What Could We With Autism Know on Today's Exams?
The world – whatever we might think when terrified by its vastness and our own impotence, or embittered by its indifference to individual suffering, of people, animals, and perhaps even plants, for why are we so sure that plants feel no pain; whatever we might think of its expanses pierced by the rays of stars surrounded by planets we’ve just begun to discover, planets already dead? still dead? we just don’t know; whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which we’ve got reserved tickets, but tickets whose lifespan is laughably short, bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates; whatever else we might think of this world – it is astonishing.
The Poet and World, from Nobel Laureate Wislawa Szymborska's lecture on the occasion of its awarding, December 7th, 1996.
This always makes me think of Annie and how it must have been for her to make sense of her home-country of water, as changeable as typhoon and dead doldrums, as differing as icebergs and fruity breezes; and with its tiny fringes of land. (When the distance from New Bedford to the bulge of Brazil is the shortest leg of a journey, we are talking truly massive here.) Something about this happening in my family may be why I gravitate to being as near as I can be to as many people with autism as will let me.
In my second lesson on my first day as a teacher in a great Spectrum school I’d used way to many words to describe how I wanted each of the seven young men, “non-verbal” (poor terminology), to build towers out of paper clips and paper. My students tried to be polite, but my teammates were moving in to help us all. In desperation, I started building one myself and before I have made anything stay horizontal everyone was on their way. Among the thousands of things I learned was that the unexpected wasn’t my students favorite thing, but it could work out OK if things made sense. One of the reasons that this wonderful school worked so well is that there were lovely regularities, modes for presenting change, and related modes when it was unexpected. Too many words? Apologize, Amy, shut up, and demonstrate. Too many noises in the hall? Start out when it is at its most peaceful and it can be astonishing that one’s student not only appreciate the quiet, but the plan itself.
My students with autism are the least ‘out-of touch with reality’ I’ve ever met. As soon as they possibly can, they gravitate towards what is the most sensible. Sure, it takes a lot of effort on the part of all involved, and a lot of time – including a decade or two of just growing – to settle into good-enough continuity and good-enough change.
That’s what the Sometimes books were written for. Sometimes a thing is this and sometimes a thing is that, but it is always what it is.
This side of the fountain being what it is, there are a few test questions, but only a week-old putti’s toe at the outskirts of a great big glorious fountain worth so far. Youth and adults with autism are who I will hire to cocreate and construct TA MOOSK. I know a brilliant librarian I’d try to poach first of all (yes CR, I mean you). I suspect he’d already be playing around with where Level’s T and 19 intersect before we all finish reading this. (And this all will be nothing new to him.)