NovWriMo Plus Forum

Phoenix,

Yes. Conversation's really important, especially with an autistic person because it's often chance remarks which trigger breakthroughs in communication. I'm going to illustrate this with an example but firstly I'll admit that I found out only last year, when I attended a seminar for parents of disabled children, that it isn't enough to provide the good things our children ask for. We have to find ways of discovering what they want or need but don't request simply because they don't have the words or don't realise it's something they can aspire to having. The lecturer's example was her multiply-disabled daughter's university education. She'd been busy providing her physical, medical and care needs and helping her overcome her autism difficulties but it hadn't occured to her that her daughter might have ambitions other than just living as normal a life as possible. We really need to work on raising expectations in families of children who have disabilities and/or who need additional help to access their education.

Communication illustration:

When our second child (Daniel) was seven years old (in Year 3, and newly moved up to Junior school), he had such big problems with his teacher that the headteacher wanted to transfer him to another school. I'd better point out that Daniel has autistic frankness and he'd insulted both his class-teacher and his school principal so she'd given me fifteen minutes' notice to remove him from the school premises and never take him back. At this time we all thought he was "normal" so all his diagnoses were years away and he just seemed like a boy who couldn't (or who chose not to) conform to the school system.

I taught Daniel at home for a few weeks while we sorted out a temporary place at our local catholic school and he attended there for half a term. My choice would have been a clean transfer but it ended up being a six-week trial period. He liked the new school and so did we (his parents) but he had to return to the first school after the term was over and the following three years were a very unhappy time for all of us. Some of it was a coincidence but some would have been helped if Daniel had been able to stay away from that particular Junior school.

Over three years later, Robert told me about some public remarks which the teacher had made while Daniel was absent from the school. Some remark of mine had triggered Robert's memory and I wish it had happened earlier. If I had known about them at the time, I might have been able to build a case for removing Daniel from the school or at least from that teacher's care.

My children and I have processing lag, which means we don't immediately understand what we've heard. I used to think my hearing was somehow slower than other people's because I used to have to ask speakers to repeat but then I would seem to hear what they'd just said before they'd started to repeat it. The result is that an autistic person might be able to hold a very technical conversation but seems slow to understand simple terms. I would think this is because the technical jargon requires a slower conversation with no expectation of immediate response. Speakers can help autistic people by using the six-second rule whereby, you allow six seconds before expecting a response and, if you repeat, you use the same words so your listener doesn't have to discard your part-processed earlier version in order to begin processing your new remark.

This was going to be incomprehensibly long but I've clipped some out for use in my book. Thank you for helping me with that. I hope some of this information is useful for you in your teaching work and, as a result, helpful to any more autistic students you have.

Best wishes,
Cathie