Teach The Way They Learn

Autistic children learn the way they learn. Although I am not an expert on education, and certainly not in special education, I can tell you from my experiences being an autistic child a few relevant things. First of all, the way we teach neurotypical kids is that we put them in whatever school environment the state and federal Department Of Education has deigned to create and expect them to adapt sufficiently to achieve reasonable success. Expecting autistic children to adapt to their environment in some sort of sink-or-swim context is a fantastic way to fail. It's not so much sink-or-swim as it is fight-or-flight if you insist on putting them between a rock and hard place. As educators and parents, you are the ones capable of adapting, not them, and you must be the ones to do so if you've any expectation of getting anywhere.

First, let's talk about obsessive interests and boredom. Autistic kids come in two modes, which are, "interest resulting in encyclopedic knowledge," and, "bored now." Depending on their type of autistic mind (pattern, verbal, visual, or auditory), they're going to have things they're awesome at and things they're abysmally bad at, which I refer to as min/maxing. This is a gaming term referring to making some traits weak at the expense of other traits. In my case, English & History are second-nature and I barely had to try in those classes. Math & science required intensive tutoring by my stepfather or I'd simply fail. Boredom comes with subjects for which they have poor aptitude, which is best understood as simply not giving a shit about those subjects. Intensive tutoring is really the only way with those subjects.

When it comes to subjects for which they show aptitude, you want to intensively train them because those aptitudes are where career skills are lurking awaiting fruition. With poor aptitude subjects, all you're doing is getting them to temporarily understand the material well-enough to keep from wrecking their GPA or failing out of school. Overall, there's going to be specific ways they need to learn that must be adapted to each individual autistic. No teacher can simply adapt their class for autistics in general because we're all unique snowflakes and said uniqueness can make said adaptation a futile pain in the ass for everyone. Intensive tutoring is important both because of the individual attention to keeping them on task with subjects that bore them and the adaptation to the individual that is really only possible with a tutor.

-Frank