Indulge your kid's passion, and build on their strengths

Consider this opening paragraph from the book Strengths Finder 2.0:

At its fundamentally flawed core, the aim of almost any learning program is to help us become who we are not. If you don't have natural talent with numbers, you're still forced to spend time in that area to attain a degree. If you're not very empathic, you get sent to a course designed to infuse empathy into your personality. From the cradle to the cubicle, we devote more time to our shortcomings than to our strengths.

Any autism parent - any parent, for that matter - will likely recognize that this is exactly what we tend to do with our autistic children. In fact, it is what is expected of us, to try to make our autistic children into someone they are not. But that doesn't mean that is what we should be doing.

The following originally appeared here in February 2006.

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Indulge your (kid's) obsession

I spent Saturday afternoon this weekend at a Yugi-oh regional tournament with my younger (non-autistic) son, who is 13. Though he was not the youngest duelist there, he was one of a handful of kids under 15 in a group of 80+ duelists. (In case you’re not familiar with Yugi-oh, participants are duelists, not ‘players.’) The ages ranged all the way up to 40+, with the bulk of them in their late teens through early twenties. All duelists were male, save one.

I have the feeling that if you were to observe many of these guys in a ‘normal’ environment – say your local high school – your first impression would be “outcast,” “nerd,” or something similar. They have long unkempt hair and a preference for black t-shirts. They keep to themselves, or a small group of like-minded friends. They are not the ‘social butterflies’ that seem to be demanded in that environment. In a word, they would appear to be “non-social” (ok, maybe that’s two words *-).

Put almost a hundred of them in a room together at a tournament where everyone is trying to prove they are the best duelist in town, though, and what you get is a room full of ‘social butterflies.’ As duelists finish their match, they congratulate each other on a match well played. They walk through the room, soaking in what others are doing. In between rounds, they seek each other out, talking strategy, asking about the cards they have (Yugi-oh is what they call a Trading Card Game). It doesn’t matter if you are good are bad, new or experienced. The only thing that matters is that you are interested (I should say obsessed) with the game.

The thing is, many parents I know don’t understand – and thus discourage – their kid’s obsession with this and other similar games. These parents can’t grasp the hours and hours their kids spend learning each card’s abilities, their strengths and weaknesses, how they can be used together, and how they can be used in response to an opponents actions, or the many more hours (and $$$) spent acquiring and sorting through cards to build the perfect deck. And of course, the many many hours spent practicing by dueling with friends, or in solo practice.

Wait a second. Those things sound an awful lot like what most kids go through when they find their obsession. Take a sport like football. Kids spend hours learning playbooks. They spend hours after school every day of the week at practice, sometimes on the weekend. They gather for games in the hope of proving they are the best. It’s just that these ‘obsessions’ are ‘mainstream’, so their parents proudly refer to them as their children’s ‘passions’ or ‘talents.’

Luke Jackson said it best (I’ve quoted this before, but it seemed worth repeating):

Q: When is an obsession not an obsession?

A: When it is about football.How unfair is that?! It seems that our society fully accepts the fact that a lot of men and boys 'eat, sleep and breathe' football and people seem to think that if someone doesn't, then they are not fully male. Stupid!

Girls are lucky enough to escape this football mania but I have noticed that teenage girls have to know almost every word of every song in the charts and who sang what and who is the fittest guy going, so I suppose an AS girl (or a non-AS one) that had interests other than that is likely to experience the same difficulties as a non-football crazy boy.

I am sure that if a parent went to a doctor and said that their teenage son wouldn't shut up about football, they would laugh and tell them that it was perfectly normal. It seems as if we all have to be the same.

Though I hate to engage in arm-chair neurology, I’d be willing to bet that if these duelists were ‘evaluated,’ quite a few of them would show up on the autism spectrum, likely as Aspies. That is, if they were evaluated in the general context that those types of evaluation are done – against the ‘norms’ of society today. Conduct their evaluation in the context of their world, the world in which they can indulge their passions, and I think they would show up as perfectly normal (whatever the hell that means).

In my thinking over the last week or so on what it means to be different, I seem to keep coming back to the same point over and over: it’s not our kids that have a problem; it’s the world they must live in that has the problem.
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Asperger's and video games

This is a slightly modified version of a post I made to my blog No Straight Lines.

I use SiteMeter on this and other sites to track visits (look in the bottom of the right column if you’ve missed it). It is interesting to see how many people visit the site, and where they come from (all over the world), but what fascinates me the most is the referrer log. I get the odd link from someone else’s blog or other site, but the vast majority of referrals to this blog come from search engine queries.

It is interesting to see what search terms people use that find my sites. Even more interesting are the other sites that those search terms turn up. For instance, a search for “video games and autism and gee” returned a link to my blog No Straight Lines, but also a link to Gaming and Students with Asperger’s Syndrome: A Literature Review:

As a teacher in the field of middle years education, I have observed a continual rising interest in video and online gaming by many of my students, regardless of gender and academic ability. In the past few years, I encountered students playing an online game set in a virtual environment (VE) called Runescape. My interest was especially piqued when I noticed students with special needs, especially those with Asperger’s Syndrome(AS) playing the game and exhibiting positive social and cognitive skills that he would rarely demonstrate in a traditional classroom environment. Students with AS were discussing the game with other classmates (and myself) in and outside the classroom. They were asking how to spell words and utilize a calculator in order to achieve objectives within the game. They were problem solving and surfing the web for online discussion groups associated with the game.

In this literature review, I will seek to answer the following questions: What educational learning principles and concepts are associated with online gaming? How do these aspects of gaming benefit students with AS? In turn, I will present a review of the latest research on the issues related to education and gaming, present an overall framework of the game Runescape, discuss some of the defining characteristics of AS, then explore how certain aspects of gaming benefit students with AS.

— Gaming and Students with Asperger's Syndrome: A Literature Review

A nice pulling together of several of my areas of interest. The Lit Review itself is well worth a read, and the bibliography provides even more.

"In My Language": The video that caught CNN's eye

The spark that caught CNN's eye about Amanda Baggs (see my last post if you don't know what I'm talking about) was her video "In My Language" posted on YouTube. While it is easy enough to just go to YouTube to watch it, I would like to share it here as well.



tagged as: Autism, Amanda Baggs, Anderson Cooper, Sanjay Gupta, Intelligence, Neurodiversity, Autism Advocacy

Homogenized Education

Quite a while back I posed the (mostly) rhetorical question, "Why doesn't every child have an IEP?"

I was brought back to this train of thought recently by a passage in Roy Richard Grinker's Unstrange Minds (emphasis is mine):

To be sure, debate is brewing about whether some of the these higher-functioning children should be classified as autistic or even disabled. Some disability experts contend that the problems encountered in educating children with Asperger's Disorder lie less with the individual child than with the educational system. The U.S. educational system, they suggest, has disseminated Asperger's Disorder as a category because it is useful to its attempt to make the student body as homogeneous as possible. The paradox they identify is that a child who doesn't fit in has to be seen as somehow impaired in order to justify an effort to normalize him.

This trend toward 'homogenized education,' an attempt to make sure that everyone* learns the same thing in the same way, reminds me of many - mostly misguided - attempts to do something similar in business. If you've ever heard the term Business Process Engineering, you know exactly what I'm talking about.

The fallacy in this approach, of course, is that education and learning are not processes that lend themselves to efficiency. Not perfect efficiency, anyway. That's not to say that their aren't things that can be done to improve the process.

But identifying a process and then trying to make everyone adhere to, and excel in, that process just won't work in education (just like it doesn't work in business).

* An exception to this are the "gifted" children, which I wrote about here.

The other end of the spectrum: "Special" education for gifted kids

In our local paper a couple of weeks ago was the article Parents, students fear for future of gifted programs. In a nutshell, gifted students and their parents are asking for exactly what many parents of autistic kids are trying to avoid- segregation from the regular classroom:

The resolution notes that gifted students have educational and developmental needs that differ from school populations as a whole, and the board believes gifted students "require programs or services beyond the level ordinarily provided through the regular school program."

"I moved to Rockwood due to the gifted programs, which I hope we can keep at their current level," parent Karen Smith said. "The way gifted children learn is so different that they need stimulation and different types of (teaching)."

Parent Julie Loos said the gifted program "prepares my children for real-world solutions."

Replace "gifted" with "autistic" and I think the statements are just as valid. Why, then, do so many parents of autistic kids want to simply put their kids in the mix with the 'normal,' instead of demanding the "stimulation and different types of teaching" that their learning style and abilities demand?

At the same time, programs for the gifted are facing many of the same challenges as 'regular' special education:

[They] favor guidelines including a means to monitor qualifications of teachers hired by districts to teach in gifted programs; continuation of certification requirements for gifted teachers; maintaining state guidelines for identifying gifted students; a means to monitor and report the number of students identified by districts as gifted; requiring districts to annually report to the state concerning whether they provide gifted programming and its nature; providing information on gifted programs on districts' annual report cards; and enhancing the Missouri School Improvement Program standard for gifted programs, so they become more important to the overall accreditation process.

Let the battle for the buck$ begin.

Update (21 Feb 08): Marla has posted a good discussion of this topic from a more personal perspective.
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tagged as: Autism, Gifted, Education, Parenting, Missouri, Special Education