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"There they go, they're at it again....", I say to myself, as I try to intervene before too much damage is done. The two pre-teen boys in our classroom start to tussle violently, one of them receiving a solid punch in the face and withdraws, whimpering and defeated. He lays his head on his desk for an hour.
It happens so often that I can count on an incident every day with them. The difference with these two fighting and any other similar fight between non-related boys, is that with these two, everything seems to be forgotten within hours.
The next thing I see is that they are laughing together at some private joke they have between themselves, that no one else will ever understand because it's the language of identical twins!
When one of them leaves the room for any prolonged amount of time and the remaining one doesn't know where the other one went, he becomes agitated and tries to leave the room to search for his brother.
When one of them isn't able to get prizes from a rewards program because of his own negligence, the other one will step in and give his own prize to his left-out brother.
These boys haven't come from an abundant lifestyle, from what I can gather. They split time between their parents because of divorce, they don't have a lot in the way of clothing or extra "stuff". And of course they are in our classroom because of some kind of learning disability. But they seem happier than most of the other kids, and their peals of laughter, mostly at inappropriate times, gladdens my heart for them.
They look so much alike that I'm sure early on the parents decided to let one of them have long hair while the other one wears his hair close to the head. It really helps to quickly identify them at school. Without that helpful hack, it would have been near impossible at the first of the year to tell them apart.
I have learned to tell them apart and have noted a couple of significant differences! I have learned that one of them (Twin A) is more able to talk and be social with grown-ups. I like to talk to him because he is so interested in things and seems to have a genuine thirst for new information. At the same time he is more spontaneous than his brother. One day, I had about 10 of the students outside during a nice fall day for about 20 minutes. It was going just great....until Twin A suddenly pulled another boys pants down. The thing is, the other kid wasn't wearing any underwear! It was not cool at all! The rest of the day was spent sorting out what everyone did and didn't see, who might have been traumatized and would anyone be suspended? An incident like that requires a whole lotta paperwork. Yet. This is the one who, when given a reward like a bag of chips or candy, will go without so he can give it to his brother, after a fight in which he was trounced by said brother.
