This is a funny little piece written by a journalist who happens
to be the mother of a daughter with Asperger syndrome. I
found it on the internet several years back, when my son was still
in school and I was still embroiled in the sometimes adversarial
politics of special education. Like many of you now,
back then I often felt I was close to my tolerance
threshold, mired in the stress and frustration that
parents can feel when IEP revision time rolls
around. I identified strongly with this mom, and this
story made me laugh -- a very good tonic when I needed it
most. Well, it's that time of year again! I
hope that for parents who are still "fighting the good fight" on
behalf of their kids in school it will provide a little comedy
relief for you, as is still does for me.
The Grievance - by Sandra
Vogel
Like everyone else who works at her school, my daughter has a
union.
At the last collective bargaining meeting, sometimes called an
Individualized Education Planning meeting (IEP) of school staff and
the Federated Association of the Autistic, Repressed and
under-Taught (FAART), I had the opportunity to present
management --a.k.a. the teacher -- with a year-end report
card written in her own language.
But first, she aired a grievance.
"I asked your FAART to write in complete sentences on the test
and she answered in three or four words", the teacher said. "She
was done before anyone else. "
Firstly, my daughter has Asperger's Syndrome. The language in
her contract forbids management giving her and others with
autism-spectrum disorders abstract instructions and then becoming
frustrated when they're not followed.
"How many words are there exactly in a complete sentence Mom?"
my FAART asked me later.
Second, the exam in question was one of those mandated ones that
gauges how well each classroom/school/district is doing compared to
others in the province/country/world. It was very, very important
to management that the "workers" did well. But the thing was
meaningless and incomprehensible to all but the brown-nosing, "Can
I take home an extra math sheet?" students, but especially to my
daughter and the other FAARTs.
Thirdly, my daughter has a writing disorder, dysgraphia. For
years I received notes and report cards that said:
- poor grammar and sentence construction,
- hurries through her assignments, makes careless errors, does
not edit,
- gets very upset if she has to rework something,
- good ideas but lacks patience, perseverance in writing
them,
- handwriting is weak and difficult,
- lacks coordination, motivation, patience
My daughter was tested for a writing disability and certified
"dysgraphic" several years ago, but not awarded a scribe until a
collective bargaining meeting last year.
The scribe's job description said: Do the grunt work, especially
on exams, so The Dysgraphic One doesn't
become so frustrated trying to remember where the capitals, periods
and spaces go, that she forgets she once knew the answers to
questions one through 68.
Writing is, to my little FAART, a foreign language. And I
thought we had won one for the working FAARTs when I insisted her
report card language be changed to read "Has good ideas, but lacks
the neurological hard-wiring to communicate in a fashion that
forces her to translate her thoughts from pictures, to words in her
head, to words on paper".
Despite being privy to the same information as I, and having
agreed to the contract language, management was now sitting across
the table asking me to explain why my FAART wouldn't answer in
complete sentences.
So I said: "Perhaps her scribe didn't understand the
instructions".
Surely the scribe, as a member of the world's second-oldest
profession, wouldn't intentionally make the teacher look bad by
writing in incomplete sentences, I thought. I know how idealistic
scribes can be, being one myself.
"She doesn't have a scribe all the time," the teacher said,
looking appalled that someone capable of such intentionally
unpunctuated work would deserve a full-time pinch-writer.
Management, I realized then, believed this service was just for
those times when the FAART was feeling
really dysgraphic and autistic, as
opposed to when she was just being "careless", suffering from
"weak" handwriting, spelling problems, letter/number reversals, and
the all-important "lack-of-capitals-and-punctuation".
Apparently management's contract allows teachers to make
judgment calls on whether the child psychiatrist, school
psychologist, pediatrician and Children's Hospital were 'right'
about their diagnosis. If they genuinely believe a FAART could do
better if she applied herself, it's okay to say so. After all,
FAARTs don't look disabled, do they?
But then my daughter's teacher doesn't look like she has an
inflexible adherence to specific teaching routines and behaviours,
development of restricted, repetitive patterns of teaching
interests and activities, or an inability to understand the social
rules of interaction with autistic people either.
So on the teacher's report card I wrote:
- Has some ability, but becomes frustrated and uncooperative when
asked to rework her teaching methods for invisibly disabled
children;
- Has good ideas, but lacks patience and perseverance in
implementing them;
- Anxiety levels often determine her success;
- Poor ability to teach grammar, sentence construction,
capitalization and punctuation;
- Attention span is short; forgets agreed-upon strategies
from one IEP to the next;
- Ability to help child overcome dysgraphia is minimal;
- Ability to think in pictures is, unlike the student's, weak and
difficult;
- Areas of strength: Is the first to put up her hand to answer a
question at IEPs, is good at drama and responds well to positive
reinforcement given publicly.
