful things in anger that he did not remember the next day.  Do we need to make sure he feels the sting of his actions in the moment, or can we make sure we touch upon those things the next day when we can process it calmly together?  There is no correct answer.  In the end, the team decided to create a check-in time with me every morning, just to see how T. was feeling and to debrief important items for the day ahead.  Simple as it was, the plan worked.  We started to notice an improvement in T. almost immediately.  I got to know him, and he I.  There were still difficult days, but T. at least felt listened to.  I knew who he was because I had seen it before in Bill, and although they were different people the Anti streak was a commonality that I could recognize and work with.

The key to understanding the Anti is in realizing he is an individual, not an archetype.  He will have a strong moral sense, and will fight for others, but the way this manifests itself is different in each kid.  Above all, he does not want to feel controlled.  He is not to be reasoned with in the thick of an argument or fight.  He can be reflective and apologetic, but if the Anti is also in Special Education than there will need to many of these opportunities in order to see any effect. In either case, the Anti is different.  They march to the beat of their own drummer, but often do not have a good handle on what drives them.

This is our challenge, I feel.  We can’t give up, and yet also can’t seem to get them to see that often there is an easier course.  We feel that life will hold many hardships for them, and can do nothing to avert that reality.  The teen Anti will become an adult Anti, as scary as that sounds.  Perhaps they will figure it out.  Perhaps not.