An American (School) Girl: The Autism Edition

One of the worst things about eighth grade for our girl is the ringing of the bells between periods. Every time the alarm sounds, it jangles her keenly sensitive auditory neural pathways, and sets off a cascade of neurotransmitters to generate a flood of adrenaline. Instead of shrugging and heading from class to class, she races through the hallways as though pursued by a saber tooth tiger or a pack of wolves (not to mention the threat of detention for tardiness). When she hears a bell she'll plough right through any obstacle — inanimate or animate — to ensure that she's on time to her next class.

The excruciating (for our girl) sound of the school bell is, according to educator Cathy N. Davidson, one of the many remnants of an educational infrastructure designed to create the compliant and synchronized industrial workforce needed to populate the factories and offices of 20th century America. The bells, the desks in rows, the proscenium stage set of chalkboard with teachers at lecterns, the out-of-date textbooks, the separate vocational and college tracks, and the standardized multiple choice tests (the results of which can shape the course of a life) are the educational dead weight of the industrial age that could keep our country from realizing the genius needed to succeed in the current century and the future it holds.

Twice in the past month I've had the pleasure of hearing Davidson talk about her new book, Now You See It: How the Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work and Learn, which takes up these and other problems (and possibilities) created by the disjunction between our neurobiology and the structures of our schools and workplaces. Along the way, Davidson's research on neuroscience has led her to consider the anomalies found among kids like ours.

In a particularly evocative section of Now You See It, Davidson writes about the fate of children with Williams Syndrome across cultural contexts. In the United States, where happiness and effusiveness are considered virtues, the ebullient and embracing nature of Williams Syndrome kids make them more lovable and socially acceptable.  However in the context of Japan, where a reserved demeanor is valued, Williams Syndrome children are more likely to be institutionalized — possibly because of their (perceived) rude and intrusive behavior.

Reading this passage had me thinking about the social deficits that our girl has. She's on the other end of the emotional continuum from the Williams Syndrome kids. Our sweet girl is by no means warm and cuddly. She rarely engages in the back and forth of tween girlhood. She's not what anyone who'd just met her would call friendly or welcoming. Smiling is just not a default facial expression for her. In short, she lacks those social skills that are so highly rewarded in the "how to win friends and influence people" American context. Her reserved nature would be a problem for any kid, but it's especially a problem for a girl. While good cheer and an affable nature are valued in middle class American boys and men, they are all but required among the girls and women of this group.

Our girl's social reticence is a very real phenomenon, but it is the social requirement of female friendliness that transforms her particular affect from a simple fact to a significant handicap. 

As our girl shoves her way through the hallway to get to class on time she is not just frantic and rude, she's also unladylike, ungracious, and simply less lovable. She's violating the social norms of her nation, as well as for her gender and her class. I am painfully aware of how she seems to others -- remote, rude, awkward, pushy.

Sometimes I wonder if things would be better for our girl in Tokyo, home of the Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh she loves. There she would be strange, but her strangeness would be chalked up to being a foreigner, to being gaijin as I once was. Sometimes she even asks when we can go to Tokyo, or what it was like when I lived there. I'd like to tell her that it was strange and wonderful — a lot like she is. But instead I tell her about coffee shops that serve pasta topped with mashed potatoes and gravy or sushi bars that make sashimi so fresh it's still quivering on your plate. Our girl recoils in horror at the thought of either, and in that moment I know that however much of a neurological foreigner she may be, in so many other ways she's still an American girl.

Now there is only the small task of making over an America in which she can thrive, and, in the meantime, an eighth grade class where she can more than survive. 

"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.