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The Things I Saw As A Teacher: Rex
“Rex Doesn’t Do Any Work!”
Although I taught a mainstream classroom, I had quite a few diagnosed and undiagnosed special ed students thrown into the mix. One of my most memorable students was a third-grader I’ll call Rex, because he had an endearing love of dinosaurs.
My grade partners happened to have taught that class in first and second grade, so they went over my class list with me and gave me the scoop on my kids. “Oh, you have Rex,” they said. “He doesn’t do any work.” They went on to explain that there was something very off about Rex. ADHD, they wondered?
On the first day of school, my students said the same thing to me. “Rex did two assignments last year.” “Rex doesn’t do any work!” And I could see why! He spent all of his time fussing over his pencils, which seemed to break the second he tried to write with them. When I went over to talk to him, he was incredibly busy looking at the wall. So I said “Rex, please look at me.” He did his best, which meant looking in my general direction but off by a few inches. Ah, we were in familiar territory now.
Oh, This Looks Familiar
Over the next few months I found that Rex’s behaviors resembled Aspergers symptoms, but since none of the other teachers understood autism he’d gone all this time without getting any help. He had a tendency to invade others’ personal space during carpet time, so I gave everyone a clearly marked-off square to sit in. When my back was turned, he would pull out a dinosaur or animal book he’d been hoarding, so I got a giant animal encyclopedia and let him read it in a quiet spot when he finished his work. He had a tendency to cram everything into his desk and forget about it, so I had him clean his desk at regular intervals and sat him next to a little girl with an organizing compulsion. I also made him aware of our classroom’s visual schedule, which I caught him looking at every chance he got.
Other teachers told me how amazed they were at his growth in my classroom. Before he came to me, he was the kid who hid under the table and had daily meltdowns. Finally he was able to work on grade level and interact with his peers, even if he was still a bit awkward.
I noticed that Rex had a speech issue that no one had paid much attention to, and begged the speech teacher to see him because it was unfairly bringing down his reading levels. The tests prescribed by the district placed a strong emphasis on fluency, and Rex had a way of speaking that caused him to leave out or whisper certain words.
(After several months of getting stonewalled by the school, the parents finally got an outside diagnosis of Aspergers.)
Schools Should Work With Autism, Not Run From The Dollar Signs
We need more teachers with special needs, because sometimes it takes one to know one. All of this, the way Rex and I just got each other, was because of who I am. The school had special autism classes on the same floor, yet no one noticed Rex. They were content to let him slip through the cracks as just another weird kid who didn’t get it.
This is also why running schools should never be about the bottom line. I wasn’t allowed to talk to Rex’s parents (or anyone’s parents) about the possibility of testing or special needs, so we had to hide and speak in whispers. It was cheaper for the school to say these children were just incapable. What I did is something any parent would hope their child’s teacher would do for them, but should it have to involve putting my job on the line? And would a parent want a teacher not to do it because job security comes first? Think about it.
The Things I Saw As A Teacher – Part 1
I’d like to talk about my past life as a classroom teacher. Coming from the rare perspective of being on the spectrum and having been a teacher, I feel like I’ve gained a little insight that might be helpful to some.
Sometimes It’s Not The Teacher
At the beginning of each school year, do you take the time to meet your child’s teacher and discuss goals? Before you assume teachers know everything that should be happening and just aren’t implementing them, have a friendly talk with them. Schools never told me who had an IEP in my class, who got services, who was supposed to leave at any point in the day, nothing. They’d watch me request interventions and information for months before someone would casually point out that the student had an old IEP.
All you have to do is introduce yourself in a friendly way, ask if he or she is familiar with your child’s situation, and if you can sit down and talk about it sometime. It’s so much better than your first conversation being a disciplinary phone call home or worse yet the result of your frustration!
And Sometimes It Is The Teacher
I’m unfortunately not shocked at those videos that are popping up online of autistic students being hit by teachers and caretakers. It happens to so many of us, and it happened to me when I was young, though not at school. Often the abuser will lie about what they’re doing to justify their actions. I knew several teachers who were open about hitting students and they would tell me “Oh his mom told me I could, it’s okay.” No, I’m sure she didn’t and it’s NOT okay.
You’d think a school’s administration would be outraged by this, but the principals at these schools actually preferred the teachers who hit students. The teachers got special privileges and power because principals could send any child to that teacher for a beating.
When they’re not actually hitting the students, schools are still afraid to report abuse. A student confided in me that he was being beat at home, but the counselor put pressure on me not to report it to CPS because she didn’t want to deal with the parents.
It’s very important to have a system where your autistic child can communicate to you that someone is hurting them. That other person may try to convince them that you said it was okay, that they do it out of love or concern or to make them not an animal, or that to tell anyone else would be to betray their secret (all things said to me when I was a child). Often when a child tries to avoid a person or place, or experiences physical symptoms it can be their way of saying something they can never vocalize. They need to know that it’s not their fault, they don’t need to keep anyone’s secrets, and there is never anything in their life they did that made them so bad that the only love they deserve is pain.
Why Closed Captioning Isn’t Just for Deaf People
Thanks to the excellent advice of Codeman38, closed captioning is one of the best discoveries I’ve made this year. I didn’t even know until recently that you could get closed captioning on any TV show just by turning it on in your cable settings!
For a long time, we’ve been really frustrated by the ratio of how much we paid for cable vs. how little TV we watched. And then, oh my god, I discovered CC. I could finally read TV instead of watching it – what a revelation!
See, following a conversation is pretty complicated.
1. You have to be able to hear what’s going on.
2. There’s also the assumption that the language being spoken is one you understand.
3. There’s the question of whether you can parse the words correctly, or tell where they begin and end. And that has to happen in real time unless you want to be mentally playing back your “recordings” and missing new ones.
4. Do the utterances have meaning to you?
5. And can you remember everything you’ve just heard?
Yes? That’s great. But…can you do all that and fit it into a social and emotional context too?
When there’s a glitch at any point in this process, a person can have a really hard time following speech or conversations. In the end it has social ramifications and I’ve gotten used to looking kind of dumb in social situations because it’s not realistic to pause for as long as it takes to replay their utterances and then process them. Some days I’ll go with sweet but dumb, some days I’ll go with aloof. I can’t watch TV shows with a lot of speech and intense social situations, especially when they’re heavily dialogue-based. Too often the plot will hinge on an important line or joke that I’ll never fail to miss.
(This is not because I’m Asian! Too many people assume English is my second language so they’ll start gesturing wildly or not even talk to me, until I open my mouth and put them to shame.)
But now that I have closed captioning, a whole new world has been opened up to me! I read very quickly and process several words at once, so I don’t feel stupid anymore. I wish I had closed captioning for everything everyone said in real life; maybe I wouldn’t feel stupid everytime I had conversations with people.
The system isn’t perfect yet; often there’s a delay between the speech and the text, and sometimes the spelling is downright atrocious. I hope this will be changed someday soon, along with people’s negative stereotypes about closed captioning. Someone came over recently and asked mockingly if someone deaf lived here because of the captioning. I was so mortified that I could find no words to explain.
I’d highly recommend giving closed captioning a try – it’s much easier to set up on cable or Hulu than you’d think. And if you’re making a simple YouTube video, maybe you’ll consider adding captions because there are many people out there who need them badly.
Learning How to Show Support
My husband ran his first half-marathon yesterday, which kind of made me the family cheerleader. I don’t remember him asking me to do anything special for his race…he’s very low-key. So it’s a good thing I knew enough about running to make pasta the night before and scout out a few spots on the race course where I could stand and cheer him on.
What I didn’t want to do was screw up the way I did last year, when my friend ran the same race and I did absolutely nothing besides show up at the finish line. When I saw how far other runners’ supporters were going to encourage them, I realized just how much I could have done to show my friend that I cared. It would have been as simple as asking her or any other runner what people usually do.
It’s like that with so many little things. I’ll realize years later that I’ve missed an opportunity to be a good friend, while everyone else seemed to just get it.
Were they mind readers? What is it that people expect us to just know that they want? What does “showing support” for someone mean?
Once in a while I’ll experience something firsthand and finally understand what I haven’t been doing for other people. Or I’ll ask someone how something makes them feel to get more insight into what they’d like me to do about it. I know someone who used to ask that all the time – “How do you feel about that?” It baffled me until I realized that she didn’t want to make assumptions about how other people felt.
If I still don’t understand what they need from me, I might just ask what I can do to help. I find that even if I sound silly, it usually works out a whole lot better than the alternative, which is to not do anything at all.
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