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Reflections…

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I have been looking back through some files laterly. Going over old blog posts that never got posted, or lesson plans I did 10 years ago that might be usable again. Part of this is to clear up some clutter. Part of this is to reorganize.

I don’t know about others, but organizing things helps me disconnect and relax. It doesn’t seem to matter if it is digital reorganizing, or physical. I never seem to be happy with an organization structure. It is never good enough, but always end up good enough. Does that make sense?

Like I am not happy with the organization, but I don’t have the ability to do more with it, so I have to abandon it until later when I will start fresh. This goes for My classroom, my shelves, my computer.

When I am overwhelmed, I start. Especially if I can’t get into one of my other tactics.

I love my new school. It’s not perfect, but its human. Of course I don’t mean literally, but due to its size, it doesn’t feel like a corporation disguised as an educational facility. I have a history with schools like that.

A lot has been occupying my mind lately, and part of it can be summed up with waiting for the other shoe to drop. I am making rookie mistakes, and am not organized enough in my class. (Thus the obsession wit htrying to find ways to do better). I want to be the fun teacher, that has all these cool projects and fun activities. But I get overwhelmed and lost trying to prepare them in advance.

Today I get so stimulated that I let my sound sensitivity get to me. I am teaching grade 2 this year, they will get loud, and I just couldn’t handle it for a bit. It hurt, and I raised my voice. Then I had a quiet talk apologizing to everyone.

I do that a lot. I apologize.
Should I ? I don’t know. With my students, they need to know, that I am sensitive to certain things, and it is not their fault. Adults, too.

There is a lot of talk about autism lately, and a lot of misinformation. (I’m looking at you , vaccines and Tylenol). There are groups of people in the world that think we should just disappear. There are groups of people out there who think we should just fit in. And there are groups of people out there who think we should just be proud of who we are, and screw the rest of the world.

I was always taught to show respect, and that if we do something that bothers others, to apologize for it. But the key word here is do. Some people want us to apologize for being.

There are people, several people, in my life that believe they understand what the autistic people are going through, or what we should be doing. People are showing me tiktocs of Autistic kids or Mom’s who have autistic kids, and asking my feeling on these. I feel like the whole genre of family tiktok/ Youtube should cease to exist. Don’t film your family for other people’s entertainment.

I have people in my life who want to tell me about every other autistic person they have met, and their difficulties. Not how they tried to help, or explain things to, or assist the autist. Just tell me about the mistakes, or social faux pas they make.

I have people in my life now that treat autistic children like they are broken, and get angry at them when they are needing a brain break, or need to just move, or do anything different.

I have someone in my life now that has made comments about me taking things literal, or not understanding jokes. I think he means well, and is just trying to communicate his concerns about communicating with me.

I don’t want to be the bad guy who has to sit down with all of these people and explain why this is exhausting to me, or hurtful, or that their efforts to help a child, could be doing the opposite.

I don’t think I have the energy for that.

But here’s the thing. All of the people I am ranting about have the best intentions. They are all trying to understand more in their own way. And Misinformation is everywhere.

I ran across this half finished blog article I wrote back in 2017. i will post it below for you. Please enjoy, or not. You can see maybe what my journey has been like for the last few years.

ADHD & Autistic Kids in the APS

ADHD & Autistic Kids in the APSEvery now and then I feel like I have to step up and say something about what I see happening, especially in our program. Last time I wrote one of these, it was taken as an attack on some of my team and I do not want this to come off sounding that way.

It seems to me that the culture in our program is still very confrontational. Teacher’s vs Parents, Teachers vs. Students. We have a few students in our program that do not fit the regular mold. They never will able to be exactly like everyone else, and there is nothing we can do about this.

As a teaching community, it is our responsibility to try to understand these students and find ways to encourage them to be better. Encourage is the operative word here. What we do is not encourage. What we are doing right now is the opposite. We criticize, and yell, and push and scream and hope that these children will change.

They wont.

Not that way. All we are doing is making them feel bad for existing.

Recently we had a girl who was diagnosed with clinical depression in the Bilingual department. She was unable to handle the stress that was heaped on her and decided it was best to kill herself. By constantly telling these kids that they are not good enough and never will be 3 years down the road what’s to keep them from doing the same?

These kids need patience, understanding, and sometimes, they need time in a quiet place to focus.

Right now as I try to teach my class to be more respectful and helpful, and to have more kindness; I feel that the rest of my team is undoing all that by teaching the class to ostracize the odd student. To let them know it’s ok to call him names and treat him as an outsider. Then they reinforce this by waiting for him to make a mistake so they can yell at him and mistreat him.

Of course he lashes out, and acts bad, we have him convinced that he is bad, so he acts that way. Any child that is constantly told that they are bad, and different, will act bad.

We have these kids in all of the classes now, and almost every class has made the conscious decision to
tell everyone that the child is bad. We should be focusing on what they can do well, so the child will want to do well. If we compliment them for good behavior and make them feel good about the things they do well, those kids will start to act better. They will stop acting up.

This is not a short-term solution. And if we try it for 1 week and get no response, then we should not give up and say “Well I tried, let’s go back to yelling.” It takes time to rebuild the child’s self confidence, and the child’s sense of worth. Especially the kids who are already different from everyone else.

If we want our kids to be inclusive, patient, and to be positive, we need to model this at all times.

We have to adapt to help our kids prepare for the future, and we have to do it quick.

There is a book I would like to have everyone read over the holiday, and find… (I never finished this, and don’t remember what book I was going to recommend.)

I have been trying to find ways to reach the different students for years. Sometimes I am successful, sometimes not. Sometimes I run across a new obsticle, and need to learn more.

I try to take as many PDs as I can to help me along with this. I cannot afford to get the degree in special education that I want. I am a father of a single income family. I have a son entering college.

Not that I am picking on my wife, I love her and if she is happy being at home, i want that for her.

But I do want to help these kids, and sometimes I work myself into a situation trying. I need to do better.

That’s been my mantra for 45 years. I need to do better. and I try.

Of Photo Shoots and Writing.

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I like to write. I am pretty sure you have learned this fact about me by now. Writing is a very relaxing activity for me. It helps me organize my thoughts and feeling. It has become a part of my daily night time routine to help me brain slow down and relax.

I have a few projects on the go for writing: I have this blog which I update on Thursdays, and periodically other days of the week. I have the Baldwin Games Blog, which is on Hiatus because most of my games are still in boxes. I am the proud editor of the newly minted School Newspaper. (The SAIS Bullseye). I have a single reporter, but we are open to submissions from anyone in the school community. I have 2 separate novels I am working on.

So each night I have something to work on. But here is what I have noticed with my writing as of late: AI.

Some days I am able to put my thoughts down clearly, and I can write for hours. Some nights, I have vague Ideas and I end up putting prompts into an AI and then spend the night reading and editing the work, because it is easier, and takes less energy. I am willing to admit it. There are chapters in my novels that the initial draft was AI Generated. I am now on draft 10 of those same chapters, but I could not have gotten started on some of them without assistance.

AI has become so ingrained in many work places, it helps so many people. But like any new tool, you need to check it. I cannot count the number of times I have worked with AI, and will get a prompt returned that contradicted the previous chapters or paragraphs. The writing sounds beautiful, but It cannot be used. But there’s the thing, It gives me ideas of terms and impressions I can use. But I cannot use the writing from the AI because it disconnects from the point.

There are so many times that AI has helped me go from overwhelmed to relaxed. When I have gone non-verbal, or am just to physically exhausted to put thoughts to words, I type to AI, and it’s responses, help. They help me process my thoughts. They help me get ideas down before I forget.

So, this week I have spent a good majority of it editing old AI created articles, and chapters. Ones I know I will need for adjustment more later.

I also was given the chance to take some professional photos at work, and really enjoyed it. Except when they put make up on my eyes or lips. That bugged me. But I Did enjoy the experience overall. I am including some of the pictures below for you all to see.

Scratching

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Buy it now on Amazon.

I have near permanent wounds on my body. Places that I won’t let completely heal. Not because I want to have these, but because I scratch.

Stimming is a way for autistic people to manage themselves. It is a repeated action that we do to either move our focus from a sensation we cannot handle, or to help ground us back in reality when we need to focus our minds. Stimming comes in all sorts of activities, one of the most common ones is the hand flapping. Each stim we design helps us with one aspect of our life.

My son would flap his hands in class when he was in elementary school. The teacher didn’t know what was happening, and I didn’t register it was a problem, so I just told her to be patient.

When things are getting too serious and boring, like standing at a school meeting, I may start to stim. in these situations I may just make a silyl face (often tongue out with crossed eyes). When I’m a bit nervous or uncomfortable, I may do a short dance. When I am thinking or processing new information, I scratch.

I sometimes scratch my head. This sounds normal, but It’s not. I put both of my hands on my scalp and dig my fingers in and move them back and forth vigorously. If I happen to feel something our of the ordinary, up there, I will dig. There have been days in my past, where I found a bug bite, or bump from an old scar, and completely dug it up, leaving a section of my hair matted in blood.

Similarly when I scratch my arms or legs, I tend to pick at bug bites, pimples, scars, and wounds. I don’t do this consciously. I will be lost in thought and then I realise my arm is bleeding, and I have to get a band aid or tissue.

There was a time when I was a teenager, that I found a wart on my finger. (I think it was a wart), and I used a pen knife to slowly remove it. It took me a week to remove it completely. I would cut a section off, then bandage it up, then the next day start picking at it, (and nibbling at it), then cut a bit more off, and bandage it up. It never occured to me to talk to a doctor about this. It was just part of my adjusting myself.

I would never have seriously hurt myself, and I still would never. This however, is hard to explain to people when you have dried blood in your hair, or you are explaining something to your coworker, and you accidentally pop a scab off you rarm, and need a tissue or bandage.

If I have to try to rein it in, so it’s less obvious, I pick at my fingernails. I will run my finger along my fingernails, and if I find any edgers, or irregularities, I will just start picking at it. This leads to part of my nail peeling off, and sometimes, my finger bleeding. Often, however, it just leads to more unven finger nails

There was a time In Korea when I became obsessed with carving my nail. I put my thumb in my mouth, and rubbed it left and right on my front teeth. Over a week of this, I had carved a dent into my thumb nail. and then I would watch it as it grew down my thumb, finally when the dent reached the clippable area, I clipped it and started the process over.

I am often told to “Just stop picking” and I wish It was that simple. If it was a conscious action, it might be possible. But stimming is often an unconscious thing. Sometimes you just do things, scratching, cross eyes, or dancing. and the more you try to ignore the urge, the harder it can become. It is usually best to just do the action and get it out of the way so you can be regulated and move back on task.

To an observer, many of these stimms may seem unacceptable, or even harmful. Imagine standing in a line with all your coworkers for a “Sport Day” parade, and you start stimming by dancing or making faces. It is seen as rude and inappropriate. However, to an understanding individual, they know that I, or other Autistics may not be able to focus, or handle the situations overwhelming sensations without this.

When my students start doing something that could be a stim, I watch and observe before I react. If it is not harmful, then I may not react quickly. Sometimes, it takes me a few weeks to begin dealing with a situation to help the child. I don’t want students to self-harm, even if it is small like mine. I need to be careful that I keep dangerous behaviour at bay while still allowing the child to stim as a way to regulate themselves. If it is an overwhelm, I may be able to remove the cause, but otherwise we want the child to learn how to help themselves with this.