High-Functioning Autism/ADD Middleschool Homework

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Hi Folks,

I have an 11 year old (he was diagnosed as on the spectrum after a speech delay...exhibits stimming...still has trouble with small motor skills...but otherwise and in spite of that appears neurotypical to most people...it's also been suggested by school people that he may have ADD), who recently started middle school. Like last year, he has a problem with doing homework. It always takes too long, he has trouble focusing, and he doesn't do his best work (either mentally or in terms of neatness). It's hard for me to remain patient and patience in itself isn't a solution (although it will obviously make us both feel better!). While I work on my own issues, I'm wondering if anyone has any solutions regarding what I've described...What do you do to make homework less dreadful for yourself or your kids? (one note: he seems overly reliant on me or or his mother shepherding him through the entire process of homework...while we don't mind it from a "feeling useful" point of view, I'm kind of worried it's creating a dependency on us that might be stymying his growth.) Further, do you have any suggestions regarding getting your child to focus on or think about their meta-behavior regarding school...stuff like being organized, the importance of making sure they have their homework when they leave, keeping their lockers organized, stuff that will help them be successful in school.

Thanks,

Read the book Smart But Scattered. It has all kinds of plans to help a child learn to be organized about things like homework. It's also a good idea to screen for learning disabilities -- figure out why he's struggling so much...

In the book "Uniquely Human: A Different Way of Seeing Autism" by Barry M. Prizant (2015), as well as in all my postings in this forum, you will find the same message: the kids are fine, they don't need to change. It is us, the adults, who need to change, including our way of providing education. This is a paragraph from Prizant's book:

"Autism isn't an illness. It's a different way of being human. Children with autism aren't sick; they are progressing through developmental stages as we all do. To help them, we don't need to change or fix them. We need to work to understand them, and then change what we do."

My son is in 1st grade. Before this school year started, I had a conversation with the teacher and principal of my son's new school, I told them: don't worry too much about my son's academics. I told them, my son's education is my responsibility. What he really learns is from home. Anything else the school can provide, is bonus. So, what do I teach my son, how do I teach my son?

Well, my son's core curriculum has consisted of taking elevator rides. I have been going with him to elevator rides for about 4 years now. He is a big fan of elevator videos on YouTube. Virtually every weekend I go with him to elevator rides (that includes yesterday). From elevators he has learned to read, to draw pictures, to type on computers, to write, to talk, to do math, to write simple computer programs, to assemble complicated electronic circuits, to eliminate some of his sensory/rigidity problems, to start to produce his own video clips, and now, to initiate conversation and socialize with strangers. Tell me, what schools offer a life-long elevator education curriculum? Ha. My son just started school a few weeks ago, and now the teachers are taking him to elevator rides (as reward). Do you notice something? The school changed.

How well is my son doing? Well, first of all, he is always happy and smiling. And in classroom (neurotypical, a public school), he is doing exactly what all other students are doing, despite my worries. He is hyperactive, doesn't focus well, making him sit still is always a challenge. Yet, somehow, he has been getting better and better throughout the years.

My son nowadays likes the play with the real things. Like the power seats in our cars. Or real electronic circuits (on the so-called breadboard), instead of snap circuits. I have bought some DC motors and opened one of them for he to see the inside. He has an array of interests/activities, from YouTube videos, some games, building blocks, drawing pictures, cutting and taping papers, play with a vacuum cleaner, going to elevator rides, play in playground, swimming, and now, shooting video clips. Sure, during summer we also did some academics: reading, writing, math. When my wife worked with him through a math problem set, a few days later he wrote on a few paper sheet and make up a problem set and gave it to my wife as an assignment for her. We just had to laugh. Very fair, my wife said. Its title was: "Roblox Math Set". (Roblox is a computer game that my son plays a lot, it's similar to Minecraft.) It comes with five sections: (1) Maze, where you need to trace a line from my son to Mom, fighting a Zombie along the way, (2) Circling, where you circle the right answer, (3) Solving, where you write in the right answer, (4) Draw a Line, where you connect two equations that give the same answer, and (5) "Easy & Popular," for basic additions. "Easy and Popular"? I wonder where he got that idea from... kind of cute, though.

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Perhaps you shouldn't focus too much on the school curriculum. Your son is not ready yet for learning things the way how our school is set up for. Frankly, even if my son flunks in every subject, I will still be a happy parent and my son will still be a happy kid. My children's happiness and creativity are my top priority. My daughter has taught herself to play with both hands on electronic piano keyboard, and now I am teaching her to sing in chromatic solfège, and introducing her to modulation in music, basically some advanced music theory so she could recognize music notes (I have no music theory training, by the way, I am learning it all myself. It feels great that at my age, I am finally understanding the logic behind music). Anyway, my point is: the kids are fine. It's the adults who need to change. Think about how the teachers in my son's school are taking him to elevator rides as reward. Think about how I have to learn about advanced music theory myself. No to be overly critical of our schools, but our current education system doesn't provide a whole lot of room for creativity. Creativity is what counts the most, in a world where our children have to grow up next to robots. If a child really doesn't benefit from regular schools, then homeschooling is always a possibility. An alternative that has always been in our mind and we might still choose to do it.

Special kids need special education, not lesser education. We have a lot of technology at our disposal. Like video conferencing. It's just that our school system still has a lot to catch up to. You can achieve economy of scale, when you gather kids with similar interests across the country (or globe, for that matter). Whiteboarding apps are also getting better and better.

Whatever they do in school, is much less important than what your son is learning outside school. Learn about your son's interests, and expand from there. Don't let his brain go idle. You still have time to make a change, before your son's underdevelopment becomes permanent. (Sorry, I call a spade a spade.) Oh, I just got a small tablet for my son, so that he could shoot video clips. They are so cheap nowadays, for $50 you can get a 7-inch tablet computer with dual cameras. Teaching your son some computer skills (including video editing and image processing skills), or introducing him to computer programming (I would recommend Python), learning to use Excel (perhaps even Power BI), PowerPoint, I would say, is so much more important than what they do in schools.

We are at a transition point. In a few more years, educating autistic children will be a lot easier. I know things are harder today, because the technology is still no there. But, in another 10, 20 years, when you look back, and realize that even with all the technology limitations, some parents still succeed in doing what would later become common approaches, I can guarantee you that you will feel regret. (I started to make video clips for my son using ancient video editing tools. It used to take me days to make a video clips. Nowadays I have apps that allow me to make animation video clips in under 5 minutes. I did not give up back then just because of technological limitations.) Put in some effort, hang in there. So that in 10 or 20 years, you can look back and be proud of yourself.

Going back to homework and school locker thing: those are not the problems you should be attacking or trying to solve. Your son's problems are not there. You handle those problems in anyway you can. If schools can't accommodate or adjust, then consider homeschooling. Your son's only problem is he is still a child, and still behaving like a child (for his age). His real problem is underdevelopment, or insufficient information connection inside his brain. His development has been neglected in the past, up to this point. For wanting to address day-to-day problems like the ones you have mentioned, parents/teachers neglect to develop their children's intellectual capabilities, for the long term. In the name of teaching their children, parents/teachers often end up destroying the lives of these children. Please, the kids are fine the way they are. Follow them, respect them. Take them as equal-rights human beings. Trust me, they are smarter than we are. I look around my neighborhood, and I don't see any other parent taking their children for elevator rides. My point is, it was not me that came up with the idea of elevator rides. It came from my son. He learned every skill he'll ever need to learn, from elevators. You son will tell you what to do. Once your son is intellectually developed, everything else will fall into place. And that includes homework and lockers. Or in the case of son, sitting still in classroom.

And these words come from someone who has been kicked out of his middle school, who later got a Ph.D. in theoretical particle physics from a top school. Yes, that's me.

We do a lot of scaffolding for executive function skills, and we always have even when out son was in public school. The requirements really ramp up in middle school and up, and if you want the school to do any of it, you have to get it put in the IEP. Often you can have teachers or some central person double check his assignment book to make sure he at least wrote the assignments down.

I know the goal is self-reliance but this is one of the ares where for aspies, the development tends to lag well-behind what is expected and you have to scaffold while the development is not there.

The thing we are trying now (not with the best success) is a kanban board. it is a way of organizing the work into a visual schedule, where he can have post it notes for his assignments on individual post it notes, in three different columns on a white board: To Do, In Progress, and Done.

That means he has to make the notes and put them on the white board, and he feels it is redundant with writing them in the assignment book. We may drop the assignment book, and only use cards, but that would not work if my son was not schooled at home.

Developmental research is clear - 11 year olds are ill suited to a middle school environment. School systems made the change to putting 6th and even 5th graders in middle school because of economics. It had nothing to do with the welfare of the children.

I don't know if this is helpful at all. But a lot of 11 year olds are terrible at middle school. They aren't ADD, or even behind. They are YOUNG. Too young to be switching classes and teachers all day. And its certainly not developmentally inappropriate to be needing your guidance for homework. If he's still like that at 14, you might want to be concerned, but not at 11.

As for homework, I really benefited from having someone sit down with me and organize my notebook regularly. I wonder if your son's IEP could include a period with a special education tutor to do homework there. That way he could spend a more normal amount of time on it at home. Also, you could ask that he be given less homework. That is an accommodation on the table. You'll find a few teachers who won't like it, but they don't really have a say in liking it or not. Its about the kid and his needs.

Have you thought about starting a reward system? You know, a chart. Stickers. Rewards - new video games for or a trip out for icecream. In general, eleven year olds are still young. This kind of thing works on them. You could give him points for neatness. You could even time parts of his homework - make it into a game like a video game. You get more points if you do it quicker. That might actually increase the quality of his work because he'll be focused on it.

My kids are younger than yours (my oldest is 9), but I wanted to weigh in on the homework thing. My oldest, whom I started homeschooling in 3rd grade, never was able to deal with homework. It was a 3-hour battle every single day, full of tears, stress, and hell for everyone. And he wasn't getting anything out of it, even when he DID complete it. I think a lot of it, looking back, was about ME needing to "prove" to the school that my son "could" (in theory) handle the material. I think if I had to do it over, and/or if I had no choice but to put him back into public school, I'd have to take a much more active role in deciding how much homework to force him to do, and/or have a very frank discussion with his teacher about the possibility of alternate assignments. Because the truth is that the homework wasn't doing ANYTHING to benefit him. NOTHING. And of course taking a stand on something like this is going to make you one of "those" parents at school, but eh. At some point you kind of become one of "those" parents anyway, whether you want to be or not, simply because your kid is different, and you have to do a different kind of management than other parents.

My advice to you would be to really try to figure out how the assignments are benefiting him-- either academically or on a more "meta" level such as teaching him how to be responsible, stick to a schedule, etc... but then, with or without the blessing of the teacher, adjust his homework to a level that seems more appropriate to his skills, needs, and what you actually want him to get out of that time. I'm guessing that by middle school this becomes more difficult than it would be in elementary school, because homework completion could be a requirement for a passing grade. But if he's miserable, and you're miserable, then it's not doing him any good anyway, and something needs to change. My son's school seemed to think that if they just kept trying to "break" him, he'd eventually crack and get with the program. Nope. He just became more and more shattered and filled with low self-confidence, even though it was never a question of his grasp of the actual material. He just didn't have the skills to sit still and focus on really boring, writing-heavy, poorly-written worksheets. None of the the tricks I tried really helped, or if they did, they only worked for a week or so. Then we'd be back to tears and battles. What I've found through homeschooling him is that he thrives in a more interactive, one-on-one discussion-based way of learning. I still give him homework, but it's deliberately not challenging from an academic standpoint-- the point of the homework is simply to stretch his tolerance to even TRY to sit still and do pencil-and-paper work on boring stuff that seems pointless to him.

For what it's worth, my neurotypical son is also terrible at homework. He needs full support from me and I have to drag him through every inch of the way, often with bribes. If he starts to suffer and cry (which has happened already this year) then I know it's developmentally inappropriate and I dial it back. Or I go ahead and modify the work. For example, if a worksheet about pronouns requires him to change a noun into a pronoun, but also to REWRITE the entire sentence just for torture's sake, (and there are 10 sentences to re-write, and that's just ONE of the pages of work he has to do that night, PLUS spelling, math facts and reading), I take out my red pen and I cross out that part of the instructions and just have him write down the pronoun. There's no reason to torture kids with busy work, especially kids for whom writing is a real struggle and homework that is meant to take only 20 minutes winds up taking an hour because of stupid extra writing busy-work like that. I have 3 boys, and all 3 three of them (both ASD and NT) have been way "behind" in writing. I have never been concerned about them being able to write eventually but the schools act like it's the End of the World and try to suck you down into a Doom Spiral with them.

I feel like the first thing you need to figure out is WHY he is struggling. Is he bored? Is he unable to sit still? Is he distracted by the tiniest little non-homework-related thing every other second? All of the above?

I agree with the other poster who suggested "Smart but Scattered" if you haven't read it already... it's a good starting place to organize your ideas about what's actually going on, so that you can target the most problematic issues.