Matching Tracksuits

Month: October 2005

The Question

Monday 31 October 2005

Recently, at an interview for a teaching position, I had the most curious feeling that I was missing the completely obvious. The principal asked, as the interview was winding down, if I had any questions.

I didn’t have any questions, and said as much.

I was asked again, a few moments later, if I was sure I didn’t have any questions.

At this point, I started thinking, “Should I be asking something? What could I possibly ask about? Is this a way of seeing how interested I am in the job?”

It’s a teaching position: the salary, working hours, curriculum — already set. I’d already asked about enrollment, student demographics, various policy issues, etc.

“What can I ask about?” I think. Finally I answered, “No — I’m sure once I leave here, as always happens, I’ll think of some question about minutiae, but for now…”

And it came again…

The interviewer had that expression that says, “I know you know how to respond!” I’ve used the expression countless times in the classroom.

What was going on? What didn’t I ask about?

Incomplete thoughts about Autism and Society

Sunday 30 October 2005

Homosexuality used to be considered a mental illness. The placing of heated glass bulbs on a bare back and the resulting bruises were once considered treatment for all kinds of ills. Medical science has shown both these medical assumptions to be false. Despite that, many still claim that homosexuality is an illness of some sort, and cupping is still performed in many places in the world.

Such interpretations of autism are possible as well.

“Autism is not a disease but social construct.” Such is one position on the causes of autism. Wikipedia explains it thusly:

This is the belief that autism is not really a disorder, but instead is a social construct. That is, supporters of this theory do not believe autism exists at all; they believe (partly supported by recent reference to the rising cases of diagnosed autism) that autism is just the way some people are–that is, a part of the person’s personality, which might explain the apparent difficulty in finding a model and a cure. This is further supported by the fact that autistic people have normal lifespans and their condition often comes with advantages, not just disadvantages.

I can imagine another, even more radical explanation for the tantrums and screaming of autism: “overly-permissive parenting.” When working with autistic children, I see from time to time a glint in their eyes that make such a thought pass through my mind. “They’re faking it, just throwing a tantrum to get their way, and taking it to a higher level than most children.” That’s the easy answer, and I realize that that “glint” I think I see is simply my interpretation plastered over the incident.

The most radical explanation would probably come from the church I grew up in: they’re demon possessed. What person in their right mind would suggest such a thing is beyond me, but I can think of groups whose members would probably easily jump to that conclusion.

But all three explanations (though quote-unquote is probably needed there) deal with our perception of the condition and our notion of what is acceptable in society. Our society considers, in most cases, kicking and screaming as an inadequate adult response to disappointment or coercion. Yet if that _were_ the appropriate reaction, autism would not suddenly disappear. Linguistic difficulties, lagging social skills, an inability to see things from another’s perspective, repetitive behavior, and exaggerated or depressed sensory systems would all remain.

The Scream

Monday 24 October 2005

If you’ve never heard the scream of an autistic child, count your blessings. It’s inconceivable how a single, shrill sound could convey so much pain, confusion, and anger. The scream comes from so deep inside them it sounds more animal than human. And yet, it’s so shrill and hollow that it’s ethereal.

Often words are woven into the scream — “I hate you!” or “Get away from me!” — to produce a genderless voice. Add the repetitive nature of what they’re screaming and it’s not difficult to see how this could have once been labeled “demon possession.”

Autism, in the time of a rage, wipes away all differences between afflicted children — gender, intelligence, everything — and replaces it with a screech. The rage contorts the face, flails the limbs, and lashes out at anything in the vicinity. The scream fills whatever space you’re in, seeming at times almost like another entity, hovering around the child as you try to isolate her so that so can calm herself.

If it happens around children who are not accustomed to it, the bewilderment and pity in their eyes is striking. And it’s impossible to deny the spark of fear as well.

Often the screaming subsides as quickly as it comes on. A raging child might notice there’s an echo in the room where he is, and that will be enough to derail the rage and pacify the child.

On Working with Autistic Children

Thursday 20 October 2005

Working with these kids takes so much out of you. It’s a constant struggle — physical but espcially mental — to keep the kids on-task, to keep them calm, to maintain a semblance of order and progress in the room. One day they can be going off like popcorn. The slightest thing can set them off.

This one runs around the room, evading all efforts to stop her, gradually getting more and more angry until the rage hits, and the screaming, kicking, biting. That one sits at his seat, sarcastically chanting his mantra of defiance. Leave him alone and he’ll continue ad infinitum; try verbally or even physically to get him back on task and he’ll be running around the room too. Another sits, watching, cheering the eruption on. “Kick him! Kick him!” is the cry. I’m trying to calm one and the other’s cat-calling us both.

Sometimes you feel as if you’ve been thrown into a lake with bound hands and wearing jeans–it’s a struggle just to survive.

Take nothing personally. That’s critical in all teaching, but especially when working with children cursed with autism. The biter might be a hugger in fifteen minutes. No, scratch that. In fifteen seconds. “I hate you! Get away from me, stupid teacher,” from the mouth of a nine-year-old who later says, “I really love you. You’re awesome.”

All your angry adult reactions sometimes build up, though, and in a flash, you see yourself screaming back at the child yelling at you, giving them exactly, word for word, what they give you. But not only does the cruel unreasonableness of this idea force the image out of your mind, but you also really don’t have time to indulge in such perverse pressure-releasing fantasies, for you see that as soon as you get this situation under control, there’s bound to be another explosion. You see it coming. He’s reaching for her pencil. She’s forcing an apology on an irritated student. They’re arguing over the finer details of an episode of _Star Wars_. And even if all’s calm except for the child you’re struggling with, you know that in a flash it can all disappear.

And yet. And yet there’s the hope that you can make the cliché difference. “If I’m just this much more patient, this much more ingenious, this much more educated about the condition,” you think.

The trick is to see the child and not the condition. The autism perverts the child’s real personality, adding hatred where there is none, confusion where clarity is simple, and fear where there should be none. When you see the real child, not the child whose face is smeared into a scream by a condition he has no control over, all the frustration and anger disappear and your heart is both soothed and broken.

Bad Moon Rising

Wednesday 19 October 2005

It’s a full moon, and I’m starting to wonder just what effects that can have on a person’s psyche.

For the past week, I’ve been working elementary school children, the majority of whom have various degrees of high-functioning autism. Today was an especially difficult day, with rages set off every few minutes. Almost to a child they had a breakdown of some sort or another.

“It’s a full moon,” one of the assistants said.

There was a time I would have been skeptical of such a claim. However, with a week of experience under my built, I know how these children usually behave. I saw today that there were quantifiably more eruptions than usual.

While I’m more than a little skeptical about the effects of stars on humans, moon and wind can certainly have demonstrable effects on people. In southern Poland, there’s a warm wind that blows during autumn and spring that brings with it sleeplessness (Once, during one of these periods, I couldn’t sleep for four nights) and an increase in irritability with everyone from students to office workers. Could I have been seeing the effects of the moon today?

It seems so medieval. “Beware the full moon!” Our issues today are attributable to most everything but phases of the moon, but perhaps the ancients got it right.

Yet, it’s not the cause. This article discusses the impact of environmental issues on autistic children.

Substandards

Wednesday 12 October 2005

Yesterday evening Kinga and I watched Człowiek z Marmuru  (“Man of Marble”), something of a 70’s Polish Citizen Kane, directed by Andrzej Wajda. I decided to watch it with the subtitles on, with the thought of possibly reviewing it for Anvil and Sprocket, a friend’s film review site.

I was horrified, though, at the pathetic translation for the subtitles. I would say no more than sixty-five to seventy percent of what was said was actually translated. The subtitles were more a summary of the dialogue than the dialogue itself. So many subtleties were completely dropped as a result that some of the more interesting characters in the film were simply flat, boring characters. If I didn’t know Polish, I would have said, “Oh, it’s okay.” But it’s not just “okay.” It’s a brilliant film, which does lose a bit of momentum at the end and Krystyna Janda does over-act a bit here and there. Still, the idea is solid – a Polish Citizen Kane that tracks the rise and fall of master mason Mateusz Birkut, a humble man who becomes a symbol of Polish Communist labor through propaganda films. It is one of the most accessible films for non-Poles, for there is a lot that depends on an intimate knowledge of Polish culture. But if you don’t know the language and rely on the subtitles, it is significantly diminished.

It got me to thinking about the art of subtitles. You certainly can’t write everything the characters say, for no one could read that fast and keep up with what the visual aspect of the film – which is, after all, somewhat important in film! And yet, you have to leave enough in to round out characters, else you get a film with flat characters.

Golden Slippers

Monday 10 October 2005

Mars Hill Fair, 1 Oct 05

Not quite as distant as it sounds, Mars Hill is a small community about fifteen miles north of Asheville. Last weekend, Kinga and I went up for a country fair. Bluegrass music, quilting stalls, homemade cheese — the whole deal.

We bought some great goat cheese, and of course, there was a bit of live music everywhere.

That’s one of the greatest things about bluegrass: it’s community music. The more, the merrier. In that sense, it’s very similar to Polish Goralski (Highlander) music. Songs that everyone knows, half the people wandering around have instruments themselves — it always becomes a big sing-along.

More than that, though, bluegrass and Goralski both run the cliche gamut as far as talent goes. In a group of players, there’ll be one or two who just astound, and one or two who clearly have just begun playing.

Another critical similarity: both sound much better live, and too much recorded music of either can be tiresome.

Good morning

Thursday 6 October 2005

I’m shocked at how many times I’ve said “Good morning” to students coming into class where I’m subbing, and been ignored.

Completely ignored.

What happened to politeness? What happened to basic social skills?

NYT on Bush Nomination

Monday 3 October 2005

The New York Times says the following of Harriet Miers, Bush’s nomination for Supreme Court:

In choosing Ms. Miers as his nominee, Mr. Bush once again signaled the importance he places on personal loyalty and familiarity. Ms. Miers has served in a number of posts for the president, and at one point was his personal lawyer.

That’s a nice way of saying, “Bush’s primary method of chosing nominees depends -heavily- exclusively on cronyism to the point of ignoring
a complete lack of experience.”

Unfortunately, we’d have to live with Miers’ lack of experience a bit longer that we lived (and people in New Orleans died) with other appointees’ lack of experience, should she be confirmed.

Shakin’ the Rolls

Monday 3 October 2005

The entrance to our apartment complex is situated between two fast food restaurants: an Arby’s and a McDonalds. When Kinga and I first came to look at the apartment, we were given directions which included those two restaurants as landmarks. Whenever we give directions, we in turn do the same.

We’ve never really eaten at either restaurant. Kinga has never been a fan of fast food, having grown up in a country more or less devoid of it (at least in the time she was growing up). I ate less than my fair share growing up. I was never crazy about any of those places, but they were convenient and so I did eat there from time to time, though almost never at McDonalds.

About once a month, Kinga and I like to walk the quarter of a mile down the long driveway and get shakes (she, vanilla, I, chocolate) at McDonalds. No burgers, no fries, just shakes. And smalls, at that.

All the same, I feel embarrassed walking in. Looking around the room at the patrons, I want to say, “We’re just here for shakes! We’re not going to eat this filthy, greasy food, just a bit of ice cream mixed with milk!” And it must be much greasier than I remember, for you walk in and smell it — you can almost feel it hanging in the air.

The cliche is that America is fat because of such restaurants, that McDonald’s and Wendy’s play a disproportionate role in the fattening of America. While not a staunch defender of freedom of grease, I used to look at that argument in the past with skepticism. “It’s more a lack of exercise,” I thought. But on seeing the average McDonald’s customer for the first time in years, I’ve come to the conclusion that it must be more the food than the lack of exercise.

Every time — and I mean every single time — Kinga and I have gone for a shake, there is always a family or two sitting in McDonald’s who probably have between them enough weight for one or two additional people. Last night, there was a family to the right of us as we ordered our monthly shakes and a family coming through the drive in, and they were all, parents and children, huge.

The question is, who’s to blame? Fast food is undeniably that — fast, and convenient. I suppose when the majority of what you sell is simply taken out of a freezer and fried, it can’t help but be fast. Don’t these fast food places have any sense of guilt in what they’re feeding people?

An interesting article ran this morning in the IHT about this: “Processed foods? Read this, France says

But food can be fast and healthy. The only place Kinga and I eat at with any regularity is

Subway, and for ten years I’ve always gotten the same thing: a veggie sub and water. But it seems the vast majority of people doesn’t want vegetables, but meat. Fatty, greasy meat.

In the end, though, it’s like cigarettes: smokers and McDonald’s patrons are ultimately responsible for their own decisions. We can argue that there has been misleading advertising and so on, but let’s be reasonable — something dripping with fat or glistening with grease is so obviously unhealthy that it’s hard to imagine who could be fooled by any kind of advertising spin whatsoever.

Yesterday’s Visitor

Saturday 1 October 2005

We had a shiny black visitor last night. There was a cat wandering around the parking lot when Kinga came home from shopping – for clothes, which is why it wasn’t “we” coming home from shopping – and the scrawny little thing followed her right up to the door of our apartment. Then into our apartment.

Fairly obviously not a wild cat.

She was small enough that she looked to be just a still-growing kitten. When I petted her, I was shocked at how thin she was. We decided to give a bit of food: some cheese and turkey. She devoured it, then drank from the dish of water we put down for a good five minutes non-stop.

“What is this cat?”we asked each other. Wild cat? Behavior ruled that out immediately. Homeless? No, too clean, and no odor at all. And yet, if its home is near, we reasoned, why did it drink so much water and eat everything in sight?

We tossed her out when she began scratching around on the carpet as if to make a mess there, then went for a walk to see if she’d follow. She did her business, then followed us a little way, stopping under a car and watching us walk away. When we returned, she was nowhere to be seen.

After a movie and “Telexpress” (a news show from Poland), we started getting ready for bed. For some reason, I was moved to go check if the cat was still around. I opened the door and there she was – walked right on in as if she were at home.

So we wondered what to do. Letting her sleep in the apartment was out of the question, having nothing for her to use as a litter box. We decided to open the storage room off the balcony and put make her a little bed there, with the door closed partially. I put some water in there and made a bed of some towels on a shelf in the storeroom.

Setting her down on the bed, I partially closed the door and darted back into the apartment. She stayed in for some time, but then left, only to return to our balcony door and begin meowing. We let her back in for a moment, then put her back out, this time waiting to see if she went to her little bed on her own. She did – we were elated. Then she left again.

This morning, there’s no sign of her. Still, there’s a can of tuna waiting for her if she shows up again, and a dilemma waiting for us if she shows up regularly and we can’t determine who, if anyone, owns her…