Teen Autism

Remember when it was called Christmas Vacation? It amuses me that even what we call our seasonal time off must conform to political correctness. But that’s okay. I actually prefer the name change, especially since I’ve been teaching this year, and I realize how essential a break really is.

One of the most common internet searches that points people to this website is “homeschooling autistic teenager.” I know this not just because my blog software tells me, but because I’ve typed that search myself. And I still do. I keep hoping that someone out there will have figured out the ins and outs of homeschooling autistic teens. And if they already have, I haven’t yet discovered their words of wisdom.

Winter Break gives me a chance to do a lot of things in addition to taking a break from teaching. I catch up on other work, like the work I do that actually generates some income (can’t let that slide!), I clean the house a bit, I try to visit with friends and family members who may be wondering if I’ve dropped off the face of the earth, and I make plans for the next school term. I have been homeschooling my autistic teenager for nearly a year now, and this is what I’ve learned.

• Homeschooled autistic teens function best with a written schedule. We went without a written schedule for one term, and we won’t be doing that again. Not having a written schedule opens the door for numerous motivation and focusing issues.
• Verbal autistic teens will debate with you the merit of any subject that they are not interested in learning. In fact, they will debate the necessity of formal education in general. They will demand to live how they want to live. This does not just happen occasionally. It happens every day. Yes - every single day without fail. You know that saying about the patience of a saint? It ain’t me. So I have learned to leave the room for a moment to get my bearings and remember that even though he is verbal, it doesn’t mean that I can reason with him. It doesn’t mean that even if we’ve already discussed the importance of education three days in a row that he won’t ask the same question tomorrow.
• Autistic teens are individuals and have their own particular learning styles. My son is a visual-kinesthetic learner. I have taught him division by taking a pile of almonds and grouping it into sets of three to show how a number goes into another number. For years while he was mainstreamed he never understood this concept because math is not typically taught that way. I have also taught him how to multiply fractions by writing out the steps for him to visually refer to.
• Autistic teens may need “crutches” to help with some concepts. I have used question marks in place of letter variables when teaching algebra to my son. After he learned how to solve the equations, he no longer needed to substitute the question marks in place of the letters.
• What works one week may not work the next. Not only do you have to “think outside the box,” you have to reinvent the proverbial wheel on a regular basis. Inspired moments like teaching division with almonds won’t always produce the same “a-ha!” results when applied to other concepts. The almonds, however, do come in handy if you get hungry.
• Homeschooling an autistic teen will stretch you - your mind, in coming up with innovative ways to reach someone who thinks differently and often simply does not want to learn; your patience, in dealing with the daily debates and the frustration of going over the same concept for weeks; and of course, your heart. Nothing else I’ve ever done is more of a labor of love than this.  

So take Winter Break, Spring Break, and Summer Break. In fact, take Friday Break also. Keep up your strength and safeguard your sanity. Take whatever breaks you can, when you can. Take Christmas Vacation, Halloween Rest, Easter Time-Out. Relax, regroup, rediscover. And then restart.

I suppose many typically-developing teenagers question why they need to learn certain things in school, or why they need to take a certain class. And you can usually reason with them along the lines of “You need to graduate from high school so that you can go to college. Or if you don’t go to college, you still need to graduate from high school so you can at least get an entry-level job somewhere. And in order to graduate from high school, you need to take some classes that you don’t like.” And they won’t like this reasoning, but they will eventually see the logic.

The autistic teen? Not so much. “You don’t think like I do.” This is what Nigel tells me after I have tried the above-mentioned reasoning tactic. He really does not see the merit in graduating from high school. “I want to live how I want to live. Why can’t we live like our cavemen ancestors? That was when survival was more needed than mathematics.” And he is serious.

This is what I deal with when I try to teach him algebra and essay writing. And I point out to him that at least now he can learn these mandatory things at home where it’s quiet and he is not distracted and harassed by other students. I also gently mention that I’ve made some major adjustments to be able to do this for him. But that’s a concept he can’t grasp. Even though once in a while he’ll take out the trash without complaining and then (!) he actually puts a new bag in the trashcan without being reminded (!) or he scoops some ice cream in a bowl for himself and then - on his own - scoops some in a bowl for me (!), even though he does these things once in a great while, he is still pervasively influenced by the aut, the self. Selfism. It’s not that he only thinks about himself or only cares about himself. It’s not egocentric or narcissistic. It’s that he cannot understand someone else’s viewpoint. He can’t possibly realize that, as a single parent, I go through a lot to be able to homeschool him. He can’t understand why education is necessary, beyond what he already knows. He is governed by the self. “You don’t think like I do” also means “I’m only able to think how I think.”

Mind you, this is just a mom still trying to figure it out. I think I know enough, and then months later I have another epiphany and I realize that I have so much more to learn. I know now that I will spend the rest of my days trying to understand my son’s autism. Trying to think like he does. Many parents say that having an autistic child will make you see the world differently. My son is fourteen and every day I am still realizing just how true - how profoundly true - that is.

There’s a saying in the autism community that you’re probably familiar with. “If you’ve met one child with autism, you’ve met one child with autism.” This loosely translates to “When an autistic teen doesn’t like math, he really doesn’t like math.” And neither do I, making it an arduous task to teach it to him. After trying to teach him long division and triple-digit multiplication late last year, I finally said, “Oh, look! A calculator!” and the two of us were much happier. That is until this year, when we got to algebra.

I tried to explain to my son as he gently banged his head on the kitchen table that if he wanted to attend the local public high school at some point (which he has indicated that he does), he would need to learn algebra. A simple equation like 2c + 1 = 7 would send him into a tirade: This is an outrage! Letters do not belong in math!

After explaining to him that the letters are called variables and they symbolize numbers that we need to figure out by solving the equation, an idea came to me. As we sat on the couch together with the dreaded math book in front of us, I suggested to Nigel that we substitute a question mark for the variables. In other words, 2c + 1 = 7 would become 2? + 1 = 7. I could actually feel Nigel calming down as soon as I rewrote the equations. And it worked. He listened to my instructions and he could solve the equations.

The drawback to this, of course, would be when we got to two variables within the same equation: 2x + y = 7. I started to think that we could use other symbols besides question marks, like an asterisk. Then I thought, okay, maybe the question mark is just a crutch, just something that will help him to understand the concept of variables so that he can learn how to solve the equations, and after a while he won’t need to substitute ? for c or x.

Following our local public school calendar, which gave all of last week off for conferences and Thanksgiving, we homeschoolers also took last week off. Today we got out the math book, Nigel groaned, and I turned to a new chapter, one that started working with two variables in the equations. We started working one together, and I wrote it out just as it was in the book: y = 2x + 8. Nigel did not ask about the question mark. He did not yell about letters not belonging in math. The question mark had been just a crutch, one that he quickly could do without. But he still reminds me every day that he doesn’t like math at all. “Just humor me,” I tell him, and then I explain what that means.

On a side note, I just discovered this article, Reaching an Autistic Teen, that I loved and wanted to share. It’s about a special school in Decatur, Georgia for autistic teenage boys. Be sure to check out the last page - there’s a bit about one of the boys wanting to build a “magic cabinet,” and it reminded me so much of something Nigel would want to do. I absolutely loved it.

Often it’s the little things that really make your day. With homeschool pictures, you get to choose the day, you get to take as many shots as you want until you get a good one, and you don’t have to write a check. You also get to make sure that your child is wearing something decent, not the ratty old T-shirt he wore last year without your knowledge that it was picture day at school. This year, I feel vindicated. Here is the homeschooled one, in all his self-buttoned glory.

Search engines amaze me. We can type in anything and in mere seconds, dozens, even hundreds and thousands, of listings pop up in some configuration of what we typed. We could spend days reading all of them. And so, when someone finds this web site by typing “teen homeschooled and doesn’t want to learn” into a search engine (as my blog tracking software indicated a few days ago), it amazes me.

The reason it amazes me is because, even though I have not yet written about it, that is what I have been experiencing recently with Nigel. It’s not that he doesn’t want to learn anything, it’s just that he only wants to learn what he wants to learn. He loves science, especially earth science and weather, but he is also interested in biology, chemistry, and even introductory physics. His favorite subject, of course, is history. His concept of the ideal learning approach is to sit on the couch and read National Geographics all day or, better yet, watch a DVD about whatever historical topic he’s studying. “That’s how I learn things,” he says. He feels that there’s no need for him to write an essay about it because it’s all in his head. And on some level, I’m sure it is all there. But I’ve got to prepare him for high school. I’ve got to teach him to write an organized essay, site sources, etc. For the time being, I’ll say that he’s resistant and leave it at that.

He is also highly resistant to learning math. Nigel, in an un-stereotypically autistic way, hates math. Numbers are good for historical dates, calendars, times of movie listings, how much a Lego set costs, phone numbers and addresses, but other than that he has no use for them. Why learn multiplication tables when we have calculators? “Long division is for losers,” he loves to say. “I’m going to destroy it.”

He says he’s going to “destroy education,” too. And Charlemagne, since Nigel thinks that’s who “invented” it. He’s going to go back in time and assassinate Charlemagne because he apparently had something to do with promoting education.  This plan came about when I pointed out today that he is required by law to be educated. “You can be educated at Blank Middle School or here at home. Which do you prefer?” “Neither. I’ll destroy education,” he says, and purposefully presses down too hard on his pencil so the lead breaks.

It isn’t supposed to go this way, I tell myself. He should appreciate that I’m homeschooling him so he doesn’t have to go to the school he hates. Doesn’t he realize all the sacrifices I’ve made as a single parent to be able to homeschool him? Of course not, and I can’t expect him to. He’s a kid, an autistic kid at that. But there’s only so much I can take. Only so much talk of “destroying” things, non-tangible things that can’t be destroyed anyway. “That doesn’t make sense,” I tell him when I am at my wit’s end, unable to try to reason with him any longer.

And so, to the person who Googled “teen homeschooled and doesn’t want to learn,” I say the following:  

You’re in good company. Despair not. Take it one day at a time. I don’t know if your teen is autistic or not, but mine is and that’s how I manage things. That’s the only way I’ve ever been able to manage it - one day at a time. That’s the only advice I’m able to offer. Some days they’ll listen and some days they won’t. Some days they get it, and some days they throw their math books across the room. And yeah, some days we want to throw the math book across the room too. Some days we want to yell, “This isn’t fun for me, either!” But we just keep at it. Yes, it is hard. What I call the “hurdle days” are especially hard. But it’s also worth it. Even though I’m making this up as I go along, I know that it’s worth it.

When Nigel was about six and seven and using some spontaneous speech, he would tell me when he wasn’t comfortable with a situation. “All done rafting,” he said when I took him rafting on a mild part of a local river. “All done doctor,” “All done wash face,” and “All done vacuum” were heard frequently, or just “All done” between hiccupping sobs when something really upset him. It is in this spirit that I attended his IEP meeting today.

I know they mean well, the IEP team. Of course they do. One of them has known and worked with Nigel for ten years. But when I tell them the poignant story about Nigel doing art therapy in his yearbook, drawing ape faces on all the faces of the kids who had bullied him at that school, and the IEP team tells me that “a lot” of it was Nigel’s “perception” that the kids were bullying him, it makes me want to scream. It makes me want to knock a few skulls, okay? And then they suggest that maybe in a couple of months Nigel might be able to come back part-time (since I am currently homeschooling him). So I try to diplomatically reply, “Nigel really does not want to set foot in this school again. It’ll be all I can do to get him to agree to come to the once-a-week social skills class.”

IEP meetings tend to be the bane of every special needs parent’s existence. Until just a few years ago, I had two kids on IEPs. I thought I was tough. I thought I could do an IEP in my sleep. Seven years ago, my children’s father moved 700 miles away, and so I have attended these IEP meetings alone. And no matter what, no matter how many of these I have attended in the last eleven years, I still feel just as vulnerable. I still feel myself on the verge of tears, trying to hold it together, trying to convey to them No, it WASN’T just Nigel’s PERCEPTION that he was being bullied. How could they say that to me? After all that my child has been through? After all the calls they made to me at work, telling me I had to pick him up because of some behavioral issue they couldn’t handle. Because the constant bullying had driven him to such an agitated state that he could not even function. He could not make it through the day. It was not just his “perception.” That much I knew, as I breathed in sharply and felt my heart rate increase and my blood race through my veins at 8:15 this morning. I just looked at the person who said it. And then I looked away.

After that, we discussed his IEP goals, we talked about the social skills class, they asked how he was doing (much better now that he doesn’t perceive himself to be bullied anymore, thank you!), and they provided some math and writing materials that will be helpful for homeschooling. We discussed the benchmark testing he will need to do in the spring. We touched on options for high school next year.  We signed the papers. Said Thank you for coming. Went through the motions.

But at the end of the hour, as I walked out to my car, I realized that even though I had been upset by someone’s insensitive remark, my mantra pulled me through. “In an hour this will be over, and Nigel’s needs will be met.” This is what I say to myself before every IEP meeting. And somehow, no matter what happens, it works. All done IEP.

There are no bells, no forced schedules, no dress code. No busses, no other students, no anxiety. This is homeschool. And even though it is the ideal learning environment for some kids (like Nigel), it’s still school. And he’d rather not do it.

We’re relatively new to homeschooling, having started six months ago (and the past three months were summer vacation), but, knowing my son, I think that even if we’d been doing it for years he would still complain, as he did this morning. I pointed out to him that I was sure he’d rather be doing homeschool than be in a classroom with lots of other students bothering him. You’ve heard of fantasy football? Nigel wants to do fantasy school. He responded, “I want to do school on a video screen lying in bed.”

So, even for homeschoolers, it’s hard to get in gear. Maybe it’s because we don’t have bells and lockers and busses. I’m still working on our schedule because we’re waiting to hear back about the time slot for the social skills group meeting that Nigel will attend once a week at the middle school. And we’re waiting to hear back about checking out an eighth grade math book for the year.  So for now, we work with our tentative schedule, we do a review of last year, we go through the math and grammar workbooks, we discuss our plans for electives (Spanish, psychology, and judo), and wait for things to be ironed out. It’s our way of warming up and easing back into academia. Short of lying in bed with a video screen, that is.

Now that it’s summer, our first term of homeschooling is over, and I thought I’d write about how it went. Overall, it was wonderful, and so good to know that Nigel was actually learning something instead of being sent to watch a video in the library as he had at the middle school. Considering the fact that I had to pull him out at the beginning of December and wasn’t able to start homeschooling him until mid-February, he learned a lot. We went quickly through all the science and social science subjects but didn’t get as far as I would have hoped in math and language arts. Next year that is what we will focus on.

I learned a lot about my son’s learning style and how to teach him. He has a semi-photographic memory which helps immensely in fact-memorizing subjects like science and social science, so that’s why we breezed through those. Language arts is challenging because it is difficult for him to organize his mind enough to write an essay, which is what we will spend much of our time on next year. And then there’s math. Nigel, I discovered, is a kinesthetic learner. He learns by doing things, physically taking things apart and putting them back together, climbing, mowing, cooking, sewing, even typing. So I had to figure out a way to teach math kinesthetically.

I realized as we went along that if anyone had tried to teach him division in the past, they did not succeed. I had to start from the beginning. And what I did was this: I got a bag of raw almonds and pulled out 12 of them. Then I said, “Nigel, how many groups of 3 are in 12?” And he looked at the almonds on the kitchen table and he started separating them into groups of 3, and then I saw the light bulb go on in his head. He got it! There was a hint of a smile on his face as he quickly finished separating and then said, “Four!” And then I showed him how that translated on paper with the long division sign, because when we first started going over it, he acted like he had never seen it before. My boy must have just felt so lost at school.

The other thing I did in teaching math which helped tremendously was to write out a list of steps for working with fractions, like changing improper fractions into mixed numbers, which I had written about previously. I was smacking my forehead because I didn’t figure this out until near the end of the school year, but at least I did figure it out, and I will certainly be implementing the “written list of steps” technique next year.

The last two days of homeschool, I had Nigel take a CD-Rom test, State Standards Middle School Edition. The tests were great, but I experienced some aggravating compatibility issues. The tech support guy I spoke to for over half an hour was not sure if it was a Vista issue or my dual-core processor. After uninstalling and reinstalling both Quicktime and the test program, it still takes about fifteen minutes to load the program, but once we get the test up and running, the test itself works fine. It’s easy for Nigel to navigate, and at the end it shows his scores in different categories of each subject so that we know which skills he needs to work on next year and in which areas he’s doing well. I’m very satisfied with how homeschooling went for the past four months, and I’m looking forward to next year. I think we’ll both really hit our stride.

Recently I wrote about experiencing setbacks with Nigel’s development and how it gets me down. It seems like I’ll never get a break. But what I didn’t remember is that usually when setbacks occur, soon afterward something happens that’s positive, a step in the right direction. And that’s exactly what happened today.

The school subject that Nigel has the most trouble with is math. Yes, math. Is that “anti-autistic?” I seem to read so much about how math appeals to autistic people because of the formulas, the predictability of working with numbers, and I don’t know why else because I’ve never liked math, so trying to come up with reasons to like it is a stretch for me. But I’ve always done okay with it, learned the basics, use them regularly, and identify the importance of mathematical knowledge as I’m trying to teach Nigel. But he has so much trouble with it (and no interest - must be genetic), that even when we go over the same problems and I walk him through so many and do them with him, he still doesn’t get it. After working on multiplying fractions for close to two weeks with no hope of him retaining any of it, I wasn’t sure what to do.

Then I remembered: break it down into written steps. That’s the only way I’ve been able to get him to pick up his room. That’s how some of his classroom teachers got him to work on activities and follow directions. And that’s how he was able to just get through the day when he was younger: having a schedule broken down into steps. I decided to break down the steps of what he was having the most trouble with - changing improper fractions into mixed numbers. Here is what I wrote for him:

Steps to convert improper fractions to mixed numbers:

1) Divide the numerator (# on top) by the denominator (# on bottom)

2) Write down the whole #

3) Multiply the whole # by the denominator

4) Subtract that # from the numerator

5) Answer is the new numerator for mixed #, placed over same denominator

He did the next problem completely unassisted in less than two minutes. I have to remember to break things down into written steps more often. Why do I forget? It should be common sense to me by now! Maybe I’ll remember better now, since I’ve written about it here. I think that’s something that works for both of us. 

Because of Nigel’s aversion to holding a writing instrument, and his earlier difficulty with acquiring verbal skills, I had always thought that learning to type would liberate him to no end. He had taught himself to read at three and a half, so I didn’t think it was too much of a stretch.

I had purchased a kids’ learn-to-type CD-Rom program years ago, when he was about seven, but he had been resistent to working with it until we started homeschooling three months ago. Maybe it seemed academic to him and he didn’t want to do “work” outside of school. When school became something he did at home, he was only too happy to work with the typing CD-Rom during the designated time for electives. And he loves it.

That probably has something to do with the fact that the CD-Rom is by Disney - Adventures in Typing with Timon and Pumbaa. The Lion King was the first Disney movie he saw that motivated him to try to quote single words, his first attempts at echolalia. And I had seen it on the big screen when I was pregnant with him, so it’s always been a special movie for me as well. But now I love it because it has motivated Nigel to learn to type, and he’s enjoying it. He typed the horse video summary by himself, as well as several others. He says he’s going to type up a list of all his invention ideas.

So, typing, paragraphs . . . maybe next a mini-essay? A blog post? Not quite yet, but someday, quite possibly soon.