![]() ![]() And after much progress, Hayden one day discovered that Sheila was quitely hemorrhaging-the result of an uncle's foray into her vagina with a knife. In the beginning, Hayden and her aides had to cope with having the goldfish's eyes poked out and other teachers' classrooms torn apart. Convinced that she was worthless (by contrast with brother Jimmie, whom her mother took along in her flight), Sheila responded with awe to the simple gift of hair clips: ""Ain't nobody be nice to me on purpose."" Not all was rosy, of course. Daughter of a migrant worker, unwashed and unkempt, Sheila had been abandoned to die on the highway by her mother, and carried the scars of child abuse. The account of how Hayden ""tamed"" this self-dubbed ""crazy kid"" into a warm and loving little girl is really a story of lots of cuddling and surrogate mothering rather than of teaching per se-though Hayden did unearth Sheila's intellectual giftedness, later confirmed by IQ tests. Placed ""temporarily"" in the class on her way to a state institution, six-year-old Sheila had tied a three-year-old companion to a tree and critically burned him. When Torey Hayden began teaching the ""garbage"" class-eight severely disturbed children, from suicidal to autistic-in her Iowa school district, she had little idea that the mid-year would bring Sheila. ![]()
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