One Child
Torey Hayden
In One Child, Torey Hayden Talks about her experience teaching in a school for emotionally disturbed children. She tells about a girl that arrived in her class and that seemed much harder to teach than the other kids. Even though it sometimes got out of control and it sometimes seemed like she couldn’t do anything to help her new student, Torey doesn’t lose faith and helps Sheila achieve many things that her previous teachers had given up on. Throughout the rest of the school year she continues to help her new girl and discovers the many talents hidden beneath the abandoned child.
Torey Hayden starts of a school year teaching in a school for severely retarded children. Her small classroom is filled with eight emotionally disturbed kids and the help of Anton, a 29-years-old Mexican-American, and Whitney, a junior high student.
Before being offered the job, Torey had come across a newspaper article about a 6-year-old girl who had abducted a neighborhood child. On that cold November evening, she had taken the three-year-old boy, tied him to a tree and burned him. Never would Torey have thought that that same girl would come to her class.
Her name was Sheila and she arrived on January 8th. She was almost six and a half and looked so innocent it was hard for Torey to imagine that that girl had abducted the 3-year-old. Along with her dirty and old looking cloths, Sheila had a very bad odor, which struck most of the other kids in Torey’s class.
Sheila would not speak, wouldn’t do as she was told and would always stay in a small chair in one of the corners of the room.
With her patience, skill and love, Torey does her best to teach the girl.
Torey soon found out a whole bunch of things about Sheila, like how she could do math problems that were difficult even for her age and her ability to read better than anyone in her class. She also started paying attention to her accent and how she always used “be” and “do”.
One day, Torey decided to read a book called “The Little Prince” to Sheila. The story told about the little prince, who came across a fox that asked him to tame him. When the fox had to leave, the little prince asked him why he had asked him to tame him if he was just going to leave in the end. The fox simply told him to go to look at the roses and then come back. When the little prince returned, the fox told him that he would remember him as one of the roses and that the fox would remember the little prince by the wheat field because it was like the prince’s hair color.
When Torey finished the book, Sheila asks her if that’s what she did with her, tame her. Torey was amazed by what she had told her because she hadn’t even thought of it. She agreed and Sheila asks her why Torey cared for her when she could just leave her. Torey tells her that she didn’t have a good reason that it just felt like the thing to do.
“Why you tame me?” Sheila asked.
I did not know what to say. Her water blue eyes rose to me. “Why you care? I can’t figure that out. Why you want to tame me?”
“Well kiddo, I don’t have a good reason, I guess. It just seemed like the thing to do.” (pg. 144)
Sheila kept on making improvements and everything went well until Torey found out that she would have to leave when the year was over to go get full certification for teaching special children. The class would no longer be there and the children had already made arrangements, all of them except for Sheila. Torey eventually found a place to put her in. Torey’s friend, Sandy, was a teacher for third graders and since Sheila was advanced in reading, writing and math she would probably be able to make it to third grade the coming year.
At the end of the year they both walked over to the bus together. They said one last goodbye and hugged each other before Sheila got into her bus and left with the memory of Torey, who she would always remember her as her own rose.
Some lines I liked from the book were:
“And I realized sadly, that we never do understand what it is like to be someone else” -Torey (pg. 179) I like this line because it proves that we never know what someone else thinks and that everyone thinks differently.
“She looks like a spirit, doesn’t she? Like if you blinked too hard, she’d be gone.” –Anton (pg. 312) I like this line because it shows how much she changed and how free Sheila seems now. It shows that anyone can change no matter how difficult it seems.
When I first started reading this book, One Child seemed like an obvious title for a girl that was different from a lot of other children because she was emotionally disturbed. But as I got through the book, I learned about Sheila’s many talents in math, reading and writing and I discovered an innocent girl that had been abandoned by her mother. Reading about how much she improved in a little more than half a school year, it made it seem amazing that that same girl had abducted a small boy before coming to Torey’s class. When the year ended and she had to leave, she did it with just a few protests and threats that she would be a bad girl when she started school again, but ended up going and admitting that she hadn’t really meant it, proving that she truly was one child.
While working with Sheila, who seemed almost impossible to be taught, Torey found out that it mostly takes patience to help someone change. She realizes that she can’t always solve everything by herself and that it’s important to count on others for help.
I thought this book was amazing in the way that just a small girl can change so much in just a short time. I also thought about how Torey hadn’t given up on any of her students no matter how impossible the task that lay ahead of her seemed. When you ask small kids what a hero is to them, most of them would say someone that has superpowers or that saves the earth. If you really think about it, those kinds of heroes only exist in comics or on television and not in real life. A hero in real life, though, is someone that makes a difference. It doesn’t matter how many people are affected by that difference, as long as it’s good. Torey made a difference herself, she didn’t give up on the children that many other teachers had given up on and managed to change their lives by making them more normal. She didn’t give up on Sheila because she knew that she wasn’t really crazy, she just had to make her believe that she wasn’t. Just by not giving up on those children, Torey managed to change their lives and that’s why she is someone that can be considered as more than a hero.
