No Tears Today

Yesterday the little girl in my year 1 class who NEVER stops crying stopped crying! It was eerie. She came in a little late with the part time teacher who helps with that class and she was dry faced and quiet, and remained that way for the rest of the lessson, although she did not participate and seemed dazed and confused throughout. Afterwards while she was washing her hands for lunch I stopped by and told her and her teacher that she did a good job today (never thought I'd ever be praising someone just because they refrained from crying when there was no need to, but that's primary teaching for you). She actually spoke to me, I was a little bit shocked to hear her voice since all I usually get is "Whaaa whaaa whaaa" (hmm, it's hard to spell crying), and she said that she was trying extra hard today cos her dad asked her to. Her dad always comes to pick her up when the kids go home because she is always crying too much to walk with the rest of them. The first time I noticed her she was crying in the dirt of the playground because on her way to line up for assembly a bigger kid had ran into and knocked her over, it was the funniest thing I saw that week, she just flew backwards and sat on her arse and started crying immediately, tears flying out of her eyes without touching her face and onto the dirt. Like a cartoon. And she is TINY so the big kid didn't even notice he'd done it! Yesterday she was doing so well that she even walked all the way out the gate with a year 6 kid who is in her walking group and her dad had to go and chase them down the road to get her back. I wonder what happens with kids like that. If this crying thing is something she will grow out of in time to catch up with her classmates academically and socially, or if it is going to be a permanent thing. There are a lot of troubled kids at this school for some reason. Every class has at least one who obviously has learning disabilities or is socially ill-equipped in some respect. But rather surprisingly, there are only 2 kids in the special needs class. I would have expected the special needs class to be about the size of an average homeroom when you look at the behaviour of some individuals here. I wonder what the qualifications are for getting that extra help when so many of them seem to need it.