Arrested Development No More

Chynnah Henn wants to be a crime scene investigator (CSI) when she grows up. The eighth grade Huntley resident has already started prepping for her future as she is an avid viewer of the hit "CSI" shows and closely watches the Dr. Phil Show and Judge Judy—although she no longer plays lawyer and walks around the house with a briefcase filled with fictitious crime scenes.

“I like watching the (“CSI: New York”) reruns because I look for all the little details,” said Chynnah, 13, whose father is a police officer in west suburban Schiller Park. “And I watch Dr. Phil because if you watch, you can tell who’s lying. It’s like little things, you know, like his cheek will twitch when he talks and her cheek doesn’t.”

Still, few TV cases compare to the one the student recently cracked. Diagnosed with Petit Mal seizures or absence seizures, Chynnah often suffers brief lapses of consciousness during which it appears she’s daydreaming or staring into space. Afterward, she has no memory of the episode or what happened around her. So just how she was going to overcome the learning disability and excel in school was a mystery. But that all changed last fall when, well, you might say the CSI enthusiast got her man. Whereas Chynnah struggled under previous teachers, she has excelled under Craig Pate, her homeroom and special education math teacher.

“At my old school, I wanted to get good grades because all the other kids were getting good grades, but I never thought it was possible because I couldn’t understand,” Chynnah said. “All my other teachers from other schools were just not helpful and I was always stuck. It was too hard and I’d always get upset with myself. But Mr. Pate helped me get on the Principal’s List. This quarter I have all A’s, so I’m on Principal’s List again.”

Finding the right way to thank Pate has been somewhat a riddle, too. Initially Chynnah wanted to nominate him for a Golden Apple Award, however, neither School District 158 nor Marlowe Middle School participate in the program which each year honors ten Chicago area teachers for their excellence in the classroom. To thank Pate, Chynnah now plans to surprise him with her own Gilded Apple award at the District 158 meeting on Thursday, April 21.

“If feels kind of better,” said Chynnah of her revised plans. “It feels cooler because I’m going to be to the first one to ever give it to him.”

Chynnah will also present Pate with a photo album and a humorous illustration of a classroom similar to his that she found at the store and had framed.

Chynnah first met Pate two years ago when he sat in on and observed one of her classes. That happened last year as well before Pate became her case manager this year. In each grade, Chynnah has been given an Individual Education Plan (IEP), which she says Pate has administered the best. In helping Chynnah reach her IEP goals, Pate had to first determine how she learns best.

“He found that her way of learning is better if it’s (via) audio,” said Chynnah’s mom, Kathy. “So he’s going to make sure that it’s in her IEP because she’s going to high school next year. He’s a good advocate when it comes to recognizing individual needs.”

Kathy says she noticed a change in her daughter early in the school year while Chynnah says the initial change began on her first day of school.

“When I first walked into the room at the beginning of the year, (Pate) asked me, ‘So what works out for you?’” she said. “And I said, ‘Well, what works out for me is if you can go slower so I can learn it. (The others teachers) go too fast and I forget it all, and then nobody likes to stay after to teach me.’ He said he would stay after with me everyday until 4 (pm).”

Still, Chynnah, who says she never looked forward to going to school until this year, was initially leery of Pate’s teaching methods because she’d had little academic success previously. Over time she warmed up to him and now Pate, who partners with Chynnah’s other teachers and sometimes makes study guides for her when she doesn’t understand the subject matter, has volunteered to assist Chynnah with her high school studies.

The one area where it appears that Chynnah doesn’t need additional help is in the adding up of clues or the subtraction of suspects from a persons of interest list.

“To this day, I still play crime scene,” Chynnah said. “Now I use dolls and teddy bears and I pretend they’re bad people. They’ve killed somebody. And there are these new dolls that you can rip apart their bodies and then put them back together. So I rip apart their bodies. There’s an arm across the street. You have to go get it…..It’s really kind of fun.”

If Chynnah is to become a crime scene investigator, she has to improve her secret keeping as she’s already leaked word of her presentation to Pate.

“Last week was a Fun Week and as we were walking down the hall I said to Mr. Pate, ‘I see something in your future that’s gold and delicious,’” Chynnah said. “He said, ‘What is it?’ and I said, ‘I can’t tell you.’”