The Decision to Homeschool My Eldest

Updated at the bottom of the post

I cannot remember exactly when I first heard the term “Asperger’s Syndrome.”

We were living in Bloomington, Indiana, and the oldest of my (then) three daughters was in preschool. One of her preschool teachers had a son with Asperger’s, and she recognized some of the symptoms in Isabel.

We — like so many parents with young kids eventually diagnosed as falling on the autism spectrum — had not noticed anything abnormal with Isabel. I cannot describe the internal terror that is unleashed when someone tells you they suspect there is something wrong with your child’s brain.

I remember pacing the lobby of the Bloomington hospital with my then infant daughter sleeping in a stroller while my wife tried to comfort kindergartener Isabel as she endured a claustrophobic MRI (normal).

I remember attending a seminar on Asperger’s at Indiana University. I was fascinated to learn about these amazing people, but the protective father in me feared for my daughter’s social future.

That was more than 7 years ago.

Middle school fears

Eight days ago marked one of the most feared days of my life: Isabel was to begin middle school.

As Isabel has grown, I have feared bullying and teasing. I’d gladly take a Singaporean caning rather than think of a bully’s words cutting my precious baby girl.

The social world is largely invisible to Isabel. That was the only solace. She’d never see most of the cruelty.

It turns out that wasn’t the problem.

Hidden social world

I have little interest in placing blame, but it seems that the special education professionals in elementary school did an admirable job preparing her to pass the TAKS (Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skill) test but little to prepare her for middle school.

Kids are difficult. Isabel can be especially difficult. As a special education student, she had extra resources devoted to her. I thank the taxpayers of Indiana, Ohio, and Texas for that.

When there’s a recurrent difficulty, you learn to manage it. I fear that Isabel was over-managed. It seems that the aides interacted with Isabel a lot. They were the liaison between she and the teacher. It was probably much easier that way.

So she learned reading, writing, and arithmetic. But she never learned how to interact with the teacher and a normal classroom setting. These social skills are precisely the skills most valuable to a child on the autism spectrum.

When she walked into the middle school classroom last week, the aide safety net was gone. And behavior problems resulted immediately.

Already largely blind to the rules of the game that are social convention, Isabel was lost in the endless hallways of middle school.

It’s tough to learn rules for a game you cannot see.

Trouble by the scoop

These behavior problems were compounded by a questionable school policy. The cafeteria sells ice cream by the scoop. When Isabel found this out on the first day, she became obsessed with the $1 a scoop ice cream. Obsessive-compulsive behavior has always been a problem with Isabel.

And the ice cream won. It’s all she thought about.

And she’s rail thin. So she can afford the calories. But her class before lunch was a good distance from the cafeteria, and we worried about her having enough time to eat her real lunch without the time and distraction of standing in line for ice cream.

So we tried to strike a deal. If she’d be good during the week, we’d give her a dollar on Friday for ice cream.

And we hoped.

Early Monday morning — just the sixth day of school — Isabel snatched $5 from a girl in her class. When the teacher tried to intervene, Isabel fled the classroom and ran down the hall. My wife got the phone call.

Isabel said she was only offering to hold it. We’ll never know what really went on inside her head.

Her former elementary school principal denied our request for her to repeat fifth grade. She had, after all, succeeded academically. Apparently this man is unconcerned with the social development and well being of his students.

So we could send her to a different elementary school with new rules and new people. Another social environment for her to navigate with blinders on. All the while she’d be bored with the academic material.

What to do?

A custom curriculum

Luckily I have a close friend who partially homeschooled his son. And he had great advice and some ingenious ideas. I’ll forever be indebted for his calm and reassuring advice when I needed it most.

So we’re a member of the homeschool community. I figure that at the very worst we can do no worse than repeating fifth grade.

I spent the evening at Barnes & Noble with Isabel picking out books. We bought books on space, famous women in history, award winning literature, and math workbooks. I even bought her a novel about a little boy that was homeschooled on a hippy commune.

And I’ve made a deal with her. If she does her work this semester, we’re taking a father-daughter trip to Austin, Texas, after I give my final exams in December. We’ll visit the state capitol and see the bats at the Congress Street bridge. We’ll see art in a museum and listen to live music. Before the trip, of course, we’ll read books about all of this.

I’m really very excited. I hope to inspire in her my love for science and mathematics. I hope to make equations come alive for her rather than rote memorization.

My wife found this quotation today: “Autistic beings develop and bloom if their spirits, talents and self-esteem are not destroyed by bullies, prejudice, ‘doggie-training’, and being forced to be ‘normal’.”

I look forward to fostering this environment for my amazing daughter.

I’ll keep you posted on how it turns out. And hopefully post photos of the trip.

Update, November 14, 2010: As it turns out, this was a relatively short-lived experiment. Isabel missed school, and she started back part-time relatively quickly and full-time not long after. She enjoys the seventh grade today, and as of three weeks ago, she had straight A’s, something I never did in seventh grade!

Tagged as: Asperger's, family