Hogg Foundation for Mental Health

If the title read, “There was a child who had special needs,” teachers would know that it referred to every child they had ever taught. “God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb,” goes the saying. Sensitive teachers know that each child is “shorn” in some way. Often teachers can judge what lies behind a child’s misbehavior or his failure to learn. Many are as insightful as the one who, knowing that some of her children were troubled, asked them to write essays concerning their own lives. The greatest troublemaker in the class wrote: "I am a watermelon. I am lying on the sidewalk. There is a crack in my side, and the pink is running out. I cry 'Help! Help!' but nobody hears."