Chosen Families

I tried a little experiment recently with Northern Virginia teachers gathered for the Arlington Diocesan Education Institute. Via PowerPoint, we first focused on 12-year-old film maker Tim Page, the star of a documentary winning national and international awards.  Kodak featured the film prodigy in advertisements, and he was interviewed about his work on network TV – all by age 13.

“What do you notice about this boy?” I asked teachers after they viewed an interview about his films.

“Advanced vocabulary,” and “very intelligent,” answered the teachers.

“If this were your son, what would you, as a parent, think of him?” I asked.

“That his focus is too narrow,” said one. “That he’s a genius!” exclaimed another.

The PowerPoint now filled the screen with my own reaction – an image of world-renowned movie director-producer Steven Spielberg. “I’d think I might just have a budding Spielberg in the house!” (and he could support his dear Mom and Dad in style, was left unspoken.)

All agreed that this boy seemed brilliant, creative and extraordinarily talented. Here comes the real point for the teachers:

“How would this child fit in your classroom?”

A roomful of heads shook “no.”

“Not well,” seemed the unanimous response. They saw young Tim’s soaring speech and expressive mannerisms, out of sync with peers, as sure sabotage of a normal classroom experience.

As it happens, the middle-aged Tim Page is a Pulitzer Prize winner from the neighborhood, where he was based at the  Washington Post when he won the big award.

But school nearly doomed him, as so often happens with Asperger types, or other neuro-atypicals who reason, communicate and respond differently than the neuro-typicals around them.

My hope for this workshop was to help teachers view such students from the perspective of parents, and better yet – through the minds of Aspergians themselves.

As detailed in his bestselling Parallel Play, the brilliant Tim Page found focus so impossible that he poked himself with pins to stay alert in class. Erratic grades won despair or disdain from teachers and parents, alike. A bully-magnet, he was grateful when kind teachers noticed and allowed him indoors recess to avoid abusive peers. Faked illness granted him welcome escape to the quiet and solitude of the nurse’s office.

The last grade Tim passed normally was seventh, moving into higher level classes subject-by-subject.  Temporarily admitted to an elite school that stressed not only academics but precise clothing, appearance and rules, Tim might as well have landed on Mars. Such social “language” is often so confusing to AS kids that efforts to conform are doomed. Cornered against a wall by a principal enraged by non-compliance, Tim responded with some choice words on a school wall.

Rejected. Scorned. Expelled. The future Pulitzer winner soon dropped high school entirely. Traumatic rejection, failure and isolation fed a suicidal focus, which was also fueled by a diet of bleak music and literature, drugs and alcohol.

How does a Pulitzer type rise from such ashes? He was saved, perhaps, by a Mother’s refusal to give up on a son whose genius-zone included classical music. She shipped him off to a music camp where he was embraced by those of similar passions, and where enormous potential in Asperger’s packaging was recognized and respected.

Camp led to music courses in New York City, which opened doors to Columbia University, where by graduation Tim had already become a highly regarded music critic and radio show host.

Illustrated here is a primary safety net for neuro-atypicals: reinforcement of strengths, a “best practice” topping educator guidelines in “school success for kids with Asperger’s Syndrome,” by Stephan M. Silverman, Ph.D., and Rich Weinfeld.  In this case, Tim’s parents celebrated his remarkable talent, and moved him onto a track where his abilities would be honed as an engine for vocational security and economic independence.

Imagine what might have happened if Tim had been routed into music or video challenges when younger? Fellow Aspergian John Robison reports exactly such school experience, when two junior high audiovisual technicians recognized his technical talent and drafted him for school equipment repairs. They “helped me on my way, and I owe them both a debt of gratitude,” John reports in his New York Times bestseller, Look Me in the Eye.

“For the first time in my life, I was able to do something that grown-ups thought was valuable. I may have been rude. I may not have known what to say or do in social situations. But if I could fix five tape recorders in an afternoon, I was ‘great.’”

Another high school flunking genius, John now reports he is “proud to be Aspergian,” which he views as “not a disease…(but) a way of being. My days of…crawling under a rock,” he adds, “are over.”

Those junior high technicians who long ago tapped John’s technical skill as a school asset likely had no clue that they were also injecting hope, identity and self-esteem into a floundering young life. Decades later, he cites that support staff as crucial to some of his most valuable and constructive education.

If the rest of us as parents, educators and community can likewise identify and “grow” aptitudes, defining young lives more by gifts than by deficits, who knows how many treasured kids can pry triumph out of trauma?  How many self-sufficient adults and
productive citizens – or even future Pulitzer winners and bestselling authors – are just waiting for a little wind under their wings – from us?

~ Bev