All posts in category Teaching Out of Autism

Intensive teaching, not necessary ABA, is what mostly helps my son. Intensive in time, difficulty, scrutiny.Teaching is imposing my way of thinking on my son. I know that. The problem is he cannot teach me, so I have to teach him.

Parenting the Sibling.

I have not written anything since May 10.  My “other” child, child without autism, had a commencement ceremony.  I flew to Oregon and  spent a few days in Portland. It was my first time away from Robert, with the exception of 4 day emergency trip to Poland. I felt strange. I didn’t even think about Robert yet I felt alienated from myself and out of place.  I followed the crowd of  other parents, clapped when other people clapped , walked when others walked.  I saw the exhibit of her work, read her thesis.  I talked to a few professors about Amanda.  I felt they knew more about her than I did.  I didn’t know what to say, but I talked a lot anyway. I helped with cooking and packing.  After my daughter either  disposed of or packed everything she gathered over the last four years,  we drove east hoping to get to Boston in our 12 years old Honda Civic.  We stopped to look at Multnomah Falls. We took pictures.  In  Baker City we found out that the lower engine of our car was damaged.  Since there was no other way out of Baker City we kept on driving. When we reached Boise, with the help of Goodwill, junk yard, and bike store  we got rid of the full trunk of stuff,the bike ,and the car.  We sent four huge boxes home and packed everything else in four suitcases.  We didn’t want to fly yet.  It supposed to be our road trip. Mother and daughter. In a rented  car we drove to Denver.  This time, only Amanda, my child without autism, was driving.  I drive with a left foot gas pedal.   It can be removed when someone else is driving and put in when I drive.  Yet, in the whole USA there is no car renting company which would rent a car with such a  pedal.   So only Amanda could drive.   And she did.    We talked a lot because we had a lot to say to each other and because we didn’t want to  fell asleep. We missed exit for Shoshone Falls.  We turned back to see them.  We took pictures.  We stopped a lot.  We were tired.  Both of us.  The 60+ miles after  Ogden were the hardest. We stopped at Days Inn in Evanstone, we watched Doctor Who, we hung out.   The next morning Amanda got a speeding ticket.   According to the state trooper she went 20 miles over speed limit.  I don’t know. I doze off for a few minutes.   Getting a ticket was a good wake up call. Our adrenaline jumped up and we didn’t feel sleepy any more.  We stopped to get gas,  eat, and look at the mountains. We talked a lot.  Mostly about  this, that, and nothing.  Just the fluff.  We were stressed and relaxed at the same time. We reached Denver before it got dark, drove through its streets, got to the hotel, returned the car to Avis, watched Doctor Who again, and talked about this and that.

As,the following morning, we were waiting for a plane, I realized that during those nine days we spent together we had a very different connections than we had ever in the past.   In the past Amanda often had to  be in the background. To make it worse, she understood perfectly why we, her parents, had to pay so much attention to Robert.  She understood this all too well.  And acted as if that was fine with her.

When she was younger I signed her for piano lessons, ballet, and art classes.  Not so much because I wanted her to develop all the talents she had, but because I felt that other people could give her more than I could.  Today, I don’t want to remember how  full of tension and stress our home was then, but I felt that for Amanda  being somewhere else was preferable to being home.  I am not so sure of that today.

I  couldn’t concentrate on what she was saying. I often interrupted her because I had to attend to her brother.  For many reasons, which luckily disappeared as Robert grew and changed, our trips to movies, restaurants, museums were always tense.

When she had  problems at school I helped her in the worst possible way explaining,for instance, math with poisonous impatience.

Even when we managed to go somewhere together – museums, independent movie theaters, cafes I was constantly checking time to make sure we would return home in time to relieve the respite provider.

Of course, she understood then and she understands now.  Still, she had her own problems, she tried to hide them.  Maybe she didn’t want to overwhelm me, knowing how on edge our lives were.  Maybe she knew that I wouldn’t be able to help anyway?

In the plane she read, while I  dealt with the  guilt, for so little time spent together, for impatience, lack of attention.  I realized how little I know about her.  And yet during all these years, not only the last four years in Portland, she managed to shape herself without my interference and/or despite my interferences, into a wonderful person I know so little about.  She is smart and yet seems lost, seems vulnerable and yet is strong.

She is alright.

And yet…

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by krymarh on June 5, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by krymarh on June 5, 2012

https://krymarh.com/2012/06/05/on-the-other-child/

On Cute Stories and Deep Anxiety

Robert takes his jacket and his schoolbag of  the hook and, against his neat nature, drops them  on the floor to emulate the behavior of his  older sister.  Robert replays actions of characters from Winnie the Pooh including attaching  Eeyore’s tail to himself.  Robert calls “Outback, Outback” (name of his favorite restaurant) when in distress. Robert designs an experiment to understand the forces that can break the glass.  Robert displays his band-aids on the carpet to commemorate his bravery under fire from allergy shots.  Each of these stories is like a small window through which Robert lets me and others glimpse at  himself.  I see a fraction too small to recreate  Robert’s model of the world but big enough to  believe that there is something more to be known and understood. Except, I do not know and do not understand.  The data are scarce and cloudy. And Robert, as I made it clear many times before, doesn’t explain himself.

All those stories happened between five and fifteen years ago.   I have an impression that as Robert learns more from me, from us, he becomes less assertive in doing things his own way. It is true, he has very few tantrums lately, and is not often upset, but it might be that he lost his own drive, that he allowed others to take much more control over his life than was necessary for him to thrive.  Maybe, everything was too confusing, too painful.  Maybe, it was impossible to let people know what he needed and wanted. Maybe he realized at some point , how different he was and lost confidence in his ways.   So  he waits for directions and prompts.

Is that the goal I should have aimed for?

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by krymarh on May 9, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Teaching Out of Autism

Posted by krymarh on May 9, 2012

https://krymarh.com/2012/05/09/on-cute-stories-and-deep-anxiety/

Looking Inside a Bubble

Robert does not explain himself.  He does not ask for explanation either.  It is not that he doesn’t want to know. Because he does.  He does want to know.  I realized that during Holiday Season when Robert was seven years old.  At that time, our Christmas ornaments were  made  of brittle, beautiful glass and Robert broke them all.  He already knew that when such ornaments fell from the tree, or slip through the hands, they break.  He also knew that he couldn’t make them whole again.  What he did not know and wanted to learn  was what  precisely was happening in the exact moment of change, the moment ornaments broke.  So sitting on the floor and tilting his whole body to the side so that his  cheek was almost on the floor he watched the glass as it was shuttering.  He also tried to figure out the breaking height.  First, he released the ornament from  just an inch or two  above the floor.  It didn’t break .  So he kept increasing  the distance  until the sphere split into a few pieces. The conclusion as to what precisely took place in the moment of this metamorphosis must have escaped Robert because as I rush to clean the glass, Robert ran for the next ornament to perform another experiment.

Whatever he learned, Robert did not share with me. I was left to my own guesses. At first, I thought that he wanted to establish the critical distance from the floor that leads to breaking of the glass.  Lately, I suspect that he wanted to slow the process hoping he would catch some sort of entity escaping from the glass bubble.  Or that he wanted to see the inside of the whole ornament.    And he hit an epistemological wall.  To see the inside of the ornament  he had to break it.  When he broke it he couldn’t see the entire inside of the sphere.  Did Robert realize the limits of knowledge and, in his wordless world, formulated his own uncertainty principle?

 

 

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by krymarh on May 9, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by krymarh on May 9, 2012

https://krymarh.com/2012/05/09/looking-inside-a-bubble/

Understanding Errors

Among materials Robert and I frequently use are folders made from pages taken from workbooks belonging to the series   Take It to Your Seat. We prepare each folder according to the instruction by cutting, gluing, laminating.  We  use one or two or three of those folders every day for many reasons:

1.To introduce a new skill/information and asses the level of help Robert would need to learn the skill presented in the folder.

2. For additional support.  For instance, when Robert was introduced to hemispheres through  different workbooks, the proper folder from the series provided visual support and allowed for extra practice.

3. To teach the skill intensively. We have just started working on three folders addressing making and reading graphs.  We will repeat the same tasks every day for two weeks. (I would not mind if Robert memorize the answers.  Memorizing is Robert’s weakness.  He would learn everything much quicker if his memory supported his learning. So ability to remember is a goal in itself. )

4. To escape the routine and incorporate  elements of play  in learning.

There is a problem, however, with using materials designed by somebody else while introducing a new concept, as those materials  don’t match exactly a particular student’s learning style and his “way of knowing things”.

One of the folders we made addressed categories of nouns: people, places, things.   When I was preparing this folder I knew that Robert had never before been taught those categories.   I knew I was entering unchartered waters but had an impression that the folder People, Places,Things was an easy and appropriate tool to introduce and practice  the task.  All pictures of people displayed community workers on their jobs and  all places were buildings (school, post office, garage, but no beach or park). What could be easier?  And yet as Robert was classifying, he made error after error by mixing people with places and things. The conclusion I drew was clear,  “Robert was not ready to learn to classify nouns.”  So I put the folder away.  I took it out a few years later (YES!, years) and noticed that Robert was still making the same errors.  But this time I grasped the essence of his mistakes.

Yes he mixed “a thing” with “a place” , and with “a person” .  But that thing was a school bus , that person was a bus driver, and that place was a school.  Robert was grouping objects that belonged together.  Categories were abstract and their force to attract particular pictures could not brake stronger bonds between “the bus driver and his school bus”.

The only way, I could think of,  to proceed with teaching  was to acknowledge the existence of those bonds and then let Robert break them.  So I placed on a separate piece of paper pictures of a mail man, a mail box, and a post office and  demonstrated to Robert that from there the pictures can go to separate categories.  Now, it was Robert’s  turn.  First,  I helped him gather pictures of a bus, a school, and a  bus driver  then I asked him to move the pictures to the appropriate categories.  That was easy.

After analyzing the way I taught Robert I realized that I didn’t analyze the logic behind Robert’s errors. Not all errors are random, and behind some of them lurks another stronger concept that controls responses. Understanding the concept behind the error is very important.   Sometimes it is impossible to find a reason for errors, but it is always a very good thing to try.

Moreover, I didn’t choose wisely the exemplars to be categorized. I used what I had in the folder instead of  thinking about possible implications for Robert of such selection.   For instance, it was not good to have only buildings as examples of places or only community workers as people . It certainly was a mistake to have objects related to each to each other as representing separate categories.

In the end, however, it was beneficial to use this folder. Have I had a perfect set of pictures, Robert’s grasp on categories might come sooner but  he still might remain confused about how to choose a key by which he was supposed to sort. The mistakes  Robert made allowed me to better understand the thinking behind his errors and adjust the way I presented the task.

That is why I frequently use different curricula addressing the same topic.   Small differences in wording or in presentation can reveal  cracks in understanding of the concept.  Such cracks should be remedied as soon as they are discovered.

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by krymarh on May 7, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by krymarh on May 7, 2012

https://krymarh.com/2012/05/07/454/

Medals for Bravery

Today, Robert went to see his allergy doctor at Children’s Hospital.  He was due for his RAST tests to check and recheck his susceptibility to old and new allergens.  I was afraid of how Robert would react to a needle entering his vein. Robert was afraid too.  I told him about necessity of the tests before the visit.  He didn’t show fear, but  was clearly anxious during the whole stay at the doctor’s office.   Although in the past, he learned to tolerate regular allergy shots, he might still not be prepared for for the blood test. Drawing blood  can cause apprehension for many reasons:   syringes lined up on the counter,  a rubber tied around an arm, a phlebotomist looking for the vein, and…

The phlebotomist’s assistant held Robert’s left arm.    I held the right one and embraced Robert’s head hoping he  would not  see the needle.   But Robert  wanted to watch everything: his arm, his vein,  the needle, and the syringes in action.   He was anxious but resolved to bravely confront the anticipated pain. And he did.  He waited patiently until all the syringes were filled.  Then he unwrapped  small, circular band-aid and placed it carefully over a small puncture on his skin.

In the beginning of 2006 Robert started a series of allergy shot to address some of his environmental allergies.  For the first two appointments my husband took him to Children’s Hospital. I was told that three experienced people had to hold Robert during the first visit.  He also strongly protested all throughout the second. However,during the following three appointments,Robert behaved like a typical teenager, if not better.   I decided to switch, just for the sake of  vaccines, to the allergy office closer to our home and spare ourselves cumbersome, frequent  trips  to Longwood Medical Area in Boston.  Because the specialist  in my town refused to treat Robert  I had to find  another one in a nearby town of Needham.  The visits went smoothly.  Waiting for a shot, getting it, and  hanging in the office for 20+ minutes afterwards to make sure that there was no allergic reaction to the vaccine, were never a problem.  At some point,  Robert was walking with the nurse alone while  I  stayed in the waiting room hoping that Robert learns to be more independent and that the nurse would  feel comfortable with  Robert on her own. After each of the two shots he received, Robert insisted on unwrapping two circular bandages himself and carefully placed them on his arms.

At home, I kept finding those band-aids on the rug in Robert’s bedroom. After I removed them a few times, I ignored them until the day, I realized that the adhesive bandages were attached to the rug in a consciously planned manner.  They formed a long line of little circles almost exactly  six inches apart from each other. It was clear that after each appointment,  Robert placed one or two band-aids on the rug as if he wanted in this symbolic way to record  his experiences.  As uneventful as those appointments became to me because of Robert’s  calm demeanor, for him they were not the ordinary events.  The  circles with tiny squares in their centers confirmed that.

To warm up the floor in Robert’s bedroom during the following winter,  I placed a washable rug on top of the first one.  It covered all the little circles, but Robert continued to add them anyway. He formed a second row.  Even when he stopped getting  vaccines, he still kept all his bandages in place.

Today,  Robert added to the rug another band-aid, his well deserved, unpretentious  medal for bravery.


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by krymarh on May 4, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by krymarh on May 4, 2012

https://krymarh.com/2012/05/04/medals-for-bravery/

Looking for Self in the Hundred Acres Woods

One day, when Robert was two years old, I found him sitting on our dining table. The table was new and  smelled of pine wood  it was made of.  Robert’s  little legs surrounded a sugar bowl while his hand, with all fingers glued together, traveled back and forth between the bowl and his mouth. Robert’s face radiated with a calm contentment.  I had an instant impression of Winnie the Pooh using his paw to eat a Little Smackeroo of Honey.  Although the association  was insanely strong and vivid (I wouldn’t remember it 18 years later if it weren’t) I didn’t dare to assume that Robert was enacting the scene from Disney’s Winnie the Pooh.

A few months later I was baffled by Robert’s habit of purposefully breaking balloons taken from his favorite restaurant, Applebee’s, by falling on them.  I usually threw away little  pieces of rubber left from the balloons, but one day as I was rushing to the dinning room after hearing yet another “POP” sound, I saw Robert placing the remnants of the balloon in a drawer under  a china cabinet.  This time, the connection between Piglet, Eeyore and Robert seemed obvious.  Robert was breaking balloons like Piglet and placing them in a a container (a drawer instead of an empty honey jar) just like Eeyore  did. Not much  later,  Robert found a piece of thin string with a bow tied at its end.   I don’t remember where it came from and what had happen to it later.  I do remember how contemplatively Robert was assessing this object and how he attempted to attach it to himself as,of course, a tail.  First, he tried this with his pants on.  Since it didn’t work, he started to take the pants off.  I didn’t let him.  First of all, we had a guest for dinner.  Secondly, he had already made his point.

He convinced me that  those episodes were not accidental. He was searching for his identity among the Hundred Acres Woods crowd,

In the end, Robert settled for  Tigger.  How could he not? Although not socially savvy Tigger, the bouncy ball of energy, is the most alive character among  the inhabitants of Milne’s masterpiece.  So Robert chose Tigger .  And from that time on, bouncing like a ball and flapping his bent arms Robert reminds me, over and over,  whom he decided to be.  “A Tigger’s a wonderful thing.”

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by krymarh on May 2, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by krymarh on May 2, 2012

https://krymarh.com/2012/05/02/looking-for-self-in-the-hundred-acres-woods/

You Get What You Expect

For two years Robert was included in the first grade class with typical peers.  When he was six and/or seven years old once a week he went with his teacher from private school to the  public school in Southboro to participate in English class.  It must have been an exciting year for him as the children, under their teacher’s guidance, treated him as if he were one of them. So he felt this way.  They admired the fact that he could read although he couldn’t talk. So he was motivated to read more. He learned to follow the group and was motivated to imitate other children’s action. He did what was expected of him.  This  teacher retired before I could thank her not only for a wonderful treatment of my son but also for her ability to influence other children to accept someone so different from them.  I still have a class newspaper where she and a few of her students wrote simply and beautifully about what they had learned from Robert’s visits.

Following year, Robert participated in the  art class at the same school. Probably with some assistance, he made a few beautiful art projects.

One day, the teacher from private school mentioned that Robert could color.  I hardly believed her because in the past, Robert had so much trouble  staying within lines that I gave up on teaching him coloring completely.  To my surprise, however, Robert could color.  He could color very well. He had, so-called,  an eye for details. Staying within contours of the picture was not a problem.   The smaller the details the more precisely Robert colored them.  Since “coloring”  was not a goal in his IEP I didn’t know when exactly Robert mastered that skill.  I didn’t know how he learned it.  Did his teacher helped him?  How many times?  Did he just observe other students busy with their coloring and follow their lead? It was probably a mixture of the urge to be like other students and the assistance from his teacher that resulted in such precise coloring.  I was just very happy that Robert learned something  useful.  From that time on I could give him a page to color knowing that he could do it independently  without me sitting next to him. Time for him to mature.  Time for me to relax.

I also sort of felt proud of Robert.  He was behaving so …”typically”.

Or so I thought.

A few years later, Robert started to participate in after school program for children with special needs.  Twice a week I drove him there at 3PM and picked him at 5:30PM.   A few responsible adults worked there with many young volunteers from high school and nearby college.  On some days before the pick up time,  the children were given crayons and coloring pages with very simple drawing so they could relax  while doing this easy activity.  The pictures were spread on a table when I came to pick up Robert.  Robert didn’t color one picture, he colored 3 or 4 of them. But his coloring was reduced to hasty scribbling of  big circles all across the pages  without any consideration for  contours of the pictures.  I was flabbergasted.  I couldn’t understand  what was happening.  He could color so well!   What was the problem?  Did the shapes were too big and/or  too simple? Was he  bored?  Was he unable to focus?  Did he took a cue of how  he was supposed to color from a picture colored in similar way by one of his friends? But where were his counselors?  Shouldn’t they provide some support, instruction, guidance?  They probably would if they believed that Robert could do a better job.  But they didn’t expect anything better than those circles, so Robert did what they expected.

The same situation repeated itself many times in different circumstances.

All summer long Robert played in the swimming pool of his camp and not even once he swam across the pool.  His counselors didn’t know that he could swim 30 laps in 30 minutes.  They didn’t expect him to swim, so Robert adjusted his behavior to their expectations and didn’t swim.

At the skating ring, young and wonderful volunteers wouldn’t let Robert skate on his own despite my asking them to let him go.  They were afraid. They didn’t believe Robert could skate.  So they held him by both hands.  As soon as Robert grabbed  their hands he hung on them (he was little, they were big)  and passively let them lead him.  He did what they expected to the fault.  In the end, his young teacher took him to the same ring and  in five minutes Robert was skating on his own.He didn’t suddenly learn to skate. The teacher knew what Robert was capable off and Robert performed to match this teacher’s expectations.

Unfortunately, many  people who meet my son don’t know what to expect.   Robert won’t tell them.  Moreover, he is so attuned to what they expect that he will not do anything to change their perception or exceed their expectations.

There were times when I had to prove that Robert can do something before the school agreed to build on that skill and take it further.

There were times when I didn’t expect Robert to learn, to know , to understand.  So it took him much longer to learn, to know to understand.

As a parent I was sometimes treated with suspicion as a person who expect her child to learn much more than he was capable of learning. The truth is that I too was infected with a plague of low expectations and my son paid the price.

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by krymarh on April 29, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by krymarh on April 29, 2012

https://krymarh.com/2012/04/29/you-get-what-you-expect/

Outback! Outback! Outback To the Rescue!

Robert, like most of us, uses words he knows to label things which have names he is not familiar with.  Once, as he was looking for a bath mitt, he used the phrase “two rags”. I didn’t have any idea what he wanted.  Finally, he led me to the bathroom and pointed to the place where the mitt was supposed to be. Robert didn’t use the word “mitt”, he also knew  because  this mitt had a shape of a rectangle without a separate compartment for a thumb. So it didn’t look like a mitt.   Another time, he was looking for “snake, door” .  It took me a while to realize that he was searching for a draft protector, which, as I learned later, is often sold as a “door snake”. During our trip to Disneyland, my husband and I learned about another idiosyncratic way Robert uses words.

Star Wars Tour was the first ride we went on.  We took our seats in the  row second to the last.  Robert sat, as always,between my husband and me.   Since he had never been before in  Disneyland, he felt a mixture of excitement and anxiety so, just in case, he held on firmly to our wrists.   Judging by the spark of recognition in his eyes, the first scenes of the movie seemed vaguely familiar to him.  He also must have recognized the music because he loosened his clutch. But when the chairs started jerking us around he became unsettled and tighten his  grip on our wrists.” The spaceship”, we were in, accelerated and centrifugal forces tilted our chairs to the right, to the left, forward, and backward in unpredictable, forceful ways. The roar of the spaceship’s engines replaced the music in a menacing racket. The floor seemed to be moving under our feet and seats.

The terrified call cut through the noise,

“Outback! Outback! Outback!”

A moment later another desperate plea filled intergalactic space,

“Fries! Fries! Fries!”

Robert screamed for Outback and fries with eyes widen with horror. Rather embarrassed, I hoped that the noises coming from  spaceship tearing through galaxies would muffle Robert’s screams and spare other travelers from the confusion my husband and I felt. I was  quite perplexed not understanding why Robert, who just had a good breakfast, demanded food in such a dramatic way.

To calm Robert down, I quickly promised, “Outback later”.  As soon as I did that I realized that Robert did not demand food, but salvation. He wanted to be immediately transported to a safe place.

I assured Robert, ” It is only a movie.  Just a movie.  Like in IMAX , or like Hitchhikers’ Guide. Just the chairs are moving too.” Robert understood.   He removed his hands from our wrists and laughed.  He glanced at me with a proud expression signalizing the  fear conquered by maturity and relaxed. He watched attentively to the end of the presentation and appeared disappointed when the show was over.

Robert knows the word “help”.  He was  taught to say it and to use it in a few appropriate situations.  Yet, he had never been in a position which would require calling for help. Until, of course , during this thrill ride.

I  have mixed feelings about  Robert using words “Outback” and “Fries” to express the sensation of being in a danger. On one hand, I do wish that Robert could ask for help in a typical way  so we would  react properly.  On the other hand, I understand that in an assumed danger, Robert wanted to be transferred to a safe and known environment of a favorite restaurant and comforted by food that  would calm his turning upside down stomach.

Isn’t that what we all want one way or another?

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by krymarh on April 26, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by krymarh on April 26, 2012

https://krymarh.com/2012/04/26/outback-outback-to-the-rescue/

Unlearning

Before Robert’s third birthday, he and I played with Duplo blocks. We built  simple structures by lining  the blocks along the edges of the base or stacking them on top of each other.  To make those structures  a little more interesting I began to  alternate blocks.  White, red, white red.  Soon, Robert followed building white and red towers or white and red paths.  It seemed  such an easy task to learn  that there was no point of practicing it over next year or year and a half.  During that year, Robert was practicing matching by color, matching identical pictures, or matching pictures of the same, but differently looking,  objects. (For instance, differently looking tables.) .   When he was already four and a half years old, I noticed that he couldn’t complete a simple ABABA pattern.  So I brought back Duplo blocks assuming that Robert would recognize the task he had already mastered 18 months before and build the tower alternating white and red blocks. But he was unable to do that.  He placed red on red and white on white.  The paths could be all white or all red. Moreover, this time, I was unable to teach Robert to alternate colors  I tried many times and failed.  ( In the end I used Robert’s strong urge to match by color by having him to match the path I built with alternating colors.  Later, a friend of mine advised me to use a kindergarten level computer program where the skill of  completing patterns was taught by matching the pictures in the top row by placing identical ones in the row below. When the identical matching was completed, the pictures from lower row were immediately transported to the top row to extend the pattern.)

When I realized that Robert could not alternate blocks by colors, I began to doubt my memory.  Could Robert really complete white and red pattern before?  Did I make it up? How could he unlearn the skill that came to him so easily before?  Where his resistance to alternating colors came from?  Did too many months of  identical matching resulted in Robert’s strong conviction that this is the only way to go?

I can only hypothesize why Robert lost the skill he had.  Yet I strongly believe that had I continued working with Robert on varying the tasks presented to him, he might have not developed this rigidity in thinking. If the matching of “same with same” were interspersed with practicing patterns, the learning of a new skill might take longer but the “unlearning” might not happen.

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by krymarh on April 23, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Prompt Dependency, Teaching Out of Autism
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Posted by krymarh on April 23, 2012

https://krymarh.com/2012/04/23/unlearning/

Bitter Digression

I wrote this comment in April.  I posted it and then I switched it to “Private” .  I felt it was too bitter and too accusatory to be left here.  But this is what I believe each and every day.  Moreover, I think that these feelings/observations are shared by many parent of children with disabilities. 

As I am writing this blog I often feel immobilized by resentments and regrets.  For the last three days I wanted to write about how Robert learned to be helpless. But this topic is not only complex but also loaded with  bitter reflections. They come from the fact that  too often and for too long I was not able to assure that Robert  was taught properly at schools he attended.  There is no doubt that I had times when I felt stressed by caring for Robert.  Yet the stress related to dealing with Robert’s schools was usually much higher. I experienced  times of relative contentment when many of my son’s needs were addressed properly and times of terrible hurt when I watched my son pushed back on a downhill slope of regression.

In this system parent has to be a  teacher, lawyer, negotiator, enforcer of the quality of education while at the same time he/she is kept blind  and has his/her hands tied.  It is an inhuman system. The emphasis on following the special education laws leads to emphasizing administrative paperwork  and not the classroom practices. That has a terrible  effect on children’s education as it leads to ignoring the significance of  the quality of the education delivery – teachers training as it relates to specific disabilities, application of proper methods, good curricula, and most importantly, the quality of education the future teachers receive at their graduate schools.

The  quality of special education received by students with disabilities can be, theoretically,  assessed by parents.  But who is checking the quality of education the future teachers receive at their graduate schools?

Teaching Robert is easy.  Teaching educators is hard but doable. Teaching people who teach future teachers? Impossible.


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by krymarh on April 23, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Teaching Out of Autism
Tagged , ,

Posted by krymarh on April 23, 2012

https://krymarh.com/2012/04/23/bitter-digression/

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