The job of parenting is measured by distinct and noticeable landmarks. The first tooth. The first word. The first step. The first day of preschool. The first day of regular school. The first sports team. They’re all wrapped into a line and sequence of firsts, each memorable in their own way, no matter what the gender or cognitive level of your child is. As a parent, you remember those firsts, and keep them locked away in your heart, to savor, reminisce, and, sometimes, cringe over.
The first day of preschool with my son sent us down a pathway which completely and totally changed my life, leading to a profession that I had not anticipated.
I am a special education teacher. But before I was a sped teacher, I was a sped parent. This diary is a brief look at how my parenting experiences led me to the profession.
It started with a phone call in the afternoon of my son’s first day in preschool. I felt good about it; he seemed to be happy and chirpy about going to preschool that morning, and as far as I was concerned, life was good.
I hadn’t counted on the reaction of his teacher.
"Usually I try to meet with my families and try to get to know them and my children before school starts," she informed me. "But this summer was way too busy, and I apologize. I should have gotten to know your son before now, because this is going to be a shock to you. Your son is hyperactive and he’s going to flunk out of kindergarten."
Thus began our journey in the world of special education. At the time, I knew little about ADHD, but I knew enough to know that you just don’t diagnose it based on two and a half hours of a child’s first day in a new environment. As a teacher’s daughter, I had serious questions about the professionalism of any teacher who would calmly dump such a statement on a parent after one day spent with a child.
But this was our introduction to the wonderful world of teacher mismatches and the first of many discussions over the years of how to play the "teacher game" and the "school game" with a bright young man who did not think or process social communication and social interactions in a typical way. We sought professional evaluation. The professionals focused on an immediate issue which explained the apparent attention issue--an obvious speech problem not just with articulation, but with language usage. The kid lagged behind his age peers in processing oral language, both in how he heard it and in how he spoke. He didn’t use articles, adjectives, or adverbs. He tended to speak in very short, basic sentences using subject/verb/object constructions with no complex or compound structures. He couldn’t find words to use when he became stressed or upset, and screamed in frustration when he couldn’t explain himself.
He didn’t process sensory input in the same manner as other kids. I had learned over his first year that any sign of ear distress meant a major ear infection, because it took a lot of pressure before he would react and respond, unlike other kids in our indoor park group. But the slightest heavy touch on his skin would send him screaming. External pain was very reactive, but internal pain was ignored until it was too severe to ignore.
He obsessed over Star Trek and trains. My sister-in-law, a preschool teacher, commented that he spent a lot of time focusing on how things worked rather than just playing with them. He could build Lego models in an hour by just looking at the plan once, and building it. Once built, he had no desire to play with the model. He would reenact Star Trek scenes throughout the house—not in imaginative play, but replicating what he had seen on TV. At the age of two and a half, he read his first street sign to me—"No Parking, Mommy! No Parking!" Reading the rest of his books wasn’t far behind. He could decode but not necessarily tell me what the story was about.
Knowledgeable parents and professionals are nodding their heads at this point, just as I do now when I start hearing similar accounts of early childhood from a parent. But in the late 1980s/early 1990s, Asperger Syndrome was unknown, much less any acknowledgement of High Functioning Autism. All I knew was that the various tests found him a year and a half behind his peers for communication issues—and no one wanted to work with him yet because the standard at the time was two years delay, and we didn’t qualify for services on an economic basis.
Fast forward to the spring before kindergarten. A different, developmental, preschool, that shared space with a school for the deaf. A teacher I knew and trusted.
"There’s a problem," this teacher told me. She brought out test results, and observations. And the clincher was this: "The speech pathologist for the deaf student in this class recommends you contact the school district for a speech and language evaluation."
So we did. We knew we had articulation problems—pretty standard, fixable problems with a frontal lisp of the sort that most speech paths see and deal with in the first three years of school. But there was more. A pragmatics language measure showed my son to be performing in the bottom 1% of language usage. That earned him a diagnosis of Communication Disorder.
We continued on with school, opting to go with a local parochial school in the mistaken belief that he would receive more attention and better education than he would in the public system. I became more savvy in the ways of dealing with stubborn teachers who, because it was a private school, could completely ignore the IEP without fear of reprisals. I argued with teachers who insisted his behavior was deliberate and not the result of his impaired ability to communicate his concerns. I also learned to wrestle with an uncooperative public school system that did not give him full services because he attended a parochial school.
By the middle of sixth grade we had a frustrated kid, despite my constant support and struggles on his behalf. His fifth grade year, with a sympathetic and understanding teacher, was stellar. He’d found his stride that year with his social group and did well.
Things changed his sixth grade year. His friends turned on him, encouraged by his treatment by two of his teachers. With six weeks to go in the school year, he finally begged us to take him out of that school and send him to the local public middle school that he had learned to fear based on the horror stories he’d heard at the parochial school. He was terrified his first day in the public school, but soon went from the frightened, timid kid he’d been to a happy and cheerful child once again.
There were still problems, but now the issue was clearly one of his communication issues. The teachers and staff at this school recommended a magnet technical high school for him. He still went through teacher mismatches, but in the public system, I learned that as a parent I had rights above and beyond shutting up and paying my tuition. I had a right to demand support and negotiate fair treatment, and we received it. The consistent quality of teachers was higher.
During my son’s freshman year in high school, I started thinking about going back to school and becoming a teacher. My current job as a secretary and bookkeeper was going nowhere, and the degree to which I was giving out advice to other parents made me realize that maybe I just should be getting paid for doing this. I was also spending a lot of time reading about all disabilities, not just Asperger Syndrome, which was what I had begun to think was my son’s real problem as far back as sixth grade. I found the field to be fascinating and attractive in the sense that it worked with people who didn’t think in typical ways. The paperwork connected with special education also made sense to me in a way it didn’t always do to others.
By the time my son started his sophomore year in high school, I’d applied to a special education teacher program and been accepted. It was time for his three-year reevaluation for eligibility, and his speech pathologist started out the assessment plan by asking me this question, carefully choosing her words while watching my reaction:
"Have you ever considered that your son might have Asperger’s Syndrome?"
I said, "I’ve been trying to talk people into considering that possibility for four years."
So we evaluated for Asperger’s. At the same time, my son was losing weight, having gut problems, and experiencing pain in his rear end. Three weeks into my first term back in college, after having been out of school for almost sixteen years, I was in the emergency room with him. Two weeks later, I was listening to a specialist pronounce a diagnosis of Crohn’s Disease.
The next day, we qualified my son as being eligible for special education services in the area of autism spectrum disorder, and later added an eligibility of Other Health Impaired to accommodate the impact his Crohn’s Disease had on his education.
Two years later, I was hired as a special education teacher in a rural middle school, while my son was in his senior year of high school. I am starting my fourth year as a sped teacher.
Several lessons I have learned during this pilgrimage from parent to professional:
1.) Politeness and persistence get you a lot further than temper tantrums. When you lose your temper you and your kid both end up in a negative pigeonhole.
2.) Don’t think that you can back off just because your kid has hit middle school/high school and you think he or she is in charge of things now (and, to some extent, this holds true for college).
3.) Things can and will get better. Middle school is hell for all kids, and quadruply so for kids with disabilities. High school is often better.
4.) Small is not always better. Sometimes your kid needs to get away from the social group that knows him or her far too well.
5.) Celebrate every victory, no matter how big or small it is.
6.) Give yourself a respite from each other once in a while.
My son is taking the slow path through college right now due to health and Asperger Syndrome issues. However, the student who melted down at the mere suggestion of a writing assignment in 6th grade is now a major in journalism. And, despite an eighth grade teacher claim that he would never get a grade higher than a C in English, and experts who said he could never learn a foreign language—he graduated high school. With honors. In French. And he earned a membership in the journalism honor fraternity, Quill and Scroll.
He’ll still talk my ear off about obscure computer technology issues. But he is a pleasant and thoughtful adult, with a dry wit and wry observations on life.
There are times when I wonder what he would be like without his disabilities. But his disabilities made him the person he is, and I would not be a special education teacher now without the sixteen years of struggle it took to raise him to adulthood through the Byzantine maze of the private and public educational systems. My experiences make me a teacher with high expectations for the students I work with, expecting them to reach for the stars rather than make excuses for their disabilities.
And I never, ever, make stupid, discouraging, predictions about a child’s future to their parents. Instead, I tell them that my kid proved many teachers wrong, and it is my hope that they, too, will see that happen with their child.
Every person is a gift. Every person has a strength and something to contribute to society. It is our work as parents and teachers to encourage that strength and develop it in our youth.