The New York Transit Museum has started a new program that is aimed at kids with autism. Knowing that autistic people are drawn to trains, their regular routes, and patterns of tracks, they have started a program that uses their love of trains to build social skills.
At a meeting with Ian's school last month, his teachers' eyes glazed over when I told them about the amazing robots that he was creating with Lego and his prodigious memory. They had no interest in robotics or computers or the fact that he can mulitply 15 x 7 in his head. His speech teacher told me that they preferred to work on his deficits. I didn't say anything, because it is useless to argue with them. But I was thinking, "how would you feel if you only had to do things that you were bad at all day and didn't get to do the things that you were good at?"
Autism education is still in the dark ages. Even the best programs still regard autism as just another disability. The primary goal is just to push the kids into a regular classroom as fast as they can. But, for many kids with autism, a regular education program isn't right. It's too focused on things that they are bad at. For example, many kids with autism are terrible at word problems in math, but are fantastic at computation. But the poor scores on the word problems leads to F's on the report card. Maybe they shouldn't have to do word problems. Or maybe the word problems should be just about trains and robots.
Every week at school, Ian gets pulled out of his classroom for speech therapy. In these 20 minute sessions, Ian is shown pictures of various scenes and he has to explain what's going on, what's going to happen next, and so on. These sessions are incredibly boring, but the poor kid has been in therapy since he's been 2-1/2, so he either particaptes willingly or stares blankly and pretends to be dumb. He never protests.
His best speech lessons happen outside of the school at the local YWCA. He attends a special swim class where high school volunteers teach disabled kids how to swim. Most of the kids in the class aren't like Ian. They are severely disabled, but they learn how to swim. It's incredibly inspiring and I'm nudging my brother the reporter to write about it for the Times.
At the Y, Ian is now swimming across the pool with his face in the water. And he's also getting speech therapy, even though it isn't officially speech therapy. The high school kid, who is completely untrained in these matters, talks with Ian the entire time. He and Ian go back and forth discussing what he is supposed to do in the water and what exercise he wants to practice next. There are no xeroxed pictures to discuss and no cubicle.
The exercise is also fantastic in and of itself. I swear that his speech is better after the exercise in the pool.
So, kids like Ian learn best when we start with their strength, they learn naturally, and there is a lot of exercise. But, you know, I think we all learn better that way, too. I think that one of the promises of special education is that it has the potential to reform the existing classroom model for all kids.