I want to talk about something real quick about something that is common for
autistics, for children, for all of us essentially, and that's education.
Autism and education is something that needs immediate action in my opinion, in
my experience. There are a great deal of opposing forces upon the
autistic phenotype within the education system, the classroom, and the school day,
the structure of the school day even, which is likely the hardest. The easy
ones to kind of understand are the social aspects of it, the social
dynamics, the speech and language, and the sensory processing. The classroom is
full of other students, of course, that is what it is. Some of the six are one-on-one
or small groups, and that's great. We have to first understand that there are
underlying feelings of wanting to help that are also driving forces against
this. We have family members, loved ones, parents, brother, sisters, whatever the
cases, and educators, school staff, support staff, special education teachers,
principals, all those involved in the school district, in the school building,
and they all want to help. What is lacking is their understanding of autism is
foremost. So within that school day, or the classroom, the socialness, for human
socialness is the most unpredictable thing that we can do. There are a lot of
different things that could happen at any time, and they have various meanings.
Some behaviors and actions have multiple meanings, so it's hard to
really dissect this and interpret this in real time because of the the sensory
processing problems and the way that memory works and understanding works.
There's a lot to keep up with in the school building. The first symptom, I use
symptom because that's what the DSM uses, the first kind of trait or phenotype
observed in autism, or that is social withdrawal. This is for a reason. Whatever
that reason is, is debated in science, and that's fine. But what's not debated is
there is a social withdrawal. There is a lack of interest. So we're kind of forced
into this environment that without this socialness, without that interaction, it
doesn't work. And that's a problem. So how to really reduce the opposing forces
upon the autistic phenotype needs to rest. People need to understand that they
have these underlying drives and urges to help and tell the autistic person what
they need to do, what they ought to do, what they can do, what they should do,
etc. And this is a big problem. The classroom is filled with many
students and there's a lot to keep up with. Whenever we hear things, whenever
we're being instructed, the social sensory processing part is a little bit
different. And if this isn't you, then you won't know. But Temple Grandin
describes it very similar to my experience. If you're talking to me and
you're describing something, be it something that I'm familiar with or if
it's a brand new novel thing, I'm taking that information and I'm building, I'm
building it up from these catalogs and samples that I'm already aware of in life.
And I'm just piecing these things together and it comes into a visual
form. Sometimes it's more like a movie where I'm seeing it play out. Remember
the JD Barker episode, we talked about it a little bit, and the episode on the
default mode network. I have to bring these things into this living arrangement
in my mind. This is how we think and how we conceptualize it, bring things into
abstract things into creation. And sometimes this takes time, especially if
it's new. And what's not understood is by others, how long should that take?
And how well are you developing this? Remember whenever I mentioned that the
autistic phenotype, the autistic brain is similar to AI where it's just taking
endless amounts of images and piecing them together to create this worn image.
So we have to consider that. We have to consider that's likely, I don't know for
sure, but likely much different than others. And you can also start to
understand why the social withdrawal, because the outside world is unpredictable
and there is a lot of sensory processing going on. So if we can just
maintain a certain object, topic, or subject, now you can see why we prefer
that. We should be able to see that by now. We don't really do relationships with
other humans, even though there are times that there are desires for that. What
we do is take this object or subject or topic and we can just dive into that and
like no other. And this was all shown with the Canterkids in Asperger's as well.
Asperger has his first paper in 1944. You can go to the episode on that,
but he covers autistic intelligence and Asperger's little professors. This is
because of what I'm describing here. Now, with this sensory processing like this,
and it's really hard to keep up, especially for taking notes, especially
if the professor or teacher has material to get through, has a goal to get
through by the end of the period or the end of the day. Sometimes that's why the
small group or one-on-one is very much a better scenario. But the biggest thing I
want to mention is B3. If you don't know B3, the DSM breaks down the phenotypes
or the symptoms into two categories, two criteria, criteria A, which is social
interaction and communication and criteria B, restricted repetitive behaviors.
You probably know that, but B3, and I've done an episode on B3 as well,
restricted fixated interests that are abnormal and intensity or focus, how
that was ever arranged in those that without wording is unbelievable to me.
You can't say something is abnormal if it is an interest and it has such
intensity or focus. Now connect that back to Asperger comments and our ability to
just fixate on that subject or topic or object and just perfect that. What we are
doing is building up that category or that catalog of information and then we
can store it and then we have that. We are now equipped with that. I don't say
that we exhaust it, but it does, we do perfect it. We do perfect things I think
quite efficiently, but they're very limited. The number of them could be
limited and this is where the school day is really, this needs to be addressed
faster than anything with autism and that's the subject switching. You can't
expect us to be in a school for seven, seven and a half or so hours depending on
the district and participate in seven different subjects. It's not working and
it will never work. We can't have a subject for 45 to 15 minutes and beyond
that with everything I just explained and then switch to a different subject.
45-15 minutes on a different subject and be able to conceptualize this, build
this up, whatever the topic or discussion is and then switch again to a
whole different topic. 45-15 minutes, be present in that, build up the category,
the catalog, being able to conceptualize what is happening and just repeat this
all day long for seven periods. It is not working. There's a big push as well from
people that are not autistic. They don't know what this is like and say, we need
to be in the general education classroom again. That's fine if you can do it.
Most can't, but it's being forced because other people, what I described earlier,
these educators, these people that have underlying urges to want to help, they
think, they know what's best. There also could be underlying drives that they're
career driven. They want you to show that, well I helped help include the
autistics again. This is not working. B3, if you don't know B3 then you should
just not comment on autism ever. This is very, this is a very tough thing with
autism. Being able to switch tasks and not, and leave that behind, you ought to
know B2 as well with the scheduling, the rigorous schedules and the sameness. How,
how can you define criteria B and how can you define the school day in the
classroom knowing that there are complete opposites and expect us to be
able to move through education properly based off of social norms, based off of
this pseudo criteria, the curriculum and think, okay you've made it through
education, now what? Well I didn't make it through education because education
sucks to me. If you don't take, if you don't consider B3, you're not doing
anything. If you really want to understand an
autistic's problem, you have to calculate how much we are forced into social
norms and then consider our specific phenotype. I don't want seven subjects in
one day. I didn't then, and I don't want it now, but there are still children being
forced to do this and nobody seems to grasp this. What is going on in education?
What is going on with the DOE and spending and the results suck? Why can't
we be in an environment that fits our phenotype? As kids, they probably don't
even understand that this is a driving force onto them and parents either
because they're just trying to figure out things too. Until B3 is
considered and understood, you won't do anything. So I hope I have a message of
if the child wants to just learn a couple of topics and perfect those, then do
that. Allow that to be good enough. You don't get to say what's good enough.