Control

Three weeks in to this year, I was helping one girl in my bottom set when she stopped responding to me. I don't mean she stopped responding positively, or engaging, I mean she stopped speaking, making eye contact or doing anything at all that I'd asked. She continued to twiddle her hair, but it was like I wasn't in the room, never mind speaking to her. After a minute or so she called across to her friend, and I though it was over, but she still made no response to me.

That's how I discovered that Silent Girl is a selective mute. What that says about the SEN system is another matter altogether, but what it meant for me in that lesson was unclear. I tried, I'm ashamed to say, to force her out of it. Threats escalated as she continued to completely ignore me, including an instruction to leave the classroom. She had an hour's detention, which she eventually did, but we failed to have any productive conversations.

It started to happen a lot, and the pattern wasn't complicated: when the work got too hard, or if she got something wrong, she'd start ignoring me. Once or twice, when something was said that made her realise that an answer was incorrect, she scribbled over it violently before becoming mute. It wasn't a physiological problem in any sense, as she was still able to talk to her friends (so her throat wasn't constricting with nerves, for example). I was at a loss as to how to solve it.

The only thing that seemed to work was ignoring her, and coming back later, but that seemed like an admission of defeat, like I was giving Silent Girl the control in our relationship. When I realised that, it made more sense. In the bottom set age 14, Silent Girl had comprehensively failed at education for the last 8 years. She's sat in classrooms where - however basic the knowledge, however 'easy' the task was proclaimed to be - she couldn't follow. Age 14, she couldn't count to 20 reliably or subtract at all, and she was forced to go over the same concepts again and again, although she still didn't understand. She had no control, and she wanted some.

I was further convinced of this in January, when I witnessed a confrontation between Silent Girl and her form teacher. She'd been avoiding her form teacher, so he found her at the end of my lesson. She ignored him. Clearly very frustrated with her, he began to shout. He hadn't lost his temper, and I could see it was carefully controlled, but it didn't work. She sat there staring into the distance as he shouted until the end of break. He left and she still sat there, and she began to smile. She had, she thought, won some power over him - he could not break her, and she could make him furious.

Ever since then, I have never got cross with her. She occasionally references the incident - 'Do you remember when my form teacher yelled at me? He was really mad!' - and she still ignores me. When she does, I stay as calm as possible and never stop smiling. I explain what she needs to do, leave her for about a minute and return. If she hasn't done it, I repeat my instructions, making sure it's something she's capable of and still being extra cheerful. If she hasn't done it after that, I outline what she needs to do by the end of the lesson, and keep returning - she stays in the room until she's done it.

She ignores me less and less, and when she does she usually gives in after a few repetitions of the instructions. I'm pretty boring to bait now, and it works. It doesn't tackle the root of the problem though: she still has no control over her days and very little understanding. Unless we fix that, she's not going to cope when suddenly, in 18 months time, she has complete control.