Summmmertime, and the livin' is . . .

Summertime,
And the livin' is easy
Fish are jumpin'
And the cotton is high

Oh, your daddy's rich
And your mamma's good lookin'
So hush little baby,
Don't you cry.

—Gershwin and Heyward*

Full-on summertime has arrived at Autism's Edges and this year the livin' is easy. And not because our girl's daddy's rich, or her mama good lookin'.  This year the livin' is easy because, for the very first time since our girl was diagnosed, we've found a summer activity that works brilliantly for her.

If you've been visiting Autism's Edges over the years, you know that we've tried a lot of things: day camps, inclusion programs, and horseback riding therapy camp. For the most part,"camp" has been a word associated with misery. With experiences that ranged from mixed to awful, in the past two summers we had opted to go with Camp Dad, using the summers to hone some math and reading skills, but missing out on the essential peer social skills activities that camp settings provide. For spectrumy kids like ours, who don't have an extended school year (or the daddy who's rich or a mamma who's good lookin'!), summertime livin' isn't always so easy.

Electronic hand puppets. Facilitated

by Becky Heritage at the Tech Kids

Unlimited Workshop. The eyes lights up 

when you close the circuits.

But this summer is different thanks to the amazing work of Beth Rosenberg, and her teams of technology educators who put on week long Tech Kids Unlimited workshops. Last week our girl took part in a computer animation and electronic puppet workshop held at the Jewish Community Center on Manhattan's Upper West Side.  

And this coming week, she'll head downtown to Pace University for a video game design workshop.  In just one short week, twenty hours all totaled, workshop participants made electronic puppets and "bugs" where they learned about circuitry, and short animated videos where they learned the fundamentals of animated movement, as well as programs like iMovie and iStopMotion.

One of the secrets to the success of Beth's workshops is that she programs the week with some of the finest tech education talent in the city, including Becky Heritage, who worked with the kids on electronic puppets; Gabriella Levine, who worked with the kids on making "Blinky bugs," whose antenna cause their eyes to light up; and Ardina Greco and Mark Dzula, both of whom are doctoral candidates at Columbia University and art educators extraordinaire. Along with amazing volunteers, the ratio of adults to kids in the room is more or less one to one, which is the golden ratio for our girl.

The electronic puppets, facilitated by Becky Heritage, was the week's first activity, and one of my personal favorites: the eyes light up when you put the hands together and close the circuits. Seems the perfect metaphor for what happens with our kids in these workshops: help them put their hands together, close the circuits, and see their eyes light up!

Our girl made this short, but epic, film:

The Battle for Love on Vimeo.

For the first summer in a very long time, we've arrived at a feeling that Gershwin and Heyward captured . . .

One of these mornings

You’re goin’ to rise up singing


Then you’ll spread your wings

And you’ll take to the sky.

•   •   •

* Postscript: The show tune Summertime was written by George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin, Dorothy Heyward, and DuBose Heyward. Don't you love the fact that like most great works of life and art, it was a team project? The copyright for the lyrics is held by © Warner/Chappell Music, Inc., EMI Music Publishing. Used here under the fair use provisions of U.S. copyright law.

Dear Diary #1: "This time I'll get it right."

Not long ago Sweet M asked me to take her to a local store to buy a diary. Not just any diary, but a locking diary. Our local store didn't have a locking diary that suited her, so we bought this one, with its beaded butterfly cover and heart-shaped keys, from an online retailer.

In advance of getting the diary, but with the promise of the diary within her field of expectation, she began to say, somewhat repetitively, "This time I'm going to get it right."

"I'll have a new diary. And this time I'll get it right."

About the third or fourth time that I heard her say that phrase, with its slightly odd prosody — a kind of caricature of determination with bonafide resolve at its core — I asked her what she meant.

"You know, I'll do it right. I won't scribble like before."

She has had other diaries. And she would fill them with pre-writing — "scribbling" — or with drawings, or with stickers from her vast collection. But she seemed to think that she'd missed the mark in the past. She seems to have the idea that she has to use language to get it right.

"But that was the right thing to do when you did that before."

"Oh," she said, "But this time I'll really get it right."

Getting it right. Really right.

I know just what she means. I often think, in terms of this blog, or other writing, or in teaching or parenting, "maybe this time I'll get it right."

Don't get me wrong. I get enough of the things right enough of the time to get through my life more or less intact. More or less okay. With an occasional verifiable success. And with quite a bit of fun.

But reaching for something new, for something beyond one's current circumstances or skill set or horizon of experience often comes with that anxiety: can I get this right? And that anxiety translates into something a bit like perseveration: I'll get it right. I can do this thing. I know I can do this thing. I think I can. I think I can.

"Thing" can be anything: learn new software program, learn new data analysis method (things on my own agenda), develop working group, take care of health and fitness issues. You can fill in your own [blank] thing to get right. We've all got 'em.

Motivational gurus and educational experts and video game designers all talk about being in the "zone" or "the zone of proximal development" — in that sweet spot where one is skilled and successful enough at a particular task to take on a new challenge that is precisely enough calibrated to allow for your development and thus not be frustrating. When those conditions are met, we enjoy what we're doing, and we do get it right because the task is so finely aligned with our current skills that growth feels natural, inevitable, and usually even fun. Failure is impossible.

It's not so much that we've gotten it right, but that the conditions around us have been right to maximize our growth and minimize our frustration.

This almost always happened when you play a video game more than once. If you went back to the game, the designers got it right. The game was calibrated to take you along a path of continuous development. Aka it was fun.

When does this happen in life? Not usually in school when standardized tests create false benchmarks and hurdles, except when teachers design extraordinary differentiated instruction. Not usually at work, unless one has extraordinary mentoring or a great deal of control over one's assignments.

I want more of this in my life. Don't you?

The challenge is that want that "got it right" feeling, but I don't want to get it from a videogame. I want that feeling about parenting, about teaching, about writing, about being in the complicated world that is not always (correction: replace with "seldom") calibrated to be a right fit for each of us.

"Art Is Not for Grading"

Sweet M had been holding up pretty well with the transitions that middle school has brought.

There had been some tears, and there was the return to the image of the solitary flower, but she was mostly buoyant and enthusiastic, especially about the upcoming school dance and planning her birthday party.

She was handling the two hours of homework each night. Yes, that was "two hours," not a typo. (And it's not just two hours for her . . . the kids are expected to do two hours of homework after an eight-hour day.)

She was suiting up in her sweats at home on the mornings when gym was the first activity of the day and participating in the field-day-like activities at a track by the river.

She was tolerating the fact that now they have just a 15 minute recess with no other breaks.

She was bewildered that library — her favorite thing — was no longer part of her schedule, but we'd started going to the local book store each weekend to give her the "book browsing" feeling that she seems to love.

She was managing the transitions of going from classroom to classroom as they do in a schedule that reproduces the model of the typical middle-school.

And she'd even gone out with her classmates on the out-to-lunch day that her school starts in middle school, though she'd stuck with eating her lunch from home.

Overall, she'd been keeping it together pretty well, albeit with some tears here and there.

But the other night, the night when she'd wished to take out the ancient Greeks so as to nip in the bud the whole idea of school and gymnasium, she told me, voice cracking, heart breaking, what was troubling her so much . . .

"I can't believe it. They're going to grade our art," she sobbed, voice shaking and tears streaming down her face. "How can they grade our art? Art is not for grading, art is for self-expression."

She spoke slowly and struggled for the language to say this, as this is not something that we've ever discussed. But she had the idea fully-formed and articulated her dismay and disbelief, her sense of injustice, of something utterly wrong in her world.

She seemed to have the sense that they would be grading her very self.

I told her that I agreed with her completely — that art is for self-expression — but also that since she is such a good artist that she doesn't need to worry at all about her grades in art.

This seemed to be only a modest consolation.

For her, it seems to be the principle of the matter.

Amidst all of this bewilderment, her artwork has returned to the motif of the solitary blossom on a landscape. And this lone tree in the moon light.