Life from the Outside: Reflecting on Aspie Tendencies

Today I got a message from Amazon in my e-mail, apprising me of a new book coming out in a few weeks. I get these messages all of the time, and sometimes I order one. This book is called Parallel Play: Growing Up with Undiagnosed Asperger's by Tim Page, and after reading John Elder Robinson's review of it (on the Amazon page linked above) I ordered it.

In part, Robinson said:

"Tim says he’s lived life as an outsider, and that’s exactly how I feel too. As a result, even though I’ve grown up to find commercial success, happiness often eludes me. Within minutes of meeting Tim, it was clear he felt the same. Neurotypical people try to welcome us into their world, but Asperger’s blinds us to the olive branches of friendship they proffer. They even shake the leaves in front of our faces, but we just gaze, impassive and oblivious. People assume we’ve rejected them, but in truth we want their friendship and acceptance with every fiber of our being. That’s the heartbreak of it." (From the review linked above).

That's the heartbreak of it.

As some of my readers know, I am raising a son with diagnosed AS.
AS is primarily genetic in origin, although there most likely are environmental triggers that influence the severity of the disorder and the particular symptoms manifested.
So the Boychick's AS had to come from somewhere, and although I believe his biological father also has AS, I have also come to understand that I manifest the characteristics also. I have taken Simon Baron-Cohen's AQ Test several times, and I have always scored above 32, and usually around 40 points. And although I have no formal diagnosis, I believe that if the diagnosis had existed when I was a child, I would have met the criteria.

Though as an adult I function reasonably well in some social situations, they take a lot of internal energy. I am well aware of my own internal awkwardness, and missed social cues. I spend many hours in bed at night reviewing the social gaffs of the day.

Last night was one of those nights. At a meeting of a 9-12 group I am part of, my intention was to ask for the group's support and involvment in the Continental Congress, because I want to go as a delegate. I have been working on this since March, but as soon as I brought it up to the group, one of the more dominant female members immediately decided that "we should send" one of the other members. She had it all planned out while I was still talking about the history of the Continental Congress of 1774 and how it relates to what we are doing.
I had not clearly communicated with the group, probably because for me, the whole history is more fascinating and I wanted to work up to what I was asking.

My immediate reaction was disappointment.
I've been working hard on this and I wanted the group's support.
I heard this more dominant woman saying "you should go, C." because C. could speak well and knew a lot.
And these things are true.

I thought of all my education, all my reading. All the ideas I would like to share. I thought of Thomas Jefferson*, who was also an awkward speaker, although he was a good writer. I, too, am a better writer than speaker.I thought of a lot of things, and my social awkwardness was that while I was trying to frame how to respond, I blurted out something just to keep myself in the conversation. Since my mind was elsewhere, I can't even remember the words I blurted out. But I did realize that it was the wrong thing to say.

*Jefferson is an example of a historical figure who demonstrated most of the symptoms of AS. Others who are thought to have had AS include Albert Einstein, Motzart, and the pianist Glenn Gould.

So, in my social blindness, I immediately started in to make it worse for myself. I said that well, maybe I was not going to be elected to go, but that I would happily go as somebody's assistant, just to be part of this great historical endevour. But I mentioned the name of a certain somebody who will most likely be elected.

This provoked two negative responses. The woman who had taken over the conversation said:
"I don't even know this __________." She seemed angry. (I thought, "Well, no. You haven't been involved in this, even though I have brought it up before.")

The other woman, the one who had been directed to go by the first, said something to the effect of:
"You mean we are just shills for the people who have already been determined to go?!" (I thought, "she didn't listen to what I said about the election.").

Oy.
If only I had been allowed to tell it all my own way, without the interrogation or interruptions, she might have understood what I was trying to communicate about the upcoming election.

The group leader said nothing, though later he allowed as to how he would be happy to vote for me.

This is one illustration in the frustrations I encounter because I forget that I tend to think about communications as words that are put together in a particular order for a particular purpose; words that must be heard all the way through before one can get the sense of them. Words that have no particular meta-content. And I forget that, in the scheme of things, I have a uniquely wired mind.

I forget that neurotypicals (NTs), tend to see the same words as imminently interruptible, and full of emotional content and other (possible nefarious) implications that I am blind to, that I did not intend. They seldom listen to the whole communication before jumping in, and thus miss a great deal of my meaning. This is probably because I have the Aspie tendency to go on and on, and in every particular, in order to be most thorough about the details. I am fascinated by the parts, and in this way I get to the big picture,and it is all fleshed out. NTs skip the parts and jump right to the whole.

It is not that I cannot see the big picture, though. I can. I can see it in all of its detail, whole and complete; a picture in my mind. But as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. And to translate that into words requires all of my attention. NTs often claim that we who think in pictures lack attention. They say we have ADD.

IMHO, it is they who lack attention. They jump too quickly, thus missing the richness of the picture altogether. It is they that have difficulty listening, becoming impatient after a few sentences. They have already jumped to what they think is the big picture the speaker is describing, and often miss what is really being said.

The neuroscience work I did this spring bears this out. There is a great deal of evidence from imaging studies combined with neurobehavioral tests, that those of us on the Autism Spectrum naturally and easily remember all of the details as we process auditory and visual information from "the bottom up" (actually, in the brain, it is from back to front). We can also remember the big picture once it is assembled in our minds. We can do top-down processing as well, although that is not our preference. And when we do it, we can still remember all of the details. But NTs cannot remember the details, and they get cluttered up with all the emotional reading into the message that they do. Thus, at least as it appears to me, they can't think through the whole idea.

It is like we live in two different worlds.
It is true that Aspies do not see the olive branches. But it is equally true that he NTs do not see the beauty of our minds. They are too impatient to be able to see it. They cannot see that the bush burns but is not consumed.
Think about it.
A person would have to stop and observe for some time to see the detail of nonconsumption.

When we do not come across immediately with what they want, they dismiss us.
Thus, the dominant female described above dismissed me, even though she knows nothing about the Continental Congress except what I described, and she does not know what I know about the Constitution, or what I know about the enlightenment philosophy upon which it is founded.

NTs seem to narrow normal down to match that incomplete big picture they construct immediately. Lacking the memory for the detail that Aspies and others with different minds retain in our peculiar way of processing, they often miss the infinite diversity in infinite combinations that is ever before them. NTs walk "sightless among miracles."

That's the heartbreak of it. That's every bit as much of the heartbreak as is our Aspie blindness to the olive branches the NTs extend. In some ways, I think, NTs are just as blind to us as we are to them. But since our diverse minds are invisible to them, Aspies are the ones that are labeled with a disorder, with being different. We are the ones "pretending to be normal."

As Robinson, himself an Aspergian, writes about Tim Page's encounter with the heartbreak:

"Tim’s story illustrates that reality with clear and moving prose. Even when he’s been with people, much of his life has been spent alone. He was always smart, but like me, I wonder what it’s been for. His book shows that genius has its benefits but it’s not a formula for happiness or even general life success. You’ll wonder if his extraordinary abilities are a cause or a result of his isolation. Or are they just more facets of a unique mind?"

NOTE: My unique mind often causes me to see the glass as not only just half-full, but dusty and cracked as well. I must remind myself that things are likely not nearly as bad as I think they are.

Ferrari Hind-Brain, Dune Buggy Frontal Lobes

Fads in education tend to be oversimplified, and the newest of fads is no exception.
Think about this current catch-phrase in education for a moment: Brain-based learning.

People are writing curricula and textbooks and making a lot of money from this phrase.

Whenever I hear it in a seminar or discussion, I am always tempted to raise my hand and ask, "Isn't all learning brain based?" Because it is. At least the learning we are supposed to be talking about when we are talking about educating children in school.


The other one--and it's been around for a while now--is the whole left-brained vs. right-brained cliche. You know it: right-brained people are so much more enlightened and spiritual than those who dwell in the concrete-sequential left brain. Except . . . it appears the religious experience is partially mediated by the left temporal lobe. Sorry, wrong hemisphere.

There is some truth to the idea that there is a hemispheric division of duty in the brain. In males, language processing is normally in the left hemisphere, whereas certain associations of the images that language evokes take place in the right hemisphere. But females tend to distribute language processing across the two hemispheres, and since the female corpus collosum tends to be larger and denser and signals move across it more rapidly, why shouldn't they?


Guys, this may be why you cannnot win at verbal tete-a-tete with your mothers. But I digress . . .

Consider the paragraph above the digression about guys. The word "normally" is operative there. Because neuroplasticity is such that people do all kinds of things with parts of their brains normally reserved for something else. And there are those on the autism spectrum that make an art of it, experiencing synasthesia, the ability to smell color, for example, or hear shapes.

The semester's work that I just finished (thank Heaven and the PsychInfo data base) was about differences in sensory processing between people with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), and typically developing individuals (NTs). I looked at visual processing, but I could have just as easily looked at other senses. In all of them it is the same. Autistics process differently, using different parts of the brain on both the right and left sides, because the real difference is between front and back.

Uta Frith, one of the researchers about this, says that non-autistics have a drive towards central coherence. NTs will look at the picture, and initially see the parts and then the whole, but they do it very quickly, and then prompty forget the details in that drive to the big picture. Many with ASD do not. Rather, their focus on the local processing is intense, and they remember the details and focus on them, sometimes not seeing the big picture at all. This makes them very good at the Block Design subtest on the Weschler Intelligence Scales (WISC or WAIS) and very bad at the Comprehesion portion.

And what portions of the brain light up on fMRI when these kids are doing tasks like BD? It appears that they shift their function backwards, to more local function. Some researcher think they mentally move shapes needed to match detail to the whole, rather than place the figure in working memory, like NTs do. The NT strategy for embedded figures and block design has many more top-down features, and thus on these kind of tasks, individuals on the spectrum are more efficient and work faster. And in time-constrained situations, they also tend to be more accurate.


These visual processing differences appear to be primary in nature, by which I mean that they show up on both social and non-social tasks. It is true that autistics process faces differently, with much of the activations happening outside the fusiform gyrus' face area. But in ASD samples, processing of right-side up and upside down faces is equally as fast, whereas in NTs it is not. This may mean that it is perception that is fundamentally different, and that it is possible that many of the other characteristics of autism flow from it, rather than from a fundamental difficulty with social interaction.

Some researchers believe that these perceptual differences are the root of savant skills like card-counting, calendar calculating, or perspective in drawing.


There are still arguments in the field about whether of not this "weak central coherence" is compensation for a deficit or whether it is an enhanced perceptual function in its own right. There is evidence that those with ASD do engage in top-down control (from the frontal lobes), and that the local perceptual functioning (bottom-up) is more efficient. But there is also evidence that the observed top-down processes are qualitively different than those in NTs.

But it is safe to say that perception in ASD (and to some extent in ADHD as well) is fundamentally different than in NTs.

fMRI activation maps do show difference across the hemispheres, but also from the back of the brain to the front. In autistic perception, the activated areas are more scattered throughout the brain, and different areas light up for perceptual tasks than in NTs.


All of this means that the structure of intelligence is different in ASD. On the new WISC and WAIS scales, the Working Memory and Processing Speed indices result in much lower scores than the norm, whereas the Perceptual Organization and Verbal Comprehension are much higher. This is true within the individual scores, so that any full-scale IQ score is essentially meaningliess. When fluid intelligence, which is the ability to reason abstractly, is measured alone, as it is on Ravens Progressive Matrices, scores are generally very high in high-functioning autism (HFA) and Asperger Syndrome (AS).


One problem with intelligence testing done by educators as opposed to those done by professional psychologists, is that they often calcuate a FSIQ when the gaps between subtests and indices are so wide as to make that number meaningless. This meaningless number is then used as a measure of a child's potential, and is attached to him/her, sometimes for years, and limits what the child is allowed to do in school. To add insult to this injury, schools are designed for the average (and with NCLB, the slightly below) child, and instruction is auditory-sequential in nature, which relies heavily on auditory working memory and processing speed. This is why school is a difficult place for a child on the spectrum to actually get an education.

The rules are made for NTs. Thus one has to memorize math facts before being allowed to take higher math. And one must take algebra before geometry. Neither of these Stupid Neurotypical Rules (SNTR: coined by Temple Grandin) make sense for kids who see the world through such different perceptual lenses. The should use a calculator. And take geometry first. And then use hands-on equations for algebra. Even so, the teacher must be able to teach math outside the SNTR box.

Here's the bottom line:

It's not about right- or left-brained people. But we could say that Aspies, Autistics, and ADHD's, all have Ferarri motors in the hind brain, but with a dune buggy control system in the frontal lobes, the drive for them is anything but smooth in the narrowly defined normal of the typical school.

A FAT City Moment: Auditory Processing and Wait Time

Many of us know smart kids who believe that they are stupid. Dumb. Losers.
Some of them are the kind of kids that you just know have more than two brain cells to rub together, but the grades, the schoolwork, and the homework just doesn't reflect what we know is there. For those who have always done well in school, it is hard to imagine what might be going on with these kids, and they get 'teacher's lounge' diagnoses.

You know what they are: lazy, oppositional, a problem child, gorked, and, of course, BAD PARENTING.

It's hard to look at perfectly normal looking kid who is not succeeding and imagine that the problem may be organic rather than moral. It's harder for someone to put themselves in the shoes of such a 'normal' child than it would be for, say someone in a wheelchair. You know, somebody who looks the part, so to speak, when it comes to having a disability.
And sometimes, it's even difficult for us--the parents--who know full well what the problems are to walk a mile in our LD or AS or AD/HD kiddo's shoes.

I had one of those experiences today.
I do not normally think of myself as having a learning disability. After all, I am an academic, I learn fast and do well on tests. But I do have problems with word finding and auditory processing. It is not usually a problem--if I have time to think.

Today it was a problem.
I had a mouse brain anatomy test.
For tests on our human brains, we would go into the lab,and using real brains that we had dissected, we have gone from station to station and looked at where the pin was located in a brain, and named the structure. No problem. If I was stuck, I just went back to the station later. We could spend some time looking at the structure and thinking about it, and if I was having word finding problems, I could think until the word came to me.

Today, the test was different. We never dissected a mouse brain. We used pictures of sections to study. We were not given the names of the structures on the pictures, we had to go on the internet and find the list of structures. But I think I could have compensated for that. What killed my A in the class was the format of the test.

We gathered in the classroom. We were handed a sheet with numbers and blanks. A slide was flashed up on the whiteboard and the professor used a laser pointer to point to the structure in question. She's say something like: "What is this tract here?" Then, after about 15 seconds, it was on to the next slide.

Since I am slow at handwriting, I often could not even write down the whole name of the structure before we went on to the next one.
And when I could not immediately retrieve the word, I was, as we used to say, SOL.
I knew that structure she was pointing to, and that one, too! But the words were not coming fast enough to me. Soon I was getting the lines that I had skipped mixed up, and then I couldn't hear anything at all.
Then she had us exchange papers to grade them.
Boy, did I feel stupid.

Now fortunately, at my age, I understand that one grade in one class is not the most important thing in the universe. In fact, it is not even that important in my life, one of several billion human lives on a small planet a third of the way out in the arm of a rather commonplace galaxy.
And I have a lot of evidence that I am, despite my performance today, a reasonably intelligent person.

But imagine having such experiences day after day.
Imagine having them and being told that grades are the most important thing your life right now. Imagine being told that your scores on high-stakes tests show that you are stupid.
I can imagine beginning to believe that the ubiquitous "they" who says all of these things are right. I can imagine that such kids would easily come to believe every teacher's lounge label that is put on them.

Every now and then, we all need to have experiences to remind us of what some kids go through every day of their school lives.
Smart kids. But they are kids who, with whatever other IDEA label they might carry, have problems with auditory processing and working memory.

For these kids, a couple of very easy interventions would make a world of difference. One is to structure tests so that the auditory working memory component does not mask their knowledge. In other words, avoid oral tests.
The other is really simple and yet universally ignored.

Wait time. If you ask a question or do a quick verbal check to see if students "got it" during a lesson, wait a long time--at least a minute, and sometimes more depending on the complexity of the problem, and do not let anyone answer in that time.

I knew that the first structure was the nucleus accumbens, and in a less stressful, less auditorily focused situation--one in which the wait time was long enough, I would have gotten it. I just needed time.
But as the test went on and I became more and more stressed, I began to get more and more questions wrong. I could retrieve fewer and fewer words.
What was being tested was not my knowledge of mouse brain anatomy.
What was being tested was whether or not I have a learning disabiltiy.

For me, it is not a big deal. I have plenty of academic success to buffer the blow. I am at a point where I can shrug my shoulders and move on, because I know that I know the mouse brain anatomy.

But for a child who experiences these failures over and over again, and who is told that grades will determine his whole future, this experience can be devastating.

It is important for me to walk a mile in the LD shoes now and then.
In fact, it is important for all teachers to do so.
This is why going to a FAT City workshop can be helpful. Richard LaVoie, the one who facilitates them, simulates what it is like to have a learning disability. He is so good that he actually gets grown men and women to throw papers and books on the floor and have temper tantrums. And then they get it.

They say: "This is what my students are going through."

My FAT City moment today reminded me of why I took N. out of school altogether.
And it reminded me that I, too, need to continue to walk a mile in his shoes. Because I get impatient with his auditory processing probems sometimes, too.
Sometimes I cannot help but compare him to the other kids I read about on the homeschool blogs.

And today I got a healthy reminder that he knows a lot. But he shows me what he knows differently.
The point is that he knows it, not how he shows it.

NOTE: I edited this blog because I spelled FAT City as FATT City. So much for my spelling ability! Richard LaVoie's video about his FAT City workshops is entitled: F.A.T. City: How Hard Can This Be? F.A.T. stands for 'frustration, anxiety, and tension.' I just wanted to add 'tired' to the mix.

Writing for Visual Thinkers

I have been thinking about writing lately.
The issue of clear, organized and thoughtful writing is an issue for me in two areas of my life, my doctoral studies and my role as a homeschooling mother of a child with Aspergers Syndrome.

At the university, the effect of poor writing has become apparent to me as I struggle to understand a series of weekly papers that are required as part of my Neuroanatomy and Neurophysiology course. Each week, we read one or two papers that document current research in areas related to the physiology that is covered in lecture. For example, just recently we have been discussing reflex feedback that affects propioception. Differences in how the nervous system deals with reflexes become important when an animal has to couple voluntary motor responses with reflex responses to stimuli. Writing neatly when the pen is jarred would be one example. And our nervous systems deal with these problems in amazing ways, using the neurocircuitry and neurotransmitters to increase and decrease reflexive responses based on the perception of where body parts are within a cycle of movement.

But speaking of writing, what I am noticing is how uniformly poorly written many of the published papers are. And these are papers by respected scientists in good journals. The last paper we read was so dense with jargon, and so poorly structured that it was particularly easy to miss the point, although once I got it (after three readings), it was interesting and important.

As I was contemplating the relatively uniformly low standards for clarity of prose in scientific writing, I was also thinking about where we are with N.'s writing skills. He is getting better at sequencing, especially after practicing by re-enacting the sinking of the Titanic. But when detail becomes dense, sequencing is still a problem. N. tends to become overwhelmed by the details and has difficulty figuring out how to elaborate with them in a sensible and understandable order.

In considering these two different examples of problems with writing, I had a niggling sense that they were somehow related, however, I was unable to put it all together for several days. Finally on Thursday, two conversations I had created the "Aha!" moment I was looking for, and I was able to develop my hypothesis about what was happening. In the first conversation with my professor of Neurophysiology and another student, we noted that the diagrams in the paper were explanatory, but the captions were quite dense and almost unreadable. And we noted that they were misplaced with the text so that the reader had to page back and forth to find the paragraphs where they were discussed. I noted at the time that neuroscientists really like cartoon depictions of processes and maybe this would better help readers access the material. Later that evening, my daughter came home with a stack of posterboard and colored pencils. When I asked if she had presentation, she said that she didn't, but that she needed to draw out the biochemical pathways as they worked in cells in order to really understand them.

MLC then said something curious: "You know, Mom," she said, "My professor is a little weird. When he is explaining a process, he leans his head back so that his nose is in the air and closes his eyes. Strange. It seems like he is kind of stuck up."
"Hmmm," I replied. "It sounds like he has to close his eyes and visualize the process in order to explain it well. He's not stuck up. He's just a little autistic. And look how you have to make a cartoon of the processes as they occur in the cell to really get at what is going on."
"You're right," she said. "Scientists love powerpoints where they can make cartoons. The more animation, the better."

Eureka! There's the connection. Many scientists are visual thinkers. We love pictures, diagrams and graphs. Not only is a picture worth a thousand words, we think of them as replacing words, and we make them do that whenever possible. The same is true for people with ASD. Temple Grandin's book, Thinking in Pictures, rings true for a reason. Many people on the spectrum, and their relatives with the broader autistic phenotype, think primarily in images. According to respected experts in the field of remedial reading, the same is true for those dyslexia.

For the majority of the population in literate countries, sequencing writing comes naturally because they are thinking in words. But for those who think primarily in pictures, sequencing is a problem for translation into verbal and written expression. Think about it: When you call up a picture in your mind, all the detail is apparent at once. The memory used for the storage and recall in visual thinking, the opticoder (a.k.a. the visual sketchpad) can hold a great deal of information--it appears to be almost infinite--and it can be connected and manipulated with lightning speed. Thus, those who think in pictures do not think sequentially, they think by making connections across categories. This is associative thinking--complete, detail-rich, and very fast. It is also considered to be a learning disability in our auditory-sequential dominated educational system.

Now consider what it would take to put ideas gained from visual thinking into words using either verbal or written language. The information must be sequenced and chunked in order to use auditory working memory, which is very limited in scope--holding about 7 bits of information at once. This seems very tedious and extremely limiting to the visual thinker, who is used to manipulating many more bits of information at once. And then there is the problem of where to start. For example, if I close my eyes, I can see the entire room in which I am sitting, with every detail down to the dust motes dancing in the sunlight from the window. There is a tremendous amount of detailed information in the three dimensional picture in my mind's eye. But if I am asked to describe it, I must immediately begin to make decisions. What is important to say? What is safe to leave out? Where should I begin? At the door? Where I am sitting? The middle of the room? In what order should I describe it? Big stuff first, then the small things? Or should it be according to the space the stuff is in? Colors first? How can I choose? Oh, forget it! The choices become overwhelming.

You get the picture. This is why scientific writing tends to be so dense and jargon-laden. To a visual thinker every detail is important, because one never knows how associations will be made. It is hard, very hard, for the visual thinker to eliminate trees in order to discuss the forest. In the auditory-sequential world, generalizations are understood as shorthand, but in the visual world they are seen as incomplete at best, and at worst, they are lies.

And to add insult to injury, the auditory-sequential world cannot understand what the problem is and tends to diagnose the visual-associative thinkers as stupid and lazy. They can't help it--many of them cannot think in pictures at all. They cannot even imagine what the problem is. In fact, for many philosophers of language, human thought must happen in words and language or it is not considered to be thought at all. The visual thinkers would say that such people have limited perspective. If they can find the words.

To make matters even worse, visual-associative thinking is so fast that on the extremes, such thinkers do not develop the alternative pathway. In order to successfully communicate in society, we must choose which pathway to use to process incoming and outgoing information. Sometimes, we use the visual pathways and sometimes we resort verbal pathways. So, in order to help extreme visual thinkers learn to write clearly, we must first help them develop the alternative pathway and then teach them to use it efficiently.

With N., it really helped to start with his strengths in visual-associative thinking and use those to scaffold to auditory-sequential. We started with sequencing pictures, and since he has all of the stereotypies and special interests of a child with AS, we started with the Titanic, since he was watching the movie over and over again. He made some gains, and then moved on to other interests. But where to go from here?

I think the answer for N. and for the scientists with the dense, jargon-laden papers is the same. It is to tranlate ideas from the pictures in the mind to auditory sequential chunks without sequencing every picture. In other words, I think the next step is to give each picture in the sequence a label, and then fade the use of the pictures. Now auditory-sequential thinkers would probably suggest doing this in one fell swoop, by introducing outlines. To them, outlines with all the fancy lettering, numbering and indentations make perfect sense. But to the visual-associative thinker, this may be too big of a leap. For example, N. tends to start to obsess on the exact spacing, on an exact pattern of lettering and numbering, and loses the point in a swamp of detail.

Fortunately, we do not have to re-invent the wheel here. For N., anything is worth doing if he can do it on the computer. And there are some great programs, such as Inspiration, that allow the use of graphic organizers that can then be turned into an outline with the touch of an icon. You can put pictures into your graphic organizer, or you can use text. Or both. And didn't MLC mention PowerPoint as the first love of geeky scientists? You can do the same thing with that program, in a different context.

Here, then, is a plan for what we want to accomplish in writing this year. In the past, N. would dictate and then I would help him organize his thinking. Now it is time for a little more independence. So this year, we can make some goals about learning the use of Inspiration or PowerPoint, or both, if N. chooses. Then I can help him move from his present level of using pictures to sequence a story with limited detail, to using pictures and text to sequence a story of similar detail, and then fade the pictures entirely, using only text to go from graphic organizers to outlines. Once that goal is successfully accomplished, we might want to move to stories with more complexity and do the same thing. Eventually, the goal is to be able to do this with extemely complex stories and processes.

Now I need to set up a time to talk about writing goals for this year, to see what N. wants to do, and how he wants to fit it in with his current focus--Kamana Wilderness Awareness. And this is going to have to be done with some delicacy. Writing is a sore subject for N. He has been called stupid and lazy too many times and will not be pushed too far beyond his comfort zones. The success rate at each step is going to have to be about 80% or he will lose interest.

The way many teachers unthinkingly label kids who think differently creates a real problem. When teachers call their students stupid, lazy, brain-damaged, and trouble-makers simply because the teacher lacks the imagination to see that there are many variations in how people think, they create the resistance to learning that they then so actively punish. People don't like to fail over and over and be blamed for "not trying" to boot!

Variation is a given in human populations. It is not a crime. Uniformity in a population is a weakness that can lead to trouble. We know this now more than ever, as we unfold the mysteries of the human genome. What I don't understand is why our educational systems are becoming more and more fixated on uniformity even as our science discovers the usefulness of variation. Actually, come to think of it, I think I have a hypothesis for this question, too.

But that's another post!

Sinking the Titanic: Learning Sequencing Using the Special Interest

One of the most important skills for conversing and writing is the ability to sequence. Kids with AS often have difficulty with sequences. N. has been known to jump into a conversation with words that don't seem to fit the subject of the conversation, which makes the rest of the family stop and say 'Huh?' a lot.


Writing is another difficult area for N. He absolutely, positively HATES the whole idea of writing. Part of it has to do with the fine motor skills involved. N. has dysgraphia and tends to grip the pencil too hard, tiring his hand very quickly as he writes. This is one reason he has a hard time getting his thoughts down on paper. However, even with keyboarding, the requirement to write a paragraph (too many words, mom) or a story (NOOOOO! A whole page?) is food for a quiet but effective form of melt-down called a sit-down strike.

As we have been working with Dr. Florance on the Brain Engineering pillars, however, I have learned that N. has highly developed abilities in visual areas. But people who literally think in pictures do not understand sequencing--after all the whole picture is there all at once--every detail. So part of our work is working out sequencing. First this happened, then that happened. Most of the people who work on Brain Engineering do treasure hunts with their kids but N. disdains this for some reason. However, today on his break, he "sank" his Titanic in the snow several times over, taking pictures of each step.

N. checked out the movie Titanic from the library two weeks ago--and he has become obsessed with it. Every afternoon, he watches a certain sequence of scenes over and over again. He has looked up the Titanic on the web and he has read several books about it.
I was getting annoyed with the constant watching over and over--he (and I) have certain dialogue memorized. Then I realized: he is obsessing about the sequencing! He has probably watched that darn ship sink 200 times. Over and over...freeze-framing, skipping parts, and going backwards from the end to the beginning of the sequence.

N. is transfering skills from our Brain Engineering work to his interests. He is beginning to generalize! Those of you who have or know kids with Autism Spectrum Disorders know how important this step is. I honestly want to break out into the Hallelujah chorus in three part harmony. I am beginning to realize how powerful N.'s visual attention and his special interests (the rest of the world calls them obsessions) are for his learning.

Today, when he took his toy Titanic outside and sank it in the snow, over and over, he took another important step in generalization:




Here is the Titanic floating on the water (okay, so it's snow--who ever said he did not have a creative imagination?) just as it hits the ice-berg. (Not pictured).











Starting to sink as the compartments fill.

Sinking more. People are starting to worry.

Almost gone!

The lifeboats are away!

Jack and Rose are getting ready to hold their breath...

Almost gone!

After N. showed me the pictures, I taught him how to download them to his pictures file. Then I showed him how to transfer pictures to Powerpoint. He did a 6-slide-show called "Titanic: Ship of Dreams." He is currently working on the annimation schemes for his slides.

He only wrote a sentence or two for each slide. His spelling, capitalization and punctuation still leave much room for progress. But he told a story in sequence and he had fun doing it!

We can work at all that some other time. Right now, the important thing is that we all Oooh! and Ah! over his Powerpoint presentation. This is real progress toward the ability to write a paper or essay in the future.

Tomorrow, I will tell him that he can add sound effects to his Powerpoint.

Hmmm. Not too early in the morning.