Where Chayse Gadison Is Today: A Teacher’s Reflection on the Student Who Taught Me to Stop Pushing
The first time Chayse Gadison was in my room, he was under the blue reading table. He had his knees pulled up, one hand pressed over his ears, and a crayon in the other hand. He wasn’t crying and he wasn’t hiding from me. He was just done. We had been reading about tornadoes, which was Chayse’s favorite subject on earth, and then the timer went off and I said the words that ended everything: “Okay, let’s put our books away.”
He looked at me for a second, then walked under the table.
It wasn’t defiance. It was something else. His face wasn’t angry. It was more like he was trying to keep something from breaking inside him. I remember saying, “Chayse, we’re going to do math now. Math is after reading.” He didn’t answer. I tried again: “You like the pattern blocks. We’re going to use the pattern blocks.” He just started coloring a little gray circle on the back of his hand.
That was the first time I realized that a transition warning isn’t the same as a transition plan.
Chayse had been diagnosed with ADHD earlier that year, which didn’t surprise anyone. He moved fast, talked fast, and thought faster. He could explain the difference between a hurricane and a typhoon while walking on his knees. But ask him to stop doing something he was fully inside of, and his whole system locked up. For a long time, I thought the problem was that he didn’t want to follow directions. It took me a while to see that he couldn’t.
What made it harder was that Chayse didn’t act out in the usual ways. He didn’t throw things or yell at me. He went quiet. He found small spaces. He tore the labels off notebook covers. He ran his thumb over his fingernails until the skin around them turned pink. He was trying to manage a feeling he didn’t have words for, and the more I talked, the worse it got.
The day he finally snapped, I understood my part in it.
It was a Tuesday. We were switching from the word wall to the daily writing journal. The class was doing pretty well, so I didn’t give as much lead time as usual. I said, “Put your paper in the tray and choose a pencil.” He had been struggling with a word—“because”—and he was almost done. He had spelled it with the little helpers on the wall, and he was just finishing the “u” when I said it. It was a small thing. But that was the thing he needed to finish.
He stood up so fast his chair fell backward. He grabbed the paper, ripped it in half, and then just stood there holding the pieces. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the floor.
“I almost had it,” he said. His voice was flat. “I almost had it.”
I didn’t punish him. I didn’t send him to the office. I asked the other kids to take their journals to the carpet, and I sat down on the floor next to Chayse. I didn’t talk about his choices. I just said, “You can finish that word. I’ll give you another paper.” He didn’t answer, but he sat down. We started over.
After that, I changed a few things.
The first thing I did was stop giving directions out loud without a visual. Chayse needed to see the sequence, not just hear it. So I made him a small first-then card. On one side was a picture of the task, and on the other side was a picture of what came next. It wasn’t fancy. I printed them on colored paper and stuck them to his desk with a piece of Velcro. When it was time to switch, I would point to the card instead of calling across the room. He still didn’t love it, but he knew what was coming.
The second thing was even smaller. I stopped using phrases like “in a few minutes” or “almost done.” Those meant nothing to him. I started using timers and numbers. A tiny hourglass on his desk meant more than five minutes. I would tell him, “When the sand runs out, you can finish that page at the back table.” That gave him a finish line he could see.
I also stopped asking, “Are you ready?” Chayse never knew the answer to that question. Instead, I gave him a choice: “Do you want to carry the timer or the lunch count?” That was easier for him to answer. He could choose something about the transition even if he couldn’t control the transition itself.
None of this was in his IEP. I didn’t need a meeting. I just needed to watch what was happening in front of me.
People sometimes ask me if Chayse is okay today. I don’t have a perfect answer. The last time I saw him, he was almost sixteen, and he was standing behind a table at the county fair, handing out cups of lemonade. He wore a bright yellow apron that was too big for him, and he had a set of orange ear defenders hanging around his neck. He wasn’t making conversation with customers, but he was doing his job. When there was a gap between people, he straightened the cups and checked the sugar shaker.
I almost didn’t recognize him. He was tall now. His voice had dropped. But he still reached up and touched the rim of his ear when he was thinking, and he still looked at the clock a little too often.
I walked over and said his name. He looked at me for a second, then tilted his head. “You’re the one with the timer,” he said. And then he smiled so clearly I had to look away.
We didn’t talk long. His supervisor came over and asked him to restock the napkin bin, and he nodded and walked off. But before he left, he said one thing that I still think about. “I still use a timer app,” he told me. “When I get stuck, it helps me know when it’s going to end.”
That made me quiet for the rest of the day.
Chayse is not a success story in the usual way. He didn’t become the valedictorian or the football captain. He is just a teenager who found a job that lets him move at his own speed. He still has hard days. He still needs the same strategies he needed when he was seven. But the people around him now seem to understand that, and that makes a bigger difference than anyone in a meeting could have made.
When parents ask me what to do with a kid who falls apart at every transition, I don’t hand them a ten-step plan. I tell them to start with the moment right before the fall. I ask them: What was the child doing? What did you say? What did you expect them to feel? Sometimes a one-minute warning is enough. Sometimes it’s the thing that makes everything worse.
I still use the first-then card with new students. I still keep a couple of cheap hourglasses in a basket. I still say “when the timer ends” instead of “in a few minutes.” These small changes didn’t solve Chayse’s ADHD. They just made the school day less frightening.
I don’t know exactly where Chayse will be in five years. I hope he finds a warehouse with good labels and a quiet break room. I hope he keeps using the timer app. I hope someone remembers to hand him the order sheet before telling him to wait. He was never a broken child who needed to be fixed. He was just a kid who needed the world to slow down enough for him to catch up. And sometimes it did.
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