Wake County Workshop - Autism

After the ACSI convention, I realized how helpful it can be to take notes on the blog.  I can find it when I need it, but I can also share it with you all.  I am sitting in a workshop offered by Wake County Public Schools on High Functioning Autism.

Must have impairment that interferes with life in at least three of these:
- Communication
- Social Interaction
- Sensory Response
- Restricted, repetitive, or stereotypic patterns of behavior interests and/or activities.

The Iceberg Effect - You can only see the behavior "above the surface," but there may be a lot more going on underneath that contributes to that behavior.

Cognition
You may see that a student:
- takes everything literally
- struggles with abstract thinking
- can't seem to keep up
- is difficult to motivate
- doesn't understand another person's point of view
- struggles with change in routine
But you may not know the reason you see it is:
- disorganized thinking skills
- dependence on routines for understanding expectations
- need for visual information in order to process
You should try:
- organizing tasks for the student, so they can think about tasks rather than organization
- provide visual cues
- provide demonstrations
- display materials in the order they will be used
- use checklists
- decrease writing demands where possible

Social Interaction with Peers
You may see that a student:

- butts into conversations

- talks during instruction

- shows little empathy

- won't participate

But you may not know the reason you see it is:

- confusion when more than two people are present

- confusion caused by unpredictability

- misinterprets mannerisms, facial expressions, or comments

- doesn't get metaphors

You should try:

- teaching coping strategies

- provide a safe place to get away

- structure as many social interactions as possible.

Language and Communication

You may see that a student:

- always wants to talk on is agenda

- talks without directing comments to anyone in particular

- can remember isolated details without the ability to identify relevance

- doesn't establish eye contact

But you may not know the reason you see it is:

- difficulty processing verbal information

- don't know what is important to focus on

You should try:

- Chunk directions

- Get attention before giving directions

- label things for them

Sensory Input

You may see that a student:

- twiddling

- no sense of personal space

- inspects things

But you may not know the reason you see it is:

- immature neurological system

- heightened senses or dulled senses

- perceives sensory input differently

You should try:

- schedule times for input

- provide a place for minimized input

- cover sections of reading with numbered sticky notes so that they can read in proper sequence without being overwhelmed

Use a First --> Then --> Next chart to give instructions.

Older students can use a flow chart for more complex instructions.

Color coded folders for each step can help them know what comes next.

Answer four questions ahead of work:

1.  What work?

2.  How much work?

3.  When is it finished?

4.  What happens next?

Talking to them will not calm them down.  Visual cues are more helpful.  

Book The Incredible Five Point Scale shows ways to allow students to take ownership of how to identify their feelings and then deal with them.  Teach it in isolation.  Then use it in the classroom. 

Comic Conversations allows students to draw themselves telling a story of how they feel.

Break tasks down into smaller steps.  If you know the student gets anxious about, break that part down even more.  

Provide prompts using

- verbal

- physical

- physical assistance

- modeling

- gesturing

- using an object to get attention

Work Worth Doing

Teddy Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States, was known for doing hard work to overcome great obstacles.  He was born rather sickly, battling asthma by adopting a "strenuous lifestyle."  He attended Harvard, wrote books, served as the Secretary of the Navy, fought in the War in Cuba, became governor of New York, and became President in the Wake of the assassination of President McKinley.  He busted monopolies, established the National Parks system, built the Panama Canal, and won the Nobel Peace Prize.  This was an accomplished man who knew the value of hard work.

In a campaign speech to the farmers of upstate New York, another group of people who knew the value of hard work, Roosevelt said, "Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing."  He believed that work was the thing that gave life meaning.  It was how you rebounded from the difficulties of life; it was good for the spirit.  When his wife died, he threw himself into his work.  In that same speech to the farmers of New York, he said, "There is no room in our healthy American life for the mere idler."

When I was a kid, I was a little afraid of growing up.  It seemed like every adult I knew hated their job.  At least, they talked about it like they did.  When I was a teenager, I did a little survey as my fellow choir members arrived at church.  I asked each of them about their job.  I got a wide range of sighs and groans until Ron Butler came in.  When I asked him about his job, he grinned and talked about living with "spizerinctum," a word he made up for how energized he felt by his work.  It was greatly encouraging to hear an adult talk with such joy about the work he was doing, and it was clear that he loved it because he believed it mattered.  

I don't know if the work I do would be deemed working hard by President Roosevelt.  After all, I am not working a plow or building a building.  I do like to think, however, that he would consider it work worth doing.  Teaching is not simply the delivery of information from 8 to 3 as many believe.  It is teaching students to think, to evaluate, to analyze, and to create new work.  It is showing them good citizenship, good relationships with other teachers, and good submission to authority (even with rules you don't like).  It is putting your own character up as a model every minute of every day.  A former principal used to say that we should be so sure of the steps we take that we have no problem with the idea that our students will put their feet in the same steps.  Imagine that is your job every day, and you know why teachers need summer.

Adam and Eve were put into the Garden of Eden to work.  That was before the fall.  After the fall, work became difficult; but they didn't sit around doing nothing before the fall.  Work is an important part of human nature when it is productive.  When it is not productive, it is punitive.  Tedious work (like digging a hole one day just to fill it the next) has been used as a form of torture for centuries.  The psychology of the human mind is such that we must believe work is worth doing in order to work hard at it.  That's why you hear kids complain about "busy work" and why you get a lot more out of them if you tell them why they are doing it.  I am sitting here writing this on a teacher work day.  I have graded, worked on curriculum, uploaded photos to Jostens, dealt with e-mails, and written this blog.  I am not drained and exhausted because I feel this is valuable work - work worth doing.  When my students come in next Monday, I will be ready to do more work.  Am I tired at the end of the day?  You bet.  But it is a very different kind of tired than that experienced by those who view their job as drudgery.  

Social psychologist Matt Wallaert set out to explore why so many are unemployed when jobs are available.  He found that many are not finding jobs that live up to their own expectations of what they thought they would make after college.  Not realizing the value of paying their dues and comparing themselves only to their expectations, they simply opt out of the job market because it makes them feel as if they haven't really lost anything - read this article to make sense of that line.  They are also being diagnosed with depression at massive rates because they are not getting the feeling of meaning that comes from doing work worth doing.  

It has been over 100 years since President Roosevelt commended those farmers for their work, and I fear that the world they built has made us soft, made us fear difficult work, and made us believe that life owes us comfort for no other reason than that fact that we were born.  The students I teach are wonderful, but it is difficult to battle this cultural idea that we might be rich and famous without doing anything.  Commercials tell us what we deserve (money for a car accident, phone plans, tires, and contact lenses).   What have we done to earn those things?  Being alive.  If I believe pop culture, the simple act of being born has apparently endowed me with the right to stuff, to happiness, and to not ever feeling shamed or offended.  This isn't the way God made us.God made us to work.  Work, like all things, was distorted by the fall.  Work became more difficult with less result.  Work became tedious.  Work did not stop being important.  It has continued to be part of the human experience.  To quote Leslie Knope at the end of the series finale of Parks and Recreation, "Go find your team, and get to work."

The Week of Too Much

We've all had the week of too much.  We have too much to do and not enough time.  We have to much stress and not enough sleep.  We do a lot of complaining about the week of too much, but we get through it.  We don't die.  The world doesn't stop spinning on its axis, and we realize that we are not as weak as we thought.  That lesson then must be learned again by having another week of too much.

The week before Thanksgiving break is often the week of too much for our students at GRACE.  No teacher wants to ask them to hold information in their heads while their brains turn to mashed potatoes and they slip into a tryptophan coma, so we mostly plan their tests during the week before Thanksgiving.  They worry and complain.  They stress themselves, their teachers, and their parents out.  They feel like they are going to die.   But you know what?  They don't.

Just like we don't die when we have a week of too much, middle and high school students also don't die.  They come out on the other end, realizing that they are stronger than they thought they were.  This is a valuable and important lesson, and it would be wrong for us to rob them of it by giving them what they say they want.  It is important to go through stressful times because they train us for more stressful times down the road.

Last week, my students got to hear a veteran from Iwo Jima speak the day before Veteran's Day.  One of the things he said that stuck out to me was about a time near the end of his training.  He was dropped at an unknown location and given the address of a different location.  He had to get there.  They provided no help and no rescue.  This probably sounded mean to the students who were listening, but I thought about how prepared he was for the same scenario should he encounter it in Japan.  It seems mean that me give our students a lot of tests / projects in one week, but the reality is that they will be better prepared for those times inevitable to adulthood than they would be if we didn't.

No one likes to see their kids stressed, but a certain amount of stress is needed.  It is needed to prepare their brains, their stamina, and their energies for the future.  Chronic stress is bad, but brief periods of acute stress are actually necessary for building strength.  Support your students through the week of too much.  Listen to their complaints and empathize with them; but do not take away the valuable stress they are experiencing.  If you do, they will fail during their adult weeks of too much.

Find a Real Problem

Normally, this blog is about education or at least the philosophy behind my teaching.  Occasionally, however, I find it useful to use this blog to respond to a current issue.  This one has been on my mind since last year.

It's November, and soon the holidays will be upon us.  They will include heavy meals, decorated malls, shopping for gifts, and animated specials.  It is also time for Christians to write Facebook posts about the most trivial issues ever.  About this time every year, several of my Facebook friends proudly announce that they will not shop at any store where the clerk has told them "Happy Holidays."  Setting aside that there are, in fact, multiple holidays that Christian celebrate within a few weeks of each other, let's address the fact that these people act as if they should get some sort of medal for their own pride.  That poor, exhausted store clerk makes about $9 an hour trying to serve as many kinds of people as possible.  She works in retail, serving a public that is increasingly entitled, impatient, and prone to offense at the drop of a hat.  She makes the effort to wish you well, but because she didn't use your preferred method of well wishing, you lash out with your angry, "It's Merry Christmas, and I won't shop in any store that doesn't exclusively say that."  Is it any wonder why the world believes we are mean.  What a witness our snappy comeback must have been to that store clerk.

Last year, I watched as 172 people argued on social media about whether a PASTOR'S Christmas greeting was heretical or Biblical because he said X-mas.  Some took the stance that he was destroying the place of Jesus while others argued that the X was the Greek letter Chi and, therefore, stood for Jesus.  The reality was that on Twitter, he only got 140 characters and was trying to save 5 of them by using the X.  Is this really something to spend our time on?

This year, we have a brand new issue for the self righteous to get bothered about.  It is about the red cup at Starbucks.  I mean, last year it had snowflakes on it, and snowflakes are clearly more Christian than solid red.  We must use our social media power to complain about this travesty.  Red cups are a the true sign that Starbucks is anti-Christian.  Never mind that Starbucks has been donating to Planned Parenthood for years and supports gay marriage, we will not drink from a red cup at Christmas time.

Do we really think these are the problems of the world that need a response?  Right now, in the world, there are 29.8 million victims of human trafficking.  There are 795 million people who will go to sleep hungry tonight and 783 million who don't have access to clean water.  There are countries of our world in which girls are executed in the street because they committed the crime of going to school and others where girls are simply left to die because they they committed the crime of not being boys.  ISIS has behead over 300 people in the past two years, and thousands of Christians are killed for their faith every year (although there is wide debate over the exact number).  American Christians have opted to turn their backs on all these issues.  No, we must take a stand on the red cup.  We must refuse the well wishes of those who disagree with us.

Starting tomorrow, when I go to the store, I will gratefully accept the well wishes of anyone.  Whether they wish me Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Seasons Greetings, Happy Hanukkah, or simply Have a nice day, I will return their good wishes.  I will also set aside five dollars.  In January, whatever amount I have accumulated will be donated to an organization that helps the truly persecuted around the world.  I am currently researching exactly which organization is best, but the ones I have found so far are: Voice of the Martyrs, Open Doors, The Persecution Project Foundation, Barnabas Aid, and RescueChristians.org.  Each of these ministries support those Christians for whom responding to persecution doesn't mean whining about the cup holding our four dollar latte or treating service personnel disrespectfully.

It's All Related

My favorite middle school history teacher, Danny Watkins, used to say, "You thought we were off the subject, but we've never been more on the subject in our - what - lives.  Everything relates to history."  Aside from just loving to hear him talk like that, I'm not sure I truly understood what he meant until much later in my life.

Like most middle school students, I did not yet have the ability to see the intertwined relationships of all the subjects I had at school.  Your life exists in 50 minute segments at that point, and it is hard to see past that.  It seemed like math was math and science was science and history was history.  It was probably when I started taking chemistry in high school that I started seeing the relationships between science and math.  When I was in college, taking the required humanities courses, I began to see the connection  between art and literature and history (which I now realize is the reason they require these courses).

It wasn't until I began teaching, however, that I realized how related all the subjects are to each other and to truly understand Mr. Watkins assertion that "everything relates to history."  This week, I took my physics students (in conjunction with the math club and an art class) on a field trip to the art museum.  Why? Because they have an exhibit on MC Escher and one on Leonardo DaVinci.  If not for space restrictions on the numbers, we could have totally included Latin and history classes on this trip.  Art reflects the thinking of the artist, and Escher's schooling (small though it was) was in architecture.  Is it any surprise that his art work often involved impossible structures, building architects could dream of but not build?  DaVinci is often referred to as a Renaissance man, meaning he was good at a lot of things.  While we are not all as gifted as Leonardo, shouldn't we all be Renaissance in our thinking?  Shouldn't we be interested in a lot of things?  If we were, wouldn't we all be able to better view the created world as a whole, instead of the specialized niches we operate in these days?


Why does it matter?  You may be wondering.  Seeing the relationships won't change the price of milk or change my gas mileage.  Why should I care enough to see the world as a whole when doing so does little to affect my daily life?  I think there are at least two good reasons.

First, it applies more to your daily life than you probably realize.  When I am teaching about physics, I may not consciously be thinking about art work of Isaac Newton's time or the fact that the periodic table was invented in Russia around the same time that the civil war was happening in America.  However, it is in my subconscious.  It does inform the depth of my understanding of what I am looking at.  You may not think consciously about whether the Mayans or the Babylonians came up with the concept of zero when looking at your bank statement, but their understanding of the concept IS why you have a bank statement.  A Facebook friend of mine recently posted that he had not diagramed a sentence in his adult life.  Neither have I, but I do know when to properly use who and whom (and I'm pretty sure that my understanding of that came from sentence diagraming even though I HATED doing it).  I know I'm not going to convince you of this, so let me move on to reason number two.

Second, and more importantly, God's work reflects God's nature.  If he has created both beauty and function, we should care about both art and engineering.  If His patience is reflected by the erosion of the Grand Canyon, we should absolutely want to understand that erosion.  If his dependability is reflected through the consistency of mathematical relationships, then we cannot fully understand how to depend on him without caring about those relationships.  Having a deep and full relationship with God should mean caring about the things He has made, whether or not they apply to our career.  When did our career become the measure of importance?  You would never say to your spouse that you don't care what he does during the day, except for the parts that impact what you do during the day.  You would never ignore your child's drawing because it has nothing to do with the price of groceries.  No, you hang it on the very refrigerator that holds those groceries.  Why, then, do we do that to so many aspects of God's work?  We have allowed ourselves to be deceived into believing that education is about getting a job and being prepared for that job.  I may have to write a separate post on this some time because it is difficult to convey briefly.  Education is about repairing something that was fractured by the fall.  It's nice that we are able to use some of what we learn in our education for our jobs, but we must let go of the utilitarian philosophy that makes us think that is all we need to learn.  I teach physics, but I would be the world's most horrifyingly dull person if that was all I could talk about.  I also love art and literature and music and television and film and dance and theater and theology and the unit circle.  I can hold a conversation on just about anything because I am interested in everything God has put for us to enjoy.  It is part of being what He created me to be as a WHOLE PERSON, not just as a physics teacher.

Mr. Watkins was right (as he usually was).  It is all related.