Episode 1 - Jack's Story Part 1

It's so true, Jessica. Every one of these kiddos is different. We parents just have to keep on trying things until something clicks with our particular kiddo. All the best to you with your own journey!

I am, Gretchen. I'll tell you. And it's fascinating to watch how Jack is pulling data up out of his "preverbal memory" and placing them in categories that the verbal world has provided him. As an example, he's going through a phase right now where he's fixating on addresses. If I can't remember the address of a place, I'll ask Jack. But he's now offering up the addresses of places he went to back when he was 4 or 5 years old. This just blows me away.  Way back then, he must have seen these numbers and recognized them as data of a particular type, but he didn't know their purpose. What kind of memory can hold onto snapshots of meaningless numbers for years -- more than half his little life, really -- and maintain them in pristine shape until the meaning is known and those numbers become useful. It's almost spooky. :)

The difference has been night and day, Susan. How can you teach a boy who doesn't understand a word you're saying? And how boring would school be to you if you didn't understand why you were there? Imagine if  you were suddenly plopped into college courses in Beijing. You couldn't read the text, you didn't understand the instructor, you had no idea what was expected of you when your name was called. How long would it take before there was any value in your spending time there?. And at least you'd know from the get-go what the purpose of school is, why people are there, and the general rules of expected behavior -- Jack didn't even have that. He was bored, he was tired (sleep disorder), he didn't know why kids were staring at him, or why aids were always blocking him from doing A and pushing him along to do B.  People would appear out of nowhere to grab his arm in exasperation, and he didn't know what to do to stop that from happening. He just wanted to go home. So he would scream and cry when he got to school. His dad would drag him down the hallway after the bell, disturbing every classroom along the way. This created more exasperation and more staring from other kids even as Jack screamed, "No he's looking," at the top of his lungs. This is a kid whose "first language" was non-verbal social cues, and he knew exactly how everyone around him in school felt about his presence. A very nice kid might ask, "What do you have in your lunch today, Jack," while thinking, "Oh, man! That freak show touched my sandwich!" The polite, spoken sentence would go right past Jack but he would totally understand the body language associated with the unspoken one, and the poor polite kid would be rewarded with a bout of screaming. School, in short, was a nightmare.

Today, school is still not his favorite place. Getting up in the morning is still hard for him, and it's a long day of exercising his new language skills. It would be like me doing stomach crunches non-stop from 8:00am to 2:30pm, LOL. But he'll often skip down the hallway on the way to class. Kids speak to him kindly and he doesn't recoil from them anymore. And because he's no longer recoiling and screaming, the kids are increasingly more sincere about the kindess they express towards him. The same principles that produced the terrible downward spiral are now working in reverse. Language is making all kinds of things suddenly seem possible for him.

Probably because the one he carries to school is a cell phone and they have a "no cellphones in the classroom" thing district-wide. There may also be privacy issues that the school needs to be concerned about. Some kid getting video taped by another kid might result in an angry dad trying to sue the district. People are crazy, and the schools, in their attempt to protect themselves, end up behaving kind of crazy too.