First, my apologies. This is a very rough draft of, as I see it, at least two different essays. But today's time for writing is up, so this must do for now...
Obviously all of school is social because it not undertaken alone. Yet how PURELY social it is is very difficult to understand. Those of us with normalish "social intelligence" can't see it because "social" is our basis, we assume it, we build our lives atop it. Those with Asperger-like differences can't see it because they see only what's really there, lots of invented, often seemingly arbitrary, rules and structures.
A simple example is the system of bells. They are there because people think a class must start and end at predictable times. People think students must attend a class together. People think a person called the teacher is the leader of a class and runs the class. People think there are certain things that need to be learned. People name this activity going to school and think it's more worthwhile, more educational, than staying at home. People project that it's tolerable for all kids, and good for kids.
When I was a kid, no one told me these things. I just picked them up from the culture, like most of us. I didn't realize all these understandings and my acceptance came from my social intelligence.
Children are expected to respect and attend to teachers, and other adults. This is a social expectation-- a reasonable and almost universal one, to be sure, but still an expectation "normal" humans invent. To some Aspie kids, the teacher is just another person. Some Aspie kids find it very difficult to accept that parents have more authority. The teacher has ideas of what should be done, but the child has ideas, too. Why are the teacher's ideas to be followed instead of the child's? It's complex, something about differences in experience, knowledge, training, even age and height. Why does that add up to this new rule? And what is "experience" anyway? An young Aspie child has had experiences, and has a poor understanding of others, so it doesn't make sense. What makes sense is "we both have ideas".
What of the child that just doesn't understand the difference? What if the reasonable thoughts from the teacher seem the same as the reasonable thoughts in his head? Except the thoughts from the teacher often don't gibe with the thoughts in his head- which take precedence? The rule is clear- follow the teacher. But the rule is enforced by authority, which is another of those non-sensical, to some Aspie kids, ideas. Physical power they understand, but what if the kid decides justice and fairness are more important, follow the teachers rules half time and his or her own half time? It happens.
Children are expected to cooperate and compete politely, not tread on each other or hit. What if a child doesn't notice others? Cooperating is a dance- what if you don't realize that others are moving? What if people are pretty invisible? You may notice you're stepping on a lot of feet, but if you don't see them, how can you avoid them? And then they shout and make grim faces- why? And sometimes the feelings well up in you and you need to spin and bump into things (people), until the urge lessens... They take you to the principal's office and he explains you're behaving badly. Why?
What about competition? This means the patience to let others win and the self-observation to reign in efforts before they damage others. Losing feels awful, intolerable! Rules are arbitrary, so why not change the rules so that you can win? These were all very problematic for my son.
Some adults think "consequences" teach. They do to many students who have the flexibility to change and the social understanding to realize that teachers just want kids to learn. My son concluded from his continuing difficulties that teachers wanted to make life difficult for him and being sent home from school for a (verbally abusive) tantrum when the stress was overwhelming merely cemented the opinion.
In fact, "consequences" don't teach anything. Good trainers know that behavior must be "shaped", gradual efforts rewarded in the desired direction using inconsistent rewards. For most kids, success, attention and acknowledgement are rewards. Yet success is a socially-defined scale, attention is obviously social, and acknowledgement is reward only if you care what the other person thinks. For an Aspie, personal success is the main reward. This might be a time-out to be away from others, or success in building something- rare rewards in school.
My son tried to go along with school, but school is made for some "average" set of children who conform more or less to the normal social skill level and understand things at a more or less average pace. My son misses some things and understands others in leaps and bounds. He understood math, but never understood the need to show his work. It always seemed to me that his process of internalizing math was mainly a conceptual one, and moving the concepts into and out of his mind almost precluded putting it down on paper. Meanwhile, he accepted that the problems had to be answered, but not that the teacher needed more than the answer. If he didn't know the anwer, he'd write "can't be done" or "impossible."
Why couldn't he just "show his work?" This concept, like many in school, is misnamed and misleading. His work is mental, it can't be shown. Perhaps a movie could be made of the numbers changing into quantities, adding up and resolving into new sets of digits, but knowing that would take an enormous amount of reflection, which kids in general and young Aspies in particular, are not good at. It would also take as a ton of effort converting it into something that can be put on a page, which for a kid with delayed fine motor coordination is a very arduous task.
What "show your work" really means is usually "emulate the teacher" which means carefully attending to the teacher's method and using that, often to the exclusion of understanding it. Attending to the teacher is an oversimplification. The teacher is talking, opening her eyes wide, than squinting while raising her voice, then talking more quietly and straightening her arm (pointing). She's walking, expressing, turning to the class, turning to the board, looking from one direction to another, as well as giving insight and instructions and directions with her words, over and above stating the simple directions. You and I filter out these things- they're like air to the bird, invisible. We see the bird flap its wings. Some Aspie kids see the dance, and its very distracting to pull out the little bits of instruction from all that noise and movement and facial expressions.
Plus, while the teacher may firmly have the procedure in mind, only a very naive teacher thinks the kids are "getting it." Though most kids can sift through the performance and peel off the instructions, studies show that, especially in America, most kids don't really learn it. But they're smart enough to fake it, in the early grades, till they make it, and later on to cover it up. An Aspie kid doesn't know about faking it. Too honest, and not aware that they "look" a certain way to others, they'll give up.
Many Aspie kids get something we call "sensory overload". I've heard that Aspie kids often can't filter out the facial cues- this makes sense to me. My son is very bright. He did great in the first couple of years of school and steadily got worse. He learned, but increasingly his performance was rated poorly, especially in group work and anything that had to do with stating a preference or relating to things he didn't know first-hand. But in 6th grade, he failed.
In 6th grade, the school staff decided he needed to get ready for Middle School, and a big part of that was attending to the teacher. Usually he sat in funny ways in his chair and played with a "fidget", something to keep his hands (and part of his mind) busy. He'd laugh at times and sometimes would walk around in the back of the room or put his head down on his desk.
So in 6th grade, they put together a program called "sitting for success" where an aide would give him points for sitting straight up in his chair, facing forward and looking at the teacher. He tried to comply. He tried hard. He stopped learning. It took most of the year to figure out it just couldn't work. This is when we, or most of us (some of the staff didn't learn it) learned that by looking away from the teacher, he avoided being distracted by her facial expressions and movements. By playing with something in his hands, he could mitigate the distractions of all the faces and bodies and movements of the kids around him. By moving around and sitting weirdly, he could avoid the distractions of the sensations in his body. Without these things, the curriculum was a tiny, tiny fraction of his sensory input. He could either sit properly, or he could learn- not both. In 6th grade, he failed some of his subjects.
For those of you who don't know, "special kids" have what's called an IEP, an Individualize Education Plan. This is a document, created by the teachers and staff and parents, specifying specific accommodations the child will have (such as breaks, additional time, fidgets) and goals the child will meet, either by special efforts of his teacher or in special classes, like a speech or social language class. I don't know if it's a Federal or a California State law, but kids who have an IEP can't be failed. Perhaps it's to not punish a kid for the failures of the education system, but more probably it's so these kids don't plague the same teachers over and over...
Toward the end of 6th grade, we had the middle school intake IEP meeting. My son, my wife and I went to the middle school one day after school and met the principal and school psychologist, and a couple of other people. My son entered the room, took a seat by my wife and quickly slipped under the table. We apologized and said he's stressed by the end of the day and finds it easier to be under a table. The principal said it was fine, and then asked him to please come out. My son said, "No, I'll stay under here." The principal said, "B, please come out of there, we want to talk to you." B said, "You can talk to me with me down here." Then the psychologist said, "We want to see you when we talk to you." B said, "I want to stay here. You can talk with me here." Then the psychologist said to the principal, "We're not going to be able to cope with this- he'll be in your office every day!"
My wife and I were shaken. What were we going to do- they couldn't deal with him! Soon after, we started looking for other schools. Soon after that, we remembered things that we had learned at PHP seminars. B was entitled to "an appropriate education." Since the public school admitted they couldn't "handle" him, they would have to pay for private school...
The following are random'ish anecdotes...
In his first dozen or more years of life, B had the acute sense that winning was great and losing unbearable. I puzzled over this, since it seems like a social sense. Finally I made some sense of it. Perhaps he felt frustrated by losing. Imagine a small child trying to move a large tree- with 100% of all they can muster until he's exhausted trying, exhausted to tears. My son was like that. He'd try everything to win, especially changing the rules. "No, you can't do that," my younger son would say. "Yes, I can", the older one would reply. He knew the art of argument, just didn't realize that most people would try to sway others, to win agreement, like agreement with the people who wrote the game rules. To him, those others didn't apply.
Once when my son was 4, we had a party. About 6 of us were sitting around the kitchen table in an animated discussion and I felt a tug on my sleeve. I looked down and B was there with pencil and paper. He said, "Dad, can you write down the multiples of seven for me?" I said, "Actually, I'm in a conversation right now. Why don't you start, and if you get stuck, I'll help you?" He said ok, put the paper on the table and started to write. I went back to my conversation and forgot about him. A few minutes later, I felt another tug on my arm. I looked down at him and he said, "Dad, what's 7 and 343?" This was at the age of 4. A year and a half later, when he started kindergarten, the teacher told us one of the goals for the year was for all of the kids to know how to count to 10.
In first grade, he had a wonderful teacher, an older woman who thought he was a wonderful kid and was eager to learn about him. After a few weeks, she called us into her office and told us he was failing math. She showed us his tests. She had a piece of paper with maybe 6 columns and 6 rows of simple math problems involving ones and zeros. B got the first couple of rows right and then his answers became random. That's when we learned that B fell apart with stress. These tests were called "mad minute math." The kids had one minute to do all the problems. The teacher had at first told them they must do it very quickly. Then she added that they couldn't go on until they passed a test. To "help" him pass, she even told him he'd be held back a grade if he didn't pass.
I'm a mathematician and also took some classes toward becoming a math teacher. The most important thing about learning math is learning "sense making", that is, learning math concepts, being able to create and understand models that represent numbers. Speed comes with ability and practice, but isn't important in itself. Speed is great, of course, but not important in learning math. Speed is only important in school. Another myth is that right answers are important. They are not. Problem-solving skills are important. 90% is an A- can you imagine how well the space shuttle would work if 90% of the answers were correct, or 100%? What's important is that the people working on it understand what they're doing, can show their work so they and others can check and verify it. Getting the right answers is the last 1% of the work. Though it's crucial, it's the least important step... But for the sake of speed, they taught my son early in life that he was lousy at math...
He had some problems as well at the special school he went to. Though the school is specialized, pretty much the only training the teachers get with Aspie kids is on the job. Many of the teachers were themselves stressed with kids who didn't look at them and were constantly fidgeting, sometimes even to the point of breaking things. Some thought it was a matter of "discipline", as if discipline could cure sensory overload and OCD. The first couple of years were much better than public school, but still rough, even in this special school with 8 kids per class. Plus his training was slow to leave him. For years he thought the answers were all-important and that he was poor at math.
Mainly, he, and we, learned that teachers are some of the most stupid, narrow-minded people on earth, just like everyone can be. Most of them are great people, and most of them are pretty competant at teaching in normal ways (whether or not they work well.) A few teachers are very good at teaching normal children, and some are great. But the only teachers who teach special kids well are those who've done it a while and are very, very open-minded, willing to teach the kid, not the subject.
I think for B, school was an endless series of not knowing what was wanted. Writing was a particular nightmare. Writing assignments take a huge amount of relating to what the teacher wants. Some teachers even tried letting him write what he want. But that assumed he wanted to write about something, which he didn't. Why would he want to write? Writing is a kind of communication- why would he want to communicate?
Later, I remember B always had a problem writing about something he didn't know about. Due to food allergies (more common in Aspie kids), we don't eat wheat (flour) or milk products. Once he got an assignment to write about the experience of eating pizza. He didn't remember ever having pizza, so couldn't write about it. I coached him to write about what he thought eating pizza might be like, but he couldn't and refused to speculate, even in his thoughts, much less on paper. I suggested he write about eating something else and explained how the teacher wanted him to write about experiences, tastes and smells and didn't really care which food. He dismissed that- how could I possibly know what his teacher wanted? No, his teacher said pizza and he couldn't write about that.
Emotions were a very anti-productive area for him. If he was upset, his brain seemed to seize up. And not knowing what was wanted made him upset.
I made the statement that a kid without a social sense might learn happily and successfully on his own but fail miserably in school.
It's our social sense that makes us attend to what others say, follow their thoughts, find interest in their interest.
What's interesting to a person without a social sense is studying things that interest them, whether systems of knowledge or the surrounding world. Experimenting is interesting and taking things apart. Traveling and moving is interesting. Above all, spending moments on a whim or hours in an exploration.
In contrast, what happens in school is a teacher guides and the kids with social sense follow. Most of the knowledge and skills that are taught are taught with almost no motivation (rather than for survival or to learn or to build things.)
And whether an activity would naturally fill a child's head for a moment or for hours, in school it uniformly gets less than an hour. So not only can learning this way be difficult, but once absorbed, a child is suddenly torn out of it. This kind of sudden transition can make school also painful and hammer home the message that what's important is following instructions, not learning.
My son learned that very, very well, and since following instructions was difficult for him, and often impossible, this early reader and mathematician with a high IQ concluded by 2nd grade that he was less than average. By 6th grade he learned he was a failure.
Of course, life without school can be boring, or dangerous. What's the answer?
The answer for my son is an expensive private school with small classes that specializes in different learners and accommodates each of them. I am so grateful that they exist as well as that the public school district realized they could not serve him.
You're also welcome to reach about math teaching in California
Last updated: Sep, 2009. Copyright 2005-2009, Randy Strauss