In the last post, the discussion turned to how to educate kids on the spectrum. I thought I would add some links to things that I've read recently and start a new post on the topic.
First, some distantly related links:
- I often read Penelope Trunk's blog, because she's a female, business blogger – not a lot
of them. And she also mixes in some incredibly personal posts in with
her business advice. She writes about being abused by her parents and
her past abortions. It's fascinating and embarrassing all at the same
time. Last week, she wrote about how she has Asperger's Syndrome, which
probably explains the oversharing on her blog.
- When he's not flipflopping on the issue of whether autism is environmental or genetic, Simon Baron-Cohen has been fighting against the use of a pre-natal test for autism. He believes that the gene for autism is located in the same area as other genes for mathematical and musical talents.
-
"The genes for autism may be linked to the genes for talent (and by
talent I don’t just mean the musically or artistically or
mathematically gifted, but even in those with apparent learning
difficulties there may be an excellent memory, or excellent attention
to detail and patterns, or an excellent ability to focus attention for
long periods, or acute sensory hyper-sensitivity), such that
eradicating the genes for autism may also eradicate the genes for these
talents."
Kids with high functioning autism or Aspergers or whatever you want to call it are both gifted and disabled at the same time. They are very good at some things and very bad at other things. They are very good at finding patterns, concentrating on things they like, and attention to detail. They are bad at following along with a group, dealing with distractions, understanding language, and dealing with the unexpected.
Since I hate people who turn special needs kids into two dimensional robots, it is also important to say that these are generalizations. Special needs kids are just as unique as any other kid. I've never met a kid with autism who was a clone of another kid with autism. They're all different, and they aren't broken.
The question is how much do we celebrate their gifts and how much do we work on their deficits? Do we create environments that are tailored to their sensitivities or do we toss them in the deep end and make them swim?
I believe that we can't protect the kids too much from a noisy classroom and the tough "why" questions. They have to try to improve on their weaknesses. And we can't let society isolate those kids in the corner. At the same, we have to recognize their talents and foster them, so they can be employed at Microsoft along with all the other autistic people. They'll make more money than the regular kids, so don't fear. They just need to be nudged along and guided as much as possible.
The key is really smart teachers. Get your kid in a program that has people who know what they are doing. If it's not near you, then figure it out. Move if you can.
And please stop reading the literature on gifted education. These kids are entirely different, and I find that literature so elitist and irritating. Don't send me links to that garbage anymore!
Apt. 11d 
Have you read Different Minds, by Deirdre Lovecky? It’s about kids who are gifted and disabled (she seems to focus mostly on AS and ADHD).
She’s also the person who evaluated my son, fwiw, so please don’t say things like “OMG, I would never let someone like her near my son!” as it would just make me anxious. 🙂
I’ve been toying around this morning with the idea of sending him to a private school, but honestly, I am too lazy to drive the half-hour to the nearest school. This is what happens when you move across the street from the elementary school–you get lazy.
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“And please stop reading the literature on gifted education. These kids are entirely different, and I find that literature so elitist and irritating. Don’t send me links to that garbage anymore!”
Is that for me? I’m the only one who has mentioned books on dealing with gifted children.
As you say, children are very diverse. Thinking about how to effectively meet different children’s individual educational needs is hard, but important and worthwhile. I don’t necessarily like the gifted terminology, but I think that kids belong in appropriate classroom settings. If a child knows the material cold, they don’t belong there.
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Sorry, Amy, not for you in particular. I haven’t read Lovecky, so I can’t say. But just the title turns me off. I think that kids are more alike than they are different. Even the kids who know the material cold. For whatever reason, sorting people into various groups based on how their brain works makes me very uncomfortable.
My kid was reading two grades ahead when he was three. He’s not as advanced anymore. And he doesn’t have the verbal skills to answer complicated questions about the text, so who cares? As parents we also have to care about more than getting As in the classes. They need to be nice people who play well with others. That’s more important to their future happiness than how they do on tests.
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Sorting people may be discomfiting, but when it comes to teaching, we do realize that our kids (and our students) absorb info in different ways. Tutoring made me realize that most of all (I don’t think anyone should be an English teacher until they do serious time tutoring many students one-on-one.) (OK, not feasible, but it’s truly one of the best ways to learn about teaching writing EVER.)
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Sure, people have different learning styles and there’s nothing worrying about the fact that one person is a visual learner and another is a auditory learner. But these people-sorting books are scarier. These authors go beyond the different learning styles argument to claim that these are kids are entirely different from other kids. The conclusions are either that A) these kids are too special/superior to be around other kids and to be even properly understood by regular adults or B) these kids are truly freaks and we should ogle them, but not get too close.
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“As parents we also have to care about more than getting As in the classes. They need to be nice people who play well with others. That’s more important to their future happiness than how they do on tests.”
But social and academic milieu are intricately connected. Remember what jen said about the joy of entering into a tracked junior high? I felt very similarly about starting high school. Suddenly, I was in the right level for almost everything. It felt great to suddenly have peers and to be studying interesting stuff. It was like being Goldilocks finding the stuff at the bears’ cottage that was the right size for her. Likewise, My husband owed much of his social development and his happiness as a kid to his gifted pull-out program and science and math competitions.
To put this in warm, cuddly eduspeak, the goal is to put the child in his zone of proximal development as much as possible throughout the day, to provide both security and challenge at the same time.
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“A) these kids are too special/superior to be around other kids and to be even properly understood by regular adults or B) these kids are truly freaks and we should ogle them, but not get too close.”
I think this (I agree) weird attitude comes from parents recoiling from the one-size-fits-all system and trying to find something better for their kids. If all kids were tested periodically and assigned to ZPD-appropriate groups for academic subjects, giftedness wouldn’t need to be an all-or-nothing deal. Instead of “Suzie is gifted!” her mom could say something like, “Suzie is at grade level for math, she’s four grade levels ahead for reading, and she’s two grade levels ahead for science. We’re taking her out of reading this year so she can have an extra 45 minutes of cello practice at school.” Or something like that.
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“And please stop reading the literature on gifted education. These kids are entirely different, and I find that literature so elitist and irritating. Don’t send me links to that garbage anymore!”
Wait, why? are we mixing threads again? I have a complicated relationship with the literature on “gifted” education. But, I do think that children learn differently, and that the learning patterns of children who are achieving at a high level are worth thinking about too, as we think about how to teach and learn. Mind you, part of my fascination with all of this is that I am deeply interesting in how learning occurs and all the different forms of it are interesting to me.
Baron-Cohen is an interesting scientist. His scientific method sometimes makes me uncomfortable (he’s less rigorous than I’d like). I also find his “masculinization” theory of autism (i.e. people with autism have extreme male cognitive styles) uncovincing, and somewhat annoying (But, Baron-Cohen switches theories a fair amount). On the other hand, I like that he tries to communicate to non-scientists. Another researcher, whose work is also interesting, is Laurent Mottron. Mottron’s work (along with many others) talks about autism as a processing disorder rather than a social disorder, and I find that line of research intriguing. It’s particularly interesting to read “Emergence” and see how similar Grandin’s personal theory (based on her anecdotal sample of one) fits with the processing disorder theory that’s gained a bit more prominence recently, even though it pre-dates it by a couple of decades. I have a purely academic interest, but I also think the information is important as we think about how to teach people with autism/aspergers, both to learn academic material and living skills.
I agree with Baron-Cohen that spectrum of autism behaviors may be closely linked with traits that humanity would suffer from eliminating (a singular and circumscribed interest in math, for example). But I think we run that risk with all heritable traits (which excludes Downs, which is not inherited, but might include depression, schizophrenia, or even diabetes) that we don’t understand completely (or at all, really).
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Along the lines of thinking that the genes that produce autism might produce some other, more desireable behaviors, and to add some food for thought for Wendy, my kids’ school is filled with traits we call “quirky.” I don’t know of any diagnoses, but, especially among the boys, a singular circumscribed interest in something (owls, dinosaurs, star wars paraphernalia, number patterns, cameras, iphones, space, copyright law) is not at all uncommon. In general, these “circumscribed interests” is tolerated (even by the other children), sometimes encouraged (all the kids like to hear about interesting things, and so, a long as you find out something new about space, they’ll listen to you), as well as being occasionally discouraged (when it pervades every activity).
Mind you, not all of the boys are like that, but some certainly are, and they are often the ones who felt out of place in other schools, who their parents felt they needed to move. The kids have to function at a high academic level, in order to be in the school, so if their quirks/diagnoses interfere with that, it’s not an option. But, if they can perform academically, the school does seem to help with some of their social needs,in a way that their other schools did not.
My guess is some of the boys are just quirky, and don’t pass the diagnosis threshold, but that others actually do have diagnoses, that I am not privy to.
(Oh, and, I can’t tell with the girls. No surprising, since the Asperger’s gender ratio is as high as 4:1).
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bj,
I remember reading recently that depressive people are somehow especially clear-sighted and are more objective in certain contexts than non-depressives.
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I had “Different Minds” then returned it to the library, and now I have a copy on order. But I seem to remember that Lovecky said circumscribed interests are also characteristic of gifted children as well.
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I dunno, all I can take out of this discussion is that teaching is more art than science. And any time a job is more art than science the key to everything is good staffing — this is true in any industry. Find a really good teacher and keep the student/teacher ratio down, and all is well. Or is that a cop-out?
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“I remember reading recently that depressive people are somehow especially clear-sighted and are more objective in certain contexts than non-depressives. ”
The most recent place I’ve seen something like that is in Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling On Happiness, where he says depressed subjects have a more accurate view of their ability to control events than the non-depressed.
But, when I mentioned the genetics of depression, I was thinking of the pop-psych link between depression and creativity (i.e. writers who commit suicide).
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“But, when I mentioned the genetics of depression, I was thinking of the pop-psych link between depression and creativity (i.e. writers who commit suicide).”
Aha. One also hears stories of artistic types going on anti-depressants and losing their creativity. And of course, there is an up side to being bipolar.
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“Find a really good teacher and keep the student/teacher ratio down, and all is well. Or is that a cop-out? ”
Well, it’s not, when we’re thinking about educating our own children. That’s what we’ve opted for, and as far as I’m concerned, I just happened to have found it in a school that is targeted to “highly-capable” kids. As good teachers & small classes were a given, though, I suspect I’d be happy with many different teaching ideologies. Ours is “inquiry” based, and it appeals to me, but I’m pretty sure that lots of other things would be fine, too, not the least because I think good teachers temper the edges of any ideology to fit the child and classroom they’re working with.
It is a cop out, though, when we’re talking about educating all the children, the political dimensions of the discussion, because we have to make decisions about what we’re going to pay for. Further, in making policy, we’re charged with considering everyone (and not just the needs of our own child).
And then, there’s the undeniable fact that having “great staffing & small class size” doesn’t seem to scale up very well as a nationwide objective. I still think the only problem is money, and that it’s worth our while to throw a lot more money at the problem to get those two things. We don’t seem to have the political will/desire to try that, though. So, we talk about how to get good education without the thing we *know* works (great teachers).
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I just got an e-mail from my son’s teacher letting me know how his first day went. I can’t get that info out of him (except for the lunch thing), so her e-mail was greatly appreciated.
Btw, under NCLB standards, our school did not make “Adequate Yearly Progress” and has been designated as “Improving” or whatever that label is and parents may now officially choose to send their kids to the other K-5 school. If you ask me, this just shows how bogus NCLB is.
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My discomfort with sorting people according to their types of thinking is mostly political. I just worry that this leads to the de-humanization of some kids.
But that said, people on the spectrum do process information differently. I like Temple Grandin’s discussion of the different types of autism: visual thinkers, math/music thinkers, and verbal logic thinkers. Ian is a visual thinker, though he has elements of the other types of thinking. He’s a whizz at Lego. The other kids in his mainstream class gather around him to watch him make things out of Lego. He can take things apart with a screwdriver and then put them back together again. He’s great at maps and directions. He’s freaky good at finding the thing that is different in a picture. He is amazing at the computer. If he can get over the things that hold him back, he’ll be able to build computers or repair cars in the future.
bj writes: “As good teachers & small classes were a given, though, I suspect I’d be happy with many different teaching ideologies. Ours is “inquiry” based, and it appeals to me, but I’m pretty sure that lots of other things would be fine, too, not the least because I think good teachers temper the edges of any ideology to fit the child and classroom they’re working with.” That’s basically my philosophy about curriculum and pedagogy, as well.
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Wendy, Our first elementary school was designated
“improving” because specific groups of kids in the school were not making adequate yearly progress. Given the fact that NCLB was touted in part as a method for forcing schools to educate all kids, and to close the education gap between racial groups, I don’t think the school labels are out of place. Just because that school did a great job meeting my kids’ educational needs, doesn’t mean it was doing a good job meeting other kids’ needs.
Now, that does beg the question of where those kids’ educational needs should be met first, and it does beg the question of which parents take advantage of the “improving” designation to school-shop within the district. But I try to be alert to the reality that my school district, which does such a fantastic job educating white middle/upper-middle-class kids, seems to fall flat on its face when it comes to black/latino kids.
I loathe NCLB, but damnit, our school district has to be held accountable at SOME point.
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Just to be clear, we were re-districted to a new school; we didn’t choose to leave the old one.
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Jody, we don’t have any racial diversity, so race isn’t an issue. And we’re a pretty well-off town. We do have a lot of middle-middle-class (as opposed to upper middle class) kids.
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This is why I don’t think it’s a good idea to load up NCLB with other provisions. If NCLB does just one thing (spotlight demographics that are not being well served and light a fire under their schools) that’s more than enough for a single piece of legislation. The more we expect NCLB to do beyond that, the less likely it will be able to perform the original function.
I was just looking at my old elementary school’s WASL pass rates on greatschools.net. The numbers may be too small for comparison, but I was very interested to see that in 3rd grade, American Indians have almost exactly the same test scores as whites on the reading test (55/56%). There aren’t any scores given for American Indians in 4th grade, but once you get to 5th grade, a huge gap has suddenly appeared. There’s a 30 percent difference in the reading scores, a 40 percent difference in science, and a nearly 30 percent difference in math. The pass rate for 5th grade American Indians in science is 7%. American Indians are 15% of the student body.
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It’s hard for my family to decide what to focus on most with my son who has Asperger’s- the things he’s interested in or the things that are important to us based on our own experience of the world. Relationships with other people are, to me, one of the things that makes us human; I can’t understand living without them. But my son truly doesn’t care about them. His relationships are all decided rationally and transactionally. While he is loyal to his family, I honestly can’t say whether he loves any of us.
So I wonder if there’s any point in pushing him to socialize or develop friendships. We coach him so he’s able to behave appropriately in public; he mostly can maintain himself in the classroom even though the noise and crowding drives him nuts. But the less he’s forced to be around other people, the happier and better able he is to accomplish his own goals and complete his own projects. And the more time and emotional energy his father and I have to support him in the things he really wants to do.
A “normal” amount of engagement with the outside world leaves him chronically overstimulated. “Protecting” him gives him the ability to use the gifts he has. Who am I to say that his choice to be asocial is not a legitimate one?
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How old is he, Sarah? Do you think he will be able to get a job without those skills?
While I share laura’s concern that my autistic daughter learns to form relationships and interact positively with other people, I also have some reservations about how the rise of group work and so on have tended to institutionalize peer relationships as a key element of academic success.
Also, my kid is starting to seem more Aspergery and obsessed with geek science subjects, but every autistic and Asperger’s kid doesn’t necessarily have the academic talents to be in a gifted classroom or school.
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As some people like to say, practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect. I’m not a musician, but I’ve heard that they need to focus on getting their pieces exactly right before embarking on marathon practice sessions. I’ve heard language teachers talk about “Terminal 2s”–language learners whose mistakes get fossilized with repetition and who never move beyond fluent ungrammatical speech to the next level (the fluent, grammatical speech of an educated speaker). Likewise, with regard to social interactions for Aspergerish people, I think that quality can be (at least initially) more important than quantity.
For you teachers out there, it just occurred to me that pair work might be an effective compromise replacement for group work. I’ve heard that Aspies are often successful in one-on-one social situations, but find larger group interactions confusing.
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“A “normal” amount of engagement with the outside world leaves him chronically overstimulated. “Protecting” him gives him the ability to use the gifts he has. Who am I to say that his choice to be asocial is not a legitimate one? ”
I think this is a question on which hearing the input of adults with autism/Aspergers who function in society is extremely valuable. I’ve become a Grandin groupie, and I think it’s a little bit dangerous, because it may allow me to over-generalize her experience. But, one of the thinks she says is that developing her talents has been the key to her happiness (enough so that one of her books is on developing talents with an eye towards careers for people with autism). The talents don’t have to come in geek form, and may not help you become Bill Gates, but developing an ability that gives you something to offer society than gives people a reason to give you the accommodations you need. This “transactional” interchange is true for everyone, of course, but for someone with greater needs, developing talents might be more of a market need.
I know I’m making a utilitarian argument here, where people are valued by “what can you offer me.” I don’t necessarily think that’s the moral solution to dealing with people with needs. But, if you can figure out a way of being utility, the equation sure will be easier. Mind you, I think this interaction applies to neurotypical children, too. It’s why parents go so far (and sometimes too far?) in trying to develop their children’s talents, because we want them to be valued by society.
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sorry for the garbled grammar.
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bj,
I just remembered something that may be of use to you. Do you know about UW’s Robinson Center? They do a lot of different things, including early entrance prep and some summer classes for kids as young as 5th grade.
http://depts.washington.edu/cscy/
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