the day kicked off with a meeting with Owen's teachers to discuss his placement and support for kindergarten next year at his new school (hey...he is diagnosed with autism. follow along) and review the progress he's made while in his preschool getting extra support and extra school days all year to see how much help we think he needs to get in "normal" kindergarten class.
He's come so far it's crazy, moving in leaps and bounds and some of the things he came into this year working on as "challenges" seem so ridiculous since he does many of them so naturally now. And yet, sitting there listening to his teacher you'd think he was still having monumental difficulties in areas that are going to be critical to his success as a human being, much less a small human in the shark tank that is kindergarten.
I think the problem I have with this process stems from a couple of things, neither of them are Owen:
First off his teacher begins every sentence with "I'm afraid" or "I worry" and I have very little patience for dealing with people like that, and it hasn't gotten any easier spending ten years working closely with people that react from a place of being positive and fearless and open to possibilities. It makes people like her sound like they live huddled in a corner shaking in terror that the sky is falling.
Not only is she afraid and worried about every little thing we bring up she worries down to the most specific things possible, she would launch into scenarios of "well, I would just worry that Owen's going to be trying to do _______ and _______ could happen and if there wasn't ______ around" and if it was a leap year, and if he had a banana for lunch that day.... it was almost a Rube Goldberg scenario that she was fretting about and wants to write a plan for.
I'm all for thinking ahead and trying to help him with things that are going to challenge him (and then seem stupid that we ever worried about not even a year later) to help him do everything he wants to do, yes I am. But I wont spend my time worrying about every what-if that could possibly happen to him or any other kid. The world is a big, sometimes scary, place and he IS going to face hard things and challenges in it....and that's good. He's going to hit things that he can't do, he's going to find things he doesn't want to do but has to and yes, he's going to run into things he can't do that other kids can....just like every other kid. Us worrying, planning and trying to soften everything for him will make him far weirder than him having to learn to work through those things when they come up.
the second problem is that she sees every little thing he doesn't do (or does do that isn't exactly normal) and treats them all equally. Sitting there talking about the fact that he still doesn't color as precisely in the lines as he could (and fretting about what might happen when they get to kindergarten and have smaller things to color and they give the kids the fat crayons and if he gets frustrated and there isn't a teacher right there that understands his diagnoses....I'm not kidding, she went off about that. you see what I mean?) as if it was on the same level as him not speaking until he was 5 or something.
this is what happens when you first put people in the profession of seeing kids as "special needs kids" and having them make note of everything that is wrong with them and worrying about every little thing they see and how negatively it's going to impact their future. No child could stand up to scrutiny like that, for one thing, and really if his coloring is a little sloppy I think there's a point where you stop and say "shit could be worse, we have kids that can't communicate and yours is doing great, this isn't a big deal" (and some of his teachers seem able to make that distinction, just not this one).
They (meaning this woman and plenty of people like her in exactly her position) stop seeing them as kids and start seeing just a collection of traits that aren't quite right, look at any kid through that lens and you could probably justify special ed for all of them, and if I was a parent of a kid that couldn't communicate I think I'd be a little pissed to know that the same level of attention went into avoiding some awkward social situations for a boy like Owen as went into helping my child speak to the world around them at all.
Owen does have social issues that he'll need to figure out in order to fit in better in public schools and that's his primary problem right now (and really, the worst case is that he'll stand out as weird? get teased? be that strange genius kid? I don't know how anyone could live through that, clearly we should cocoon him and ignore all the things he CAN do) and we're dealing with that in a supportive way, not a fearful one. I want to throw more things at him, not less, to get him more ready and I disagree completely with the idea that handling them more gently helps them go become more prepared.
That's our job as parents, to see all the things our kids to right instead of all the things they don't do quite right and see them as kids with potential to be great and nudge them that way instead of everything that could potentially go wrong and pull them back, to teach them not to live in fear of all the things they might not be able to do if they keep on holding their crayons that way and instead pay attention to the cool pictures they're drawing and help them enjoy coloring....because they're KIDS.
- a fun PS to this story: last night Owen drew me a huge picture, it was all these big, abstract shapes that he spent half an hour coloring all of them brown. just solid brown blobs on a page. When I told him it looked cool he said
"Yeah, I drew you the oceans.....with sharks in them."
"I don't see any sharks"
"Yeah, but I know they're in there"
Me too, kiddo. You let me worry about them for now.
1 comment:
So are you going to find another teacher for him that has the same ideas you do?
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