At the school workshop, they spent quite a bit of time with the early childhood social interaction difficulties. Because I'm not a developing infant or toddler, nor do I work with them, I'm going to skip over that. One item that continues to be a problem through the teenage years, is the inability to read facial expressions and understanding what other people are feeling. I've always felt that I was pretty good at this. In fact, sometimes I feel what others feel too strongly. But thinking about facial expressions got me thinking about how I interpret the facial expression of my students on the autism spectrum. When most kids look bored and won't make eye contact, it means they are bored and/or not paying attention. I need to remember that autism spectrum kids aren't going to give me the same physical and facial feedback, but they still might be engaged. On a humorous note, one of the slides they showed that they use to test young children for autism is a smiley face picture and 4 candies with the question, "Which chocolate will Charlie take?" The idea is that the kids see "Charlie's" eyes looking up toward the Milky Way bar. Normal kids immediately know that that is the one he wants. Kids with autism can't figure it out. I hadn't figured it out by the time they explained it, because I was stuck on the fact that one of the candies was "Smarties" and those are not chocolate. I was so thrown by this and the question about chocolate that I hadn't even looked at Charlie's eyes.
As they discussed social difficulties for older students, I did see some similarities in my own life, but my diagnosis is social anxiety. They talked about how if asked to work on a group project, kids on the autism spectrum have trouble participating. They either take over the whole thing, or don't do anything. That is so me. Although as a teacher I can see the benefits of group work, as a student I despised it. I can be a leader or a follower, but I'm just now at this point in my life learning how to be a team player, an equal with those around me.
Again, related to my social anxiety, I understand the person with autism that has difficulty building and maintaining relationships. It's all about knowing how to play the game, and people with social anxiety or autism spectrum disorders don't understand all the rules of the game. It doesn't mean we can't have relationships, but it does mean that it's harder than the difficulty the rest of the world has with relationships.
In the area of communication/comprehension, the area that fascinated me with regards to my own experience was echolalic speech. Some kids can parrot back impressive information, but don't really understand the information or how to use it in a different context. I have an excellent memory for factual memorization and therefore graduated at the top of my class. I don't know that I would do as well in today's education system where so much is about applying the knowledge. I can give you the facts, but have more difficulty in applying it to new situations. That's why word problems were so tough for me in math. The funny part here is that I really do feel like I am a good voice teacher and teaching voice is all about applying the facts to different situations since no two students have the same issues or respond in the same ways.
They talked a lot about how concrete autism spectrum kids are in their communication. They don't understand metaphor, sarcasm, etc. Metaphors, imagery, and sarcasm are my life, although I'm trying to cut back on the sarcasm. This is one area where I have no understanding of what these kids are experiencing. Metaphors and imagery is how I take the meaningless facts and make them mean something. So much of singing is seeing beyond the the words written on the page. I don't know how to talk interpretation without asking, "What do you think this imagery means? What do you think the character feels?" Yes, I know that these kids feel, but how do I go about getting them to understand what a character is feeling? And when I put it that way, I realize that it's the same as with any other kid--you have to relate it to something they do understand. I still don't know what to do though about kids that don't get metaphors and imagery.
Believe it or not, social interaction and communication were the two areas that I didn't have much in common with those on the autism spectrum. Sensory issues, however, are very easy for me to understand. I have fibromyalgia. There are many theories about why it develops and what it is, but basically it boils down to hypersensitivity. If my door is open at night, I will sometime wake up when the fridge motor kicks on. Sometimes the sound of the fridge running is more sound than my body wants to deal with. Sounds that are normal to the rest of the world are physically painful to me. I never go to the pepfests at school. I'm all about school spirit, but all those people and all that noise in one room is just too much for me. Socks drive me nuts if the seams aren't lined up the right way, but even worse, is not wearing socks. At the workshop, they mentioned that kids with autism often won't wear socks or shoes because they don't like how they feel. Socks feel better for me than all the other stuff I feel if they are not there. They also said autism kids are sometimes tip toe walkers. When barefoot, I actually walk mostly on my heals trying to keep my toes off the floor.
Other difficulties related to autism that I also understand all too well:
- Inflexibility. See the world in very "black and white" terms; concrete understanding of rules. --
- I'm getting much better at this, but I used to be very rule bound, rigid and inflexible about many things.
- Easily feel overwhelmed or anxious.
- Unexpected changes or events cause extreme anxiety--I don't usually have the melt downs that happen with autism kids when they encounter unexpected changes, but I do experience a lot of internal anxiety. Again, I'm learning to deal with this and am much better than I was even 10 years ago.
My main point in all of this, was not to tell you more than you probably wanted to know about my life. The point is, if all we see is the differences, it becomes "them" and "us". (Black and white thinking, by the way.) We can't understand people and we can't love them until we see that there are a lot of ways that we are very similar.
At the neurology lecture these were two bullet points on a slide about ADHD:
- Kids with ADHD need structure, firm limits, and lots of positive reinforcement.
- What if an entire school could have that kind of approach?
I am for whatever programs we can have in our schools to help kids with ASD or ADHD succeed. However, I also see the difficulty my choir director colleagues have in teaching to the special needs of each of the students when there are, for example, 90 Freshmen girls in the same room. My situation is different. I work mostly one on one with the kids. I'm in the perfect position to give them instruction tailored to the way they learn. Although it was pushed to the bottom of a long to do list, I'm still very interested in doing some kind of a formal study on voice instruction for students on the autism spectrum disorder.
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