I'm going to give the presentation very soon, actually, and have started another thread in order to get some help with it, but I'm putting it here too:
Next week, I shall be giving an informational and instructional presentation on how to help Aspies in the classroom and in the school yard. I have ten minutes, including time for questions. I've just done a draft that I know is longer than that. Plus, I'm not sure if I've made too many generalisations from my own experience, are about to drone on uselessly about unimportant things, or have left any crucial concerns out.
Think, what do you wish your teachers had known about your condition when they were teaching you, and what do you wish they would have done differently?
I've copied the first part of the draft below, and would love some feedback on it. I'm also going to run through the presentation with my family, the members of the Aspie club I started late last year, and a few teachers. I want to make this as accurate, useful, clear and coherent as possible, and I would really appreciate your help.
Word of warning: the draft is extremely long. Please read as much as you can, and give me as much feedback as you can. It would be an incredible help to me, and I would be very grateful for it.
I'll post the other part later.
Thanks in advance:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
For those of you who don’t know Asperger’s Syndrome is: a developmental disorder characterized by severely impaired social skills, repetitive behaviours, and often, a narrow set of interests, but not involving delayed development of linguistic and cognitive abilities: now considered one of the autism spectrum disorders. But it’s high functioning autism that’s less noticeable usually.
Basically, people with Asperger’s think and feel differently to Neurotypicals, or “normal” people. So now I’m going to discuss those key differences and give suggestions of ways to help students with Asperger’s when it comes to those differences.
A really important one is a difficulty with facial expressions and body language. A lot of the time they’re either completely blank on the face and showing nothing of how they’re feeling, or they’re showing something that’s completely inaccurate. We can often be very hard to read, and find it hard to read other people. Sometimes we have no clue what a person’s body language means, or we have some vague idea – like recognising that they’re sad – but we can’t deduce exactly why, and we need to know exactly why in order to know how to respond to them feeling that way.
So the way to overcome that barrier is really to communicate verbally, and very specifically. Aspies are usually completely honest and open people. They see no reason to lie, or why you shouldn’t call someone ugly if they are, or say exactly what your bowel problems are if that’s the truth. If you think they’re upset, and you ask them directly if they are, they won’t mind and they’ll tell you what’s happening, but you need to be specific. Don’t ask, “Are you okay?” because that’s so vague and they’ll find it really difficult to summarise how they’re feeling and what they’re thinking and what’s happening in their lives, so they’ll probably just say “yes” to keep you happy. It’s much better to ask something like, “from the way you were scrunching up your face you looked like you were had a problem that was really affecting you, am I right.” And if they say yes, then ask, “What exactly was bothering you?” because they won’t necessarily infer that you wanted them to elaborate on what the problem actually is. It might seem really wordy and indiscreet, but that’s actually really helpful for us to know exactly what you’re thinking so we don’t have to guess. If you’re visibly annoyed with them – they will pick up on the fact that you’re annoyed, but won’t know exactly why – just tell them that you can’t help getting impatient, but that you don’t blame them. We do appreciate this honesty, because it means we don’t have to guess at what’s going on inside your head, and whether or not it has anything to do with us. We’re also not really aware of what we’re doing with our face, so that helps.
Another thing we find really difficult is knowing what to do in a conversation. We often can’t recognise when it’s our turn, when it’s someone else’s turn, when someone’s addressing us if they don’t use our name, when someone wants us to respond, when someone’s trying to end a conversation and so on. In the classroom, what really gets frustrating is knowing whether or not it’s hands up or just an all-in. Especially if it switches during the lesson, because what that means they either talk out of turn without realising, or they have something to contribute, but they don’t know how to cut into the conversation and get it in, so they stay silent and it either goes unheard or someone else says it, even though they thought of it first. Either way, it’s really disheartening, so sticking to hands up really helps. It might also be useful to get them to write these thoughts down so that they’re not lost. Aspies are often extremely frustrated because thoughts and feelings that they can’t express, or never get the chance, pile up internally and come out eventually in very confusing and inexplicable ways. It’s a good idea to make sure that these thoughts are expressed before they drive the poor aspie mad.
In terms of outside the classroom, if they want to talk for ages, and you can’t or you’ve just had enough, feel free to tell them. Say, “I’d like to talk about something else now, because I’m getting bored,” or “I have to leave now,” – only if you really do have to leave, though, of course. Not only do they give out blunt honesty, but they can certainly take it from other people, and even expect it. They don’t understand how honesty can be seen as rude. However, it also makes them very dependable, very likely to keep their promises and often means they have a much higher worth ethic than most Neurotypical students.
We often get into these endless, repetitive conversations because have we have these particular obsessive interests that can keep us occupied for ages. For me, it’s language and literature that I’m obsessed with, which is very convenient because they’re two of the subjects I’m doing this year, but it’s usually something much more specific like penguins. Unfortunately, there’s no school subject dedicated to that, so they would satisfy that by talking endlessly about penguins to someone, not even trying to pick up on social cues of disinterest, because they’re so absorbed. So, three things you could do there:
1. Find someone else with the same interest, or a very similar one – there’s bound to be someone – and they’ll be able to connect
2. Try to tease out of them a few other interests – it’s difficult, but it is impossible, just get them to think hard about it
3. Give them a numerical limit on how much they can talk about it. So say – time yourself, you can only speak for two minutes or say ten things about penguins before you have to let the other person speak
That’s another thing, with the specificity comes a difficulty with understanding figures of speech – if you tell them to wake a couple of minutes, they’ll think to themselves “okay, two minutes” get out their watch and time you – so always be specific, say “at least two minutes” and make sure they’ve understood you’re instruction. I remember when I was in primary school we were doing a writing task that I should have been blitzing, but I just wasn’t getting the instructions. So finally the teacher asked, “weren’t you listening when I was explaining what you had to do.” So, I thought, alright, she’s asking, “Were you not listening” – like most Aspies, most of my language skills were developed through reading, not speaking, and since I mostly read classic fantasy, I had much more knowledge of old-fashioned British English than I did of the Australian vernacular – so I thought the question meant, “Is it true that you were not listening?” to which I replied “no” because that wasn’t true. I was listening, I just didn’t understand. You can see how specific you often need to be.
Also, when encouraging them to socialise, never just throw them into a babbling bunch of Neurotypical students. Having conversations with six or seven people at once is usually impossible for Aspies. Instead, find someone else who is alone and not talking to anyone, and get them to engage in a simple two-way conversation, which still requires effort, but is much less confusing and scary for them.
Aspies can also have a lot of sensory issues, so they can be very overstimulated and stifled by loud noises, strong smells, bright lights and so on. So keep this in mind as you might need to move them in the classroom to a more quiet, less bright and less smelly spot. Again, ask them directly if any of these things are bothering them. What they’ll often to do deal with discomfort, mostly anxiety, is stim. They’ll perform a repetitive action, like swaying or bobbing or clasping their hands together, that relieves the stress. They can control this, technically, but often will not be aware that they’re doing it. They don’t consciously choose to do these actions, and if they’re not paying attention to what they’re doing, they will start. Socially, they may often be teased by these habits, but everyone stims, or self-stimulates, to some degree. Everyone fidgets. So it’s good to remind other students of that.
