We Go With Him

Why and How I Teach Greek

Rather ironically, I finished this Guardian piece on the value of face-to-face interactions in college teaching typing on my laptop across from a student (our one Classical Civilization major graduating this year) who was also typing away on his laptop to finish a history paper (he'd almost finished it the night before but his computer choked, so to speak, and he lost the whole thing). He asked me a few questions and I had some for him (including the name of one of the video games herein referenced, as another student had done a presentation on it in Mythology class two years ago).

Earlier, I had given a book (an interlinear Greek-English New Testament) to another of his friends (he wants to be a minister).

I obviously and absolutely value the Internet as a teaching and communication (and more) tool, know that online education has been a godsend for many and that just because you have a real live teacher in the classrom, she or he is not always being so lively. I've been lucky to have quite a few great teachers and to have seen what more than a few have done for Charlie. Online education is improtant for some kids on the spectrum, but, for sure, not for Charlie. If anyone ever needed a real live human being as a teacher, whose expressions and movements and presence make all the difference, it is him.

(In the photo, Charlie himself is putting away bike gear after a Saturday evening ride in Jersey City, a few miles from where I teach.)

Boy. On. Bus.

We emerge from Spring Break MMXIII a bit tattered and having put in 20-something mile walk/bike days, and after a two-day onslaught of 'NO SCHOOL BUS,' and the above (not entirely foredrawn) conclusion.

In Which the White Car Is Not the Desired Object

Anywhere from 4 - 6am seems to be about the term Charlie has been waking up this week and it was so today. He got dressed (in his swimsuit, as that's scheduled at his school) and gave me an expectant look and I said 'walk.' He changed into his long pants and out we went in the snow.

We passed two boxers and their owner and noted that it was not so cold and there was light trying to emanate from the sky. We neared our driveway and Charlie said 'white car.'

Immediately I thought that he wanted the car and wouldn't be thrilled about the school bus, due to arrive in a half-hour. We went inside and Jim informed us that parts of Liberty State Park are open! and gave Charlie a hug. We mentioned the bus. Charlie still looked rather grim.

I handed Charlie his swimsuit and his face lightened up (a bit). Yes, there's school, we assured him. I went in the kitchen and started spooning some rice into the container that goes in his lunchbox and he was very cheerful.

From then on till we saw him grinning at us from his seat on the right side at the back of the bus (with a driver honking in the car behind, evidently not thrilled they could not zip around and speed away), Charlie was peaceful easy. Snow days don't have to mean anything's disrupted.

Nemo Venit

 

There is quite a bit more snow out there now this morning (photo take Friday night); I just shoveled the driveway. I anticipate a slightly nerve-wracking day as there won't be a bike ride and there must be time indoors. I've noted scrapof s blue sky and a pale whiteness that would be the sun making a show and it is not that cold.

After Wednesday, we had Charlie's IEP at 9am Thursday morning: Down to 0.3 instances of SIBs a day and recently had recycling added to vocational training. Lately attempts to flip the table; signs of really trying to contain himself from more 'exciting' behaviors.

Then Jim drove us into Manhattan and smartly avoided the Holland Tunnel traffic (which was bad) by manuervering around Bayonne and Jersey City as only someone who had ridden around there with Charlie on bikes would be able to do.

Charlie came home cheery and he and Jim did a full local bike ride and there were walks and, on the advice of his teacher who wanted to get him back into the usual as soon as might be possible, Charlie took the bus to and from school on Friday with nothing remarkable to report except that school ended early due to Storm Nemo.

(Though I'd rather call it Imbres Nemo, the former being a word for such a storm in Latin and I've got too many vaguely epistemological quips to make about hunc imbrem sic nominatum, because Nemo means 'no one' with huge resonances to Book 9 of the Odyssey where Odysseus tells the Cyclops his name is Ούδεις or 'no one' -- that is what Nemo means, a bit too much for a Pixar movie fish!)

On the media front, Thursday was a banner day in general, because Jim got this just-released Criterion Collection disc of On the Waterfront and he's got a sweet interview on it.

Causation

On Friday (21.12.12), Jim mailed off half the holiday presents (I'm still packing the rest) and exams are all graded though not all grades posted as some more papers may be submitted, though paper-writing, and therefore paper-grading, have drastically changed courtesy of the internet. It was more of an exhausting, perhaps exhilarating, semester than usual not only because of extreme weather events but as all aspects of humanity came to the surface in my early morning Elementary Latin class in particular.

I was still proctoring an exam/enjoining students to f-o-c-u-s and finish writing about Herodotus' and Thucydides' views on causation and evidence when Charlie came home due to having a half-day. He has been extremely wary of getting on his bike after the brakes were fixed and a new axle installed on the rear wheel on Tuesday (he and I had to pick up the bike at the bike shop on Tuesday evening as Jim had an important meeting to attend and seeing the bike come out of the store instead of the shed probably weirded Charlie out). Wednesday there was a ride in twilight, Thursday Charlie preferred not too -- I think he could also feel that our latest storm Draco was due to hit -- and he kept giving me looks in the evening that (along with the word tickle which has come to mean 'go to a different level of the house for something) I divined meant I should get the swim bag.

Charlie's school swims about once every quarter, 3 times in a row. Only this time (maybe because of the hurricane?), they only swam twice and will have one more swim day in January. But Charlie knows they swim 3 weeks in a row so on Thursday he wanted, and did, put on his swimsuit and on Friday, with a fleece vest over his sweatshirt, he boarded the bus with the swimsuit on and his swim bag packed with a towel and long pants. Apparently there was not an issue about this at school as no mention of such was made. 

These past weeks, he's been showing some tiny bits of such order-ful awareness.

On a walk on Tuesday, Charlie bent over to toss a tree branch out of the path, instead of stepping on, over or around it.

Some nicely articulated two-word echolalic utterances have also been heard (so I've been informed 'bye sweetie').

Last weekend, too, Charlie kept looking at me after we had gotten back from a rainy ride and said 'purple' and looked at me: He wanted his daily dose of one of his stomach-comforting meds. 

Understanding cause and effect: Scientific thinking.

Friday the 14th of December

I taught my last class of fall semester 2012 on a big wave of emotions. I'd been thinking a lot about Charlie going off to school -- getting on the bus after I left for my early Friday morning Elementary Latin class -- because as I was ascending the curving on-ramp onto the Pulaski Skyway and hearing the Decemberists launch into the mariner's revenge song I remembered, amid giving Charlie various things for sinus congestion and stomach discomfort and concluding that I have whatever he has, I had forgotten to give him his daily meds.

Happily, I immediately contacted Jim at the gym and he hastened home to get the meds and thence to the Big Autism Center to give them to Charlie.

When some students expressed less-than-thrilledness about the essay question format of an exam I emphasized the importance of ye most basic written-by-hand-on-paper-communication by talking about how I rely on a black-and-white notebook that Charlie's teacher, therapists and I write back and forth in. If his teacher isn't there, anyone can read it whereas an email to his teacher would only go to the teacher's account and it's not that the school classroom staff can just check emails when they have kids to teach and care for. Of course, Charlie's teacher and therapists arent's writing essays on Herodotus and Thucydides but I know from daily writing, writing and writing that the more you do it, the better and more fluid it comes.

Our children and those to whom we entrust them every day to learn, how beyond important they are and all the more so on this day.

Conference Night

I talked a lot at Charlie's parent-teacher conference last night. It is all a march to him turning 21 now and I know these conferences are finite in number. I enjoy every moment sitting around a table and talking to teachers and aides.

The vocational teacher was there along with Charlie's (really great) teacher and (really great) aides and there was talk of sheltered workshops. I said I thought Charlie would do best with work not at a desk -- sorting and folding are things he can do but too much of that and he could be heading to OCD lockdown -- janitorial work, working in a recycling plant, outdoor yard sort of work would suit him.

One of Charlie's aides has gone to India to study yoga!

The OT asked about shaving which Charlie certainly does well with at home, though only with Jim. I looked at the electric shaver we had sent in a few years ago and dumped it; will send in a new one.

'Behaviors,' aggressions and the like are all averaging less than 1 a day.

Another student and Charlie seem somewhat to be pals. They play Connect 4 together, the other student prompting Charlie to take turns. They give each other high-5's. Sometimes when Charlie is unhappy it helps that he goes and says hi to the student.

The other day Charlie was giving his teacher a lot of stares (the kind he gives us often before getting quite upset) and then occasional smiles and even stares. He had grabbed earlier in the day and is teacher wondered if maybe he was trying to express 'sorry.'

He is drinking cups of water at school.

Reading single words remains very challenging. Charlie has been working on 'cracker' and 'cereal' and not getting too far and I asked if he might be confusing the words as both start thigh 'c,' plus Charlie does ot eat cereal. Perhaps 'water,' 'bagel,' 'apple,' 'watermelon'? Or, veering from the food words, 'bike,' 'helmet,' 'strap,' 'gloves,' 'cap.'

Cadence

There was throwing of some items in art but Charlie held it together.

I started really discussing Thucydides in Greek history class and taught my Latin class material from three chapters to make up for the missed-due-to-hurricane classes, In Greek, we learned the pronoun αύτός, αύτή, αύτό which means, among other things, 'self' and is the root word for autism.

Jim went to finish some things begun earlier in the semester in his office and got the black car fixed too.

In Mid-November

 

Great day at school, bike ride, more uneasy (but not 'on edge') on Thursday evening. But maybe Charlie having woken at 4am-ish, helped himself to the crumbs on the crumb cake (which counts as Trying a New Food!) and conked out on the blue couch till the bus appeared at which moment he shot up in a flash and was out the door has something to do with that.

 

The Monday After

Improbably, or maybe not, Charlie and I had a fabulous Monday in which he paced or sat at the front window while I scrubbed the kitchen sink and went through a pile of papers and read about radical democracy in ancient Athens. Then we stood for over an hour in the front yard waiting for Jim (who had made a run to get on the fourth people-packed train that pulled up to the station; the previous three had simply gone by) and there was a yellow jacket bike-lit bike ride.

At 7.37 pm just as Charlie and I were headed out for a walk, the Big Autism Center called: School Tuesday.