A friend of mine who is an exceptionally talented high school math teacher recently told me this story about one of her students with Asperger's Syndrome. At the beginnng of the year, she asks the students to write her a letter introducing themselves to her. She gives them a few specific questions to respond to. At the end of class, the student with Asperger's told her that he already knew what letter he was going to write to her. He was going to write the letter "I." (9/6/08)
I was teaching in Germany for the Department of Defense Schools (DoDDS). As Child Committee Chairperson, one of my tasks was to review new special education students' incoming records for appropriate placement. Billy's mother brought his records to the CSC office in a box (not a good sign) and demanded that he be placed in school immediately.
When I asked her about his educational history, she said that her family had been in DoDDS before when Billy was in the first grade and they were sent back to the States because Billy's educational needs could not be met. Five years later, they were told that his needs could be met and they returned for an overseas assignment in Germany. She stated that he had Asperger's Syndrome.
I had never heard of that disability before so she eagerly provided me with both oral and written information about this disorder. For placement consideration, the most important piece of information that I received from her, after some questioning, was that Billy had never been in a regular school before and had never been included in any regular school activities. For five years, he had attended a day school affiliated with a hospital. But, she insisted that he was ready for a full day of regular education. I told her that I needed some time to review his file completely and that I would contact her within 24 hours. She left stating that he would be in school on Thursday (two days later).
Billy's file was complete with medical, psychological, and educational information. He had been tested and tested and tested. He was taking several types of medication for hyperactivity and depression. He had never been mainstreamed or included in regular school, not even for lunch.
I read the articles on Asperger's including "An Anthropologist on Mars" written by Oliver Sacks (A Neurologist's Notebook in The New Yorker, 12/27/93 and 1/3/94) about Temple Grandin, an Associate Professor in Animal Science at Colorado State University. Described in the 1940's by Leo Kanner in Baltimore and Hans Asperger in Vienna, Kanner's account was predominant in the U. S.. Asperger's account was only translated into English in 1991. Asperger's account highlighted the positive possibilities. He concurred with Kanner about some qualities of this disorder such aloneness, obsessive insistence on sameness, and highly focused, intense fascinations and fixations. Asperger stressed the lack of eye contact, poverty of facial expressions and gestures, abnormal, unnatural use of language, and impulsive behavior regardless of the demands of the environment, and he noted a "particular originality of thought and experience, which may well lead to exceptional achievements in life."
Asperger's Syndrome is a form of autism. Autism may be traced to biological or genetic factors. Students with Asperger's Syndrome have normal or superior intelligence but have difficulty with abstract language and social skills. Many are weak in writing and math skills. Most of all, these kids seem to be odd, eccentric, weird, and robotic.
Being a veteran teacher of secondary students, I knew that the most important thing in the school day to adolescents was lunch, which most of the boys eat on their way to the cafeteria, then go outside for recess or play time. Billy could succeed in the academics, but he would definitely fail in the social environment.
So, I convened an IEP team meeting to develop an appropriate schedule and IEP for Billy. Mother and Billy attended. He played his video games throughout the meeting talking only to the characters on the screen. The people at the meeting did not really exist for him.
At one point during the meeting, I asked Billy to to turn off his computer game and look at me. With much groaning and moaning, he did.
I asked him, "What do you think you need to learn in school?"
Without hesitation, he replied, "How to play."
The IEP Team agreed that Billy needed a gradual assimilation into regular school and that the focus of his IEP would be the development of age-appropriate social skills. Fortunately, we had a sufficient number of instructional assistants so I could assign an energetic, male to teach Billy how to play the games of middle school.
He began his school day with one period in math, his strongest academic area, and one period of resource that was devoted to learning how to play the games that the other boys played during lunch time. The instructional assistant taught Billy one-to-one, then added single players to recreate the playground scene. Although these students were not "friends," they were peers with whom Billy could interact and imitate their age-appropriate behaviors.
As Billy's social skills repertoire grew, we added more academic classes. By grade 8, he was attending a full day successfully. Although his physical movements were still robotic, he had learned to play the games of school and was not all alone.
In fact, he asked me to sponsor a chess club during lunch time so students would have something to do on rainy days, of which there are many in Germany. I supervised the activity, but he enlisted the chess players. This feeling of aloneness often exacerbates any depression during adolescence and can be devastating, even leading to suicide for some teens. Hopefully, we had avoided that road, but the many struggles of normal adolescence are much more difficult for these kids as they try to intellectually understand emotions that they cannot feel but others are feeling intensely.
One day, Billy came marching into my classroom and stated without facial expression, "I got an A on my science test." I mirrored his expressionless face and restated his sentence. He put his fingers to the corners of his mouth and pushed his lips up to form a smile and said, "I got an 'A' on my science test." He had learned to imitate expressions of emotion but did not have the feelings to connect to the words. It made perfect sense to me why his favorite character on TV was Data in the Star Trek series!
Howard Gardner, a psychologist who writes about multiple intelligences, says that the autistic mind may be highly developed in visual, musical, and logical intelligences, but the personal intelligences, the ability to perceive one's own and others' states of mind, lag grossly behind. As Billy said to me one day after he had made a joke, lame as it was, "I am indeed a work of art." All human beings are works of art to be appreciated and understood as best we can with the knowledge we have and the emotions that we feel. I appreciate the insight that Billy gave me into his unique world and I still admire his spirit that gives him the strength to try to understand the complexities of human emotions without being able to feel the pleasure that such understanding might bring.
* A good resource for teachers is Asperger Syndrome: A Practical Guide for Teachers, by Val Cumine, Julia Leach, and Gill Stevenson (London: David Fulton Publishers, 1998). This book is available from Amazon.com.
*Thinking in Pictures and other books by Temple Grandin
