TGIF: A Roundup of Various Happenings PLUS Dan's Mental Break!

"IT'S FRIDAY, HOORAY!" I couldn't agree more with these sentiments. One of the kids shouts this every week. It amuses me. This week was actually pretty good for being the second week back after Winter Break. (Not CHRISTMAS Break. Winter Break. Got it? Good. Need to make sure you're being PC, now.) Here are a few of the random events from the week:

- Tuesday morning, we were distracted because of some other things that were going on, and the kids were left largely to themselves. It was an opportunity to run a bit of a test, too, to see if the stuff would end up in the right cubbyholes, etc. Here's what went down: Joann stole a DVD from the shelf and put it in her bag when no one was looking. Jordan got excited and ran at someone. He wanted to take away their dry-erase marker, for some reason. Tara put her journal in the wrong place, and it wound up at someone else's house that night, making her all mad about it the next morning. Overall, though, most things ended up where they should've been.

- We discovered that Tara was stealing pencils and markers from the room, which explains why we were always short. The entire front pocket of her book bag was stuffed full of them. When confronted with this, she insisted they were hers. All of them. And she needed them at home. She was not amused when we took them away. The next day's "morning lesson" was all about stealing and lying. That's the second time this year we've had that lesson...

- Joann's parents sent back the DVD. She didn't like that one bit. That set off the first tantrum of the week. We had three more after that. By the way, Joann's tantrums? They're amazing. If there was some way to harness all the energy released during them, we'd probably be able to power the school for a day. You think you've seen a child scream, wail, kick, and flail about at the grocery over a candy bar? HA! You haven't seen anything.

Anyhow, those are the major happenings of the week. I should keep a journal someday, doing minute-by-minute logs of the minutia we deal with every day. Then again, that might be overly tedious... Hmm... Still, I'll consider it.

So, the story you've all been waiting for a long time to hear: Dan's Mental Break! Really, I don't know if it was a TRUE mental break, but it seems close enough to me. As you may remember, Dan has a problem with people who don't fit his definition of "normal". He calls them weirdos. That is tame, fortunately, because he could call them a ton of other, crueler things if he wanted, I'm sure. He has the vocabulary, at least.

Well, one day, he absolutely lost it. I don't remember the exact trigger at this point, but he went nuts. He started lashing out at the "weirdos" yelling that he's going to "kick them all until they're dead!" He literally was kicking at them, spitting at them, hissing like a cat, and screaming. The teacher's patience for him was thin long before he got to this stage. Earlier that day, he threatened to kill me, and said that he would sue the school for blah blah blah. Where he gets this stuff from, I have no idea. His excuse was, as always, that the weirdos were controlling his mind and making him say and do these things.

So what does the teacher do? Well, let me preface this by saying she is awesome. She grabs a desk, throws open the door, and drags it out into the hall. Then she runs back, grabs him by the arm, and drags him out. She sits him down, lectures him, etc. He calls her a bitch, she comes back in, calls his mom, and so on. Meanwhile, Dan is looking in the window, glaring at us, and spitting on the glass. It isn't long before there's a river of spit flowing down the glass. We're just ignoring him though, and the other kids, despite all of this, seem to not be noticing him. It's like he never started yelling to begin with. Must be nice...

Meanwhile, one of the aides goes to get something from our room across the hall. She opens the door, and--get this--he tries to knock her down with the desk! That was the final straw. The teacher dragged him down to the office and sat him down, leaving him for the principal to deal with. The funny thing was that the principal didn't seem to want to do a thing with him--he called his mom to come get him and left him sitting on the chairs in the waiting room up front. When I left for the day, his mom still hadn't arrived. There was spit everywhere though. I felt bad for the custodian that had to care for that later...

The funniest thing about all this was the fact that EVERYONE was just completely ignoring the kid sitting in the front office! He's sitting there, covered in spit, and no one even looked at him. Not even an amused/shocked stare! The secretary could care less, the other staff members just walked on by, and students/parents just sat far away and minded their own business. It almost seemed to disturb him more that he wasn't getting attention for his behavior. As I left the building, I smiled and waved at him. He just glared at me in response, and spat on the floor.

I AIN'T DEAD

Hey, remember that one time I said I was back and would be posting more? That was awesome...

What happened, you might ask? Or maybe you aren't asking that. Either way, here's the scoop: I got busy in October, and in November, I was participating in some shenanigans elsewhere. December rolled along, I was sick of writing, and we had Winter Break. I did nothing for two weeks. It was NICE.

So, here's the list of posts I owe you from the last post I made:
- Dan's mental break and subsequent freak out.
- Neal suddenly threatening ridiculous things and substituting other words for cusswords so he doesn't get in trouble.
- Samantha learning a new phrase to shout at everyone... all... day... long...
- Joann stripping and playing with herself

Let's add to that:
- The Christmas party
- Christmas present roundup (AKA What our parents bought the staff)
- Parents lying to their kids--and asking us to fix it for them (This one's gonna be LOOOOONG and full of capital letter abuse.)
- Samantha trying to escape from the building
- Joann's new obsession--and subsequent freakouts
- Jordan's medication adjustments
- And MORE. Ugh. I am behind.

So, let's roll the dice and select.... "Neal's ridiculous threat" as the subject for today!

Neal, as you may remember, has some issues with language, but is pretty tame overall. However, he seems to have picked up some funny new things. Here's a sampling:

• "Hey Pat! Fuck you Pat!" - I've only heard this once. It was out of nowhere and hasn't resurfaced since.
• "Fart... Fart... Fart..." - Said quietly under his breath. No explanation for this one.
• "I'm gonna scratch your eyes out!" - Said to me very quietly. I heard it clearly, asked him to repeat it to see what he would do, and he responded very loudly with "I didn't say anything." He grinned at me for about the next half hour. I kept my distance the rest of the day. Apparently he's been known to throw things at people in the past, and as far as I'm concerned, it's not a far leap to scratching from there.
• "You piss me off!" - After he got in trouble for saying this to someone, he began to substitute similar sounding words just to see what he could get away with. "You prince me off!" and "That principals me off!" are two examples of the more creative things he came up with.
• "Hey Pat! I did it with a cat!" - Ummm ... yeah... SOMEONE must've taught him to say that one.

 So yeah... There were more but I can't even remember most of them now. He seems to purposely try to say things in a way so that we just catch enough of it to get an inkling of what he said, but we can't be sure half the time.

Anyhow, I'll be back with more (for real this time) soon. As you can see, there's quite a backlog, and there's something new every day. I'll have to mix new with old until I'm finally caught up.

Normal Kid Moments

OK, first off: I'd like to start this post by letting you all know that I'm not dead! That's right, I'm still alive and kicking (and being kicked, some days). My absence can be explained, generically, as busy-ness. More specifically, I picked up a temporary, evening job and have been assigned some additional afternoon tutoring work. I've also been reading obsessively when home, so time isn't exactly a commodity I've had a lot of. But, the temporary job ended, tutoring is only two days a week, and my life is getting a little less complex. I'm breaking my rule of "no work on the evenings" since it's a slow Saturday night and I have nothing better to do...

Some things to look forward to in the coming days:

- Dan's mental break and subsequent freak out.
- Neal suddenly threatening ridiculous things and substituting other words for cusswords so he doesn't get in trouble.
- Samantha learning a new phrase to shout at everyone... all... day... long...
- Joann stripping and playing with herself
- And much more...

So, today's update is about what I call "Normal Kid Moments." These are times when the one of the kids seems to "lose" their disability for a split second, does something completely normal, and then goes back to being themselves. Sometimes it can be the funniest thing to see, especially when it comes at an unexpected time.

To give you an example, the other day I was sitting with Joann, showing her various pictures of kids in different situations, seeing what she could identify. One of the pictures was this kid who had set up a lemonade stand. But it wasn't just any lemonade stand, it had the e backwards and some letters missing; all of the letters were misaligned. I guess that's supposed to be "cute" or something... Now Joann CAN read, when she gets focused. (She also appears to have every book about Clifford memorized and can recite it word for word.) She looks at the picture, but seems thrown off by the way lemonade is written. She zeros in on the pitcher on the table in the picture instead, and says excitedly:

"ORANGE JUICE!"

"No, Joann," I say, "That's not orange juice, that's lemonade!" Suddenly, the normal goofy, blank look completely disappeared, and it was as if she was suddenly able to express a normal human emotion on her face. (Something that's difficult for many autistic kids to do. A lot of them mimic emotions and normal social interaction as they see them, and can infer how they're supposed to work, but don't truly understand them. Temple Grandin [who is autistic herself] has some very interesting things to say on the matter, and I recommend reading something by/about her if you can.) Joann's face twisted into a look of pure displeasure, she frowned and looked convincingly annoyed. She looked me straight in the eyes (up from the picture in front of her that she'd been staring at) and said "Yuck." The look held for about 2 seconds, and then disappeared, replaced by the normal vacant, slightly goofy look. She pushed the picture aside and went on to the next picture of kids playing soccer. She identified this as "space ball", something I almost didn't catch because I was still slightly shocked by her earlier denouncement of lemonade...

Another "normal kid moment" comes from our friend Neal and also involved Joann indirectly. Joann was throwing a fit again at the front of the room. I was working at a table near the back with some of the other kids, who were too distracted by Joann to focus. Neal was sitting in one of the armchairs in the corner near us, plugging his ears. Like Jordan, he doesn't like prolonged, loud noises. Since no one at my table is paying attention, I shift my focus to Neal. He's closing his eyes, looking down, obviously distressed. Suddenly, he looks up, unplugs his ears, and stares straight at me. "That pisses me off," he said. Then he went back to plugging his ears, closing his eyes, and looking down, rocking back and forth slightly.

Finally, for our last "normal kid moment", we come to Austin. You've not met him yet, but he's NEVER a problem for us... Well, almost never. It's exceedingly rare, though, to say the least. Given that I'm mostly writing about the troublesome kids in our class, you probably won't hear much about him. Anyway, one of his behaviors is continually greeting people throughout the course of the day. He'll approach someone and say "Hello! How're you!" even if he's seen them all day. It's not really annoying or bad, though, just funny. So recently he came up to me and did the usual song and dance. I looked at him and said: "I'm fine! How do you do?" something I usually don't respond with. I was hoping to see if I could get him to mix up the greetings instead of always saying "How're you?". Instead, he looked at me, and in complete seriousness said: "How do you do what?" I was a little flabbergasted, and apparently he thought I wasn't going to provide an answer, so he ran off... Note to self: some English phrases and idioms should not be used with kids who take everything literally...

More later on this week!

Spectrum Vs Spectrum

A large percentage of the kids in our class are in there because they are somewhere on the Autism Spectrum. What fascinates me so much about autism is that no two kids with autism are the same. With other disorders, you can make a few generalizations about a kid who has it, be it the way they look, act, and so on. Kids with autism, though... there's no generalization that seems to hold true for ALL of them. (Of course, I am aware that no generalization will hold for any disorder. The point is just to emphasize how widely varied autistic kids are.)

Let me introduce you to two of our autistic kids: Joann and Jordan. Joann is one of our new students this year. We're still trying to figure her out, but what we do know is that she has some obsessions (I won't go into them at the moment) and if we try to prevent her from doing what she wants to do (it's rather disruptive) she throws a fit. She screams, she whines, she cries, she'll hit herself in the process. It's a ridiculous behavior, and we're working to put a stop to it. It won't be easy though. Additionally, she tends to moan all day at random times as is. This seems to be her outlet, so we can't eliminate it entirely. It's just the tantrums that need to stop.

Meanwhile, Jordan is autistic but very reserved. He has no real obsessions. The only issue with him is that he cannot tolerate really loud noises. Granted, people are screaming all day, but as long as it's not continuous, he's generally fine. One of Joann's fits today, though, pushed him over the edge...

Joann was once again making her way to the object of her obsession. One of the aides intervened, and Joann lost it. She fell into a heap on the ground, screamed, cried, hit herself, etc. Something like this isn't an entirely unusual experience, so none of the other aides were in a rush to offer help. We figured Joann would quit in about a minute as always. But she didn't. She carried on and on and on. Jordan got up, yelled "WHAT IS JEANIE DOING?" (he still hasn't learned to say her name properly) and came running towards her. He was poised and ready to attack.

Fortunately, the teacher turned around and blocked Jordan before he could get to Joann. Unfortunately for the teacher, Jordan didn't care who he attacked at this point, and punched the teacher square in the gut. While the teacher was recovering from this blow, the aide who had triggered Joann's tantrum grabbed Jordan (he kicked the aide in the knee for this) and led him out of the room to calm him down. On his way out, he threw anything he could grab back at Joann, who was still screaming. I believe he got hold of a pencil, book, and folder. Peanuts compared to last year, when he threw a chair across the room. Then he kicked another student who was just standing there staring at the chaos.


Finally, as soon as Jordan was gone, I resumed math time with the other students in my group. Just another day in our room...