I found out from Running in Circles that October is Sensory Processing Disorder Awareness Month. I thought I’d list some of the posts on my blog which relate to SPD.
If you’re just starting out, I encourage you to start here and here. Then proceed onto:
Description
Solutions
Suggestions
Book Review: Arnie and His School Tools
For even more information, be sure to visit Everyday Adventures for links to some of the best resources on the net.
It was noon and I was preparing Josh’s lunch as he waited anxiously for the sandwhich. As I threw things on (meats, cheeses, sauces), I asked the mom which parts to include on his sandwhich, and which to leave off. Because Josh has no speech, I didn’t bother asking what he wanted, and merely used the mother as a mediator.
The idiocy of this dawned on me when I was getting a drink for Lawrence. Lawrence as echolalic speech, so I can’t ask him to make a choice verbally. But I did grab two bottles, set them in front of him, and allowed him to grab the juice he wanted to drink. He didn’t need words to clearly convey that he wanted strawberry banana juice over fruit punch.
The cliche rang in my head, “Not being able to speak is not the same as not having anything to say.” Of course Josh has opinions, and he has the right to choose the ingredients that are added to his sandwhich. Would it have taken much longer to ask Josh to grab item by item, everything he wanted included? Probably. Would it have been worth it to give Josh some control over even this tiny aspect of his life, rather than ignoring the fact that he is a human being with his own desires, which cannot be channeled directly through his mother? Absolutely.
Josh was denied yesterday a sandwhich made exactly the way he wanted it. But more importantly, he was denied his opinions, his rights, and his humanity. I can’t ever do that to a child again.
Given Carl’s recent success, you might assume that school had always been a breeze for him, which would be undeniably false. I thought I would supply you with a bit of a backstory on my brother’s schoolyears.
Preschool: Two months into Preschool, my mom gets a call from Carl’s teachers, informing her that Carl is verbally harassing the other students. When my mom points out Carl isn’t speaking, they both realize the teacher has confused my brother with another kid in the class, and probably has no idea which one of the 30 students Carl is.
Kindergarten: Carl refuses to speak for the first couple months, though he is now talking at home. The school wants to put him in a Special Ed class, but the only special ed. class available is children with no speech who are still in diapers and learn no academics. My mom insists he remains mainstreamed and recieves the “expert lecture”.
First grade: Carl’s first year goes poorly. He’s tiny and behind, so my parents decide to keep him behind. His second 1st grade teacher is wonderful. Carl learns to read and begins to meet friends. During this time his 504 kicks in, and he begins to receive OT, PT, Speech, and Resource Room in school.
Second Grade: No change.
Third grade: Carl seems to be doing okay in school. His math is far behind, but his reading is right on par. One day Mom gets an enraged call from his teacher. It turns out Carl is raising his hand to ask to use the bathroom, and in this class students simply take the pass and go. Due to Carl’s unwillingness to change this bathroom routine, he and the teacher do not get along during the school year.
Fourth Grade: Carl’s academics are average, but he still plummets out in math. One day, when playing at a neighbor’s house, the boys begin to throw balls at Carl. Carl informs the mom that he “just wants it to end,” meaning the ball-throwing. She takes it to mean his life, and calls the school. A psychologist is added to the list of services Carl is receiving.
Fifth grade: Carl is taken to an eye doctor after the nurse determines that he memorized the eye chart and they could not get an accurate reading. It turns out that Carl has very poor vision and is given glasses. His grades begin to improve.
Sixth grade: Mom gets a call one month into the year that Carl has yet to turn in any homework. My mom thinks this is ludicrous because she watches and helps him do his homework each night. It turns out that Carl sits in the very front row of the class, and so when the homework pile gets passed up to be handed in, he forgets to also add his to the pile. His math ability begins to increase due to an excellent remedial math teacher. The teacher suggests that Carl’s main problem seems to be in his attentional abilities, which are far less then would be expected at his age. Carl is seen by a psychiatrist and diagnosed with ADD. He begins to take Ritalin, and his grades reach the B+ level. My mom’s suspicions that Carl’s brightness was being masked by other conditions are confirmed.
Tomorrow, I will post the second half.
This is the final part of a series on socialization from elementary school through college.
The July following my senior year rolled around and Kelsey left early for school to try-out for cheerleading and band. Thus I had a full summer stretching free in front of me. The limitations of my chronic illness made working impossible (I was only awake and functional 4-5 hours of each day), so I was pretty much able to do as I chose.
The summer was thus spent in the company of Justin, a boy I had met in the gifted program in elementary school, and my lab partner for 3 years running. We learned Magic the Gathering together, and spent every day doing one of three activities: MTG, Nintendo-64, or experimenting with Justin’s liquor cabinet. It was a great summer. All misfits in school, we fit nicely in the company of one another.
But then the end of August arrived, and we flew out to our respective colleges, dotted across the landscape of Pennsylvania and upstate NY.
I was nervous arriving at school. I had met a few kids on the internet, but also made a few enemies. I knew nothing about my roommate as he had spent the summer in the rockies and thus never had time to answer emails.
Fortunately, on the second day of orientation, Emily came up to me in the bookstore and mentioned that we had met online. We got to talking (mostly about books, because we are both total bookworms), and immediately hit it off. A few hours later, Mario got lost during Orientation and joined my group for introductions. Within 48 hours of arriving on campus, I had met the two students who would grow to become myt best friends.
As the year went on, my social life only got better. Mario started a Killer Bunnies (card game) group, and at point we had a dozen members attending the twice weekly meetings. I was walking into town with Emily each week, and we’d shop for books and old clothes at the thriftshops and swap stories aboiut our very different childhoods. I joined a Christian socialization group and met some kids that are still game for a shared dinner or quick conversation.The end of the year came much too fast, and I set up to live with Mario and Emily the following year, which was a great decision.
Sophomore year dawned, and I entered much more prepared. I assisted at Orientation and TA’d for a freshman class, giving me a chance to meet some of the new kids who were in search of friends. I met Kristen on Move-in day (read that story here), and found an Aspie in the freshman seminar who played MTG. I became friends with Emily’s roommate and another student who lived in my suite. I became involved in the Autistic swim, elementary socialization program, and working with Charger and babysitting the triplets. I also hit it off really well with a professor who shared my special interest.
Junior Year is now approaching, and promises to be more of a challenge then sophomore year. Emily will be abroad, Mario and I have drifted, and I will no longer be living with the same suite mates. But hopefully with a bit of effort on my part, I can make this year as fantastic as the last two.
Sorry for the interruption in posting this past week. Many factors converged at once. High personal stress, 2 literature reviews on TS due, packing for home, rearranging summer plans, the 9 hour journey back home, the readjustment to home life, and oh, being off-meds (oops!).
The first five aren’t particulalry interesting, but the last two provide nice jumping points.
First: the transition from college to home. You all know how much we Aspies love transitions. But whe it comes to college-aged Aspies, people tend to focus on how difficult the switch from home to college is. Which it probably is for some. For me it was rather enjoyable. My school had freshmen orientation directly before school started, so I had four days to adapt to campus and my classmates before everyone else arrived and classes began. The whole process was rather smooth.
But very few people discuss the transition back. I went from a semi-private dorm room (I bascially only saw Mario for sleep), to a home for four, where my connection to the internet was in the living room. I went from the ability to choose when and where to eat to scheduled meal times and even foods! A bottle of pepsi and some fiddle-faddle no longer counted as lunch; I actually had to ingest green things. My mom wanted me to unpack the day I returned, my brother wanted me to hang in his room and play video games, and I just wanted to escape into solitude. The end result: I came hom e Wednesday afternoon and watched My Cousin Vinny with Carl. I ate dinner with mom. I escaped upstairs and pretty much refused to come down until Saturday morning when I had my MRI. I just couldn’t deal with one more person, one more decision, or one more useless bit of information my mom likes to spew at a too-fast-to-process rate whenever I haven’t seen her for a long time. It was ugly.
By now I’m still very much on edge, but everyone but me is either at work or school so my sense of privacy and independence is restored, at least until 1 when Carl returns so we can set out for lunch.
Issue 2: Off-meds. I’m on Zoloft for issues with panic, anxiety, and “manic tendencies.” I’ve been taking it since a nervous breakdown during the second semester of my freshman year, notorious for the fact that I was afraid to shower for 17 days.The medicine is very well tolerated, and I have no issues with the fact that I need to take psychaitric medication to maintain functional sanity.Going off-meds wasn’t a political statement (I know it is a very political issue for some, but for me it simply wasn’t). I simply forgot to refill, ran out, called my pharmacy who said they needed doctor autorization and determined that my neurologist went back to India for a month. So although it could be phrased as, “I stopped taking them,” the more accurate concept is, “there were none left to take.” For the first week, as the medicine ran out its half-life, I felt the same as always. And then, suddenly I felt better. Not in a euphoric sort of sense, but in a, “my brain is running faster, I’m making deeper connections, where had my power to think been?” sort of way. And that was sort of cool, but with the world intensifying the way it did, both my highs were higher and my lows were lower. A relatively difficult situation among my friends escalated rather quickly. I burned red for two weeks, long after everyone else had calmed down. I cried at the drop of a hat; I felt like a pregnant woman. And, like things always do when you’re going nuts, my two papers felt like the end-all and be-all of the universe. I had a 19-reference source list for a six-page paper. I had articles stacked at every corner of the bed. A visit to my favorite professor after the papers were done made me realize just how out of alignment my views were. So when finals ended and I got home, we called the local pharmacist who had old prescriptions on file, and got a “temporary” refill until my doctor returns.Sanity is slowly settling into my brain again, and although the last month was intense, and a bit fun, it was not the way I want my life to be all the time. I’d burn out by 30 instead of 45.
So those are my excuses for being gone so long. My apologies. But autism blogging will return tomorrow.
Listening to parents, reading through the literature, and heck, just watching the kids, you’ll notice a common trend: autistic kids are clumsy. Oddly enough, this tends to be specialized by diagnosis (with Aspies having worse gross and fine motor control at 15 then HFA’s. In fact, it is one of the few things that can separate those with an Asperger’s and HFA diagnosis at that age. And yes, you have my permission to cite that handy fact whenever you’re informed that Asperger’s is not a real disorder, while autism is.) But I have seen little speculation as to why there is that separation, and I’m not going to try to address that here.
However, what I do think is important is the fact that autistic kids tend to be clumsy, and there has to be a reason for this. One of the biggest contributing factors, in my opinion, is our poor proprioceptive sense. Proprioception refers to knowledge of the body, specifically where the body is in space. If you have a typical nervous system, it probably is one of the senses you think least about. In fact, when asked to list the bodily senses, unless you have a deficit in one or are studying them specifically, you’re almost guaranteed to miss vestibular (balance and head-orientation) and proprioception. But for many individuals with autism, proprioception is a very big deal, mainly because ours tend to be terribly deficient.
If you will, humor me for a second. Hide your arm behind or under something, and your hand behind or under something else, so that all you have showing is a bit of forearm. Stare at that bit of forearm and gently wiggle your fingers. Note that the forearm doesn’t move. Now for most people, despite not being able to see the arm moving, there wold be no reason to believe that the forearm is not your own. After all, you can most likely feel it, from the inside, and thus know it is there. If you have an ASD however, this situation might utterly confuse you. Just yesterday I grabbed my forearm with the extent to remove it from the area where I was trying to sleep only to realize it was, in fact, my arm. Oops.
Dr. Sacks (one of my favorite authors) writes about a similar case in “An Anthropologit on Mars.” The story is titled something like, “The man who threw himself out of bed,” and is about a man who loses sense of self v. non-self and thus throws himself off the bed when attempting to get what he believes to be a mannequin’s leg off of his bed.
Now consider how this relates to movement. You’re walking along the hallway. You know where both your legs are in space because they’re moving. But your arms, well, they could be anywhere. You’re left with two options. A) Stim. B)Accidentally ram your arms into things because you didn’t realize your arm was about to come into contact with something. (This is one of the reasons I highly suggest against stopping stimming. Though it looks purposeless to you, I promise, it has meaning to us).
What can help? Compression clothing is a nice option because it provides constant proprioceptive input. Puffy/spiky chair cushions are quite handy when sitting. Something to carry in the hands provides pressure and thus input (you notice that common trend of wanting an item in both hands? This is part of where it stems from). Stretching the muscles often can provide a bit of an ache which can be rather helpful.
Can anyone relate? Or totally disagree? Have any suggestions on how you get proprioceptive input?
Autistic individals are inherently good learners. When something interests them, they can memorize the information and parrot it back without a modicum of difficulty. So why do so many do so poorly in school?
There are two main culprits: lack of motivation and poor learning environments. And although lack of motivation is important, it is also rather complex and difficult to address in 1000 words or less. So I’ll get back to that thought in a later post. No, what I want to talk about now is the poor learning environment ASD kids find themselves immersed in, aka ‘the classroom’.
At first glance, the classroom doesn’t seem like a particularly problematic environment. The rules are relatively simple: you sit in your seat, listen to the teacher and take notes, raise your hand to ask and answer questions, and then grab your books and move on to the next class. If everyone else can do this effortlessly, why is it next to impossible for the ASD child?
These are just a few of the issues that the ASD student faces in an average day in the classroom. If you had all these challenges to overcome just to make it through each day, how well do you think you would be performing in school?
Sex Ed: Theory Vs. Practice
At our school, sex ed. was offered in 6th, 9th, and 11th grade. Here’s a look at what the educational plan was vs. what we actually got.
6th Grade
Theory: For two days, separate the kids by sex. Have two female teachers meet with the girls and two male teachers with the boys. Let the kids ask questions such as “where do babies come from?” and “what is sperm made of?” Because everyone is equally naive, there will be no laughing at the students who ask obvious questions.
Practice: All boys (50) were herded into a classroom with two male teachers, one aged 45 and one aged 75. The floor was opened for student questions. For the first 20 minutes no one spoke. Then the 45-year old offered smarties to the first person to ask a question. For the next 10 minutes, the popular boys took turns asking questions in an attempt to gross out the teacher. Questions like, “Can a dog knock up a woman? Can a man knock up a dog? Can a dog knock up a cat to make cat dog? Do people eat their own sperm? Could you survive on an island with only your own semen?” etc. The question period was eventually closed when the teachers realized there were going to be no real questions. The second day for this activity was cancelled.
9th Grade
Theory: All students will be required to take a semester of personal health. They will learn about the various STD’s, how they are contracted, where they can get tested, and how to avoid them. They will be taught how to put on and take condoms off of a zucchini, and will watch the Miracle of Life at least twice.
Practice: All students took health, but since it was pass/fail they only needed to show up often enough to not flunk. Our entire sex ed. unit was 4 sentences: AIDS is a deadly disease. If you have sex without a condom, you will get AIDS and die, and no one will come to your funeral. (Teacher proceeds to put condom over entire head/face). Never let any guy tell you he’s too big for a condom. Note condoms also protect against pregnancy, so wear them to avoid AIDS and getting a girl knocked up.
11th Grade
Theory: Students would be educated on the nature of marraige and family life. They will learn basic child care including first aid and CPR. They will be taught an approved curriculum on sexual assualt and preventing pregnancy. They will learn the fundamentals of maintaining healthy sex lives, debate the use of sexual enhancement pills in the older generations, and get a third review of the STDs and how to avoid them.
Practice: Three times a week for half a semester, we all watched “Friends”, the television show. Near the end of the semester, most of us went to go see “Rent” for extra credit.
Sometimes, simply knowing your child is taking a sex ed. course in school is insufficient As well planned as they might be, many do not reach par. Request to see the teacher’s syllabus and feel free to email them with your concerns. Or teach sex ed. at home (though note students will be more likely to accept a teacher’s opinion then yours).
In honor of Autism awareness month:
Ideas for raising Autism Awareness in Schools
What else do you do to raise autism awareness in your school district?
Today, April 2nd, is apparently World Autism Awareness Day, which is a part of Autism Awareness Month. Other than hang up fliers and wear the T-shirt, you might be looking for somethings you could do to raise autism awareness/understanding/tolerance.
Ideas for Groups (what our AOC is doing):
Things You Can Do on Your Own
What are you doing to raise autism awareness/understanding/tolerance?
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