Advice for my AS son, re: homework

Post Reply New Topic

I'm asking this with my son in mind. He's only 11, so when you think about this, try to imagine yourself as you were before you were mature enough to do things like post on message boards, and have these kinds of discussions.

He's diagnosed with AS, and is what they call "gifted". However, his grades aren't all that wonderful, because he can't bring himself to do homework. When he tries to do homework--even if it's easy--he can't tune out the desire to do or think about his special interest. It's bad enough that you can't even modify the homework so that it incorporates aspects of his special interest, because he's got such a mental block when it comes to homework.

His IEP has provisions for "modified" homework, but that's kind of vague, and the fact is, his grades suffer and he gets benched at recess for not having it done. He doesn't like that, but he doesn't seem to have the ability to focus on the homework. The more he tries, the worse he feels about himself, so mostly he just doesn't try. I understand that very well, because it's similar to myself.

Now...I want to ask you this. If YOU were in his situation, as a young kid--if YOU had been a kid who really needed to acquire the discipline (or whatever) to tune out your special interest thoughts long enough to focus on your homework---what do you think might have helped? I mean, looking back, knowing what you know now? (If you are thinking medication for attention/focus, he IS able to do his in-class work.)

I've been trying for years to "make" him do it, but the more I push it, the more stressed out he gets, and really becomes emotionally unavailable. I try to explain that, year after year, to the teachers, but they don't ever get it. I think homework for fifth graders is a bad idea, honestly, but the school district is mightier than the lone weirdo parent. Besides, I do think that he needs to learn the skill of self-discipline.

Thanks in advance. It would help to know your general age, so I have some idea where you are coming from.

What jumps out at me from your post is that he is able to do his in class work. Did/could you look into what is different at home and at school? If there are any elements from school atmosphere that you can create at home it may have a little help.

With school I didn't have problems with concentration much so I can't help you with personal experience but I would suggest to try to check into the home/school differences if you haven't already. For example is the room at home very noisy or quiet by comparison to the school. Apart from that I have no idea.

I'm in my 50's.

My sense is that at school everyone is doing the same thing, so it's both supportive in that way, and constraining as well. Aspies do shared interests/projects, so that might be what's going on there. Whereas at home, he's solo. Regardless of whether or not the home environment is conducive to studying (and that's worth taking a look at), it's still a solo activity.

His special interest is intrusive in this case, and medication may actually help with that. I'm not sure ADD/ADHD meds are the most appropriate though; meds for OCD might be better. Temple Grandin has a very good chapter on meds in "Thinking in Pictures"; she talks about using very, very low doses of some to good effect.

You're obviously aware how important it is for him to learn to discipline himself, and how frustrated he's getting. If meds can help him be more successful and develop the discipline and patience to do his work, you'll no longer be asking him to do something that is impossible.

Remember the old say... You can't teach a pig to sing? It irritates the pig and makes you look like a fool. Right now your son's wiring is working against him... it's not a fault, just a fact that has to be dealt with.

I never used to do my homework. I was always the one who had no space left in my planner for teachers' comments by the end of Monday. Homework was boring and I had no real motivation to do it. At my primary school I had my first after school detention when I was 8. My secondary school only did lunchtime detentions and they were ok. I didn't have friends anyway and generally the teachers got me to do my homework then. They put me in a quiet room and I could work in peace.
I always found working at home difficult because so mch of my day had already been taken up by things I didn't care about. If there is somewhere quiet you can put a desk, if possible maybe not in his room that might help. Trying to work in your room with all your things around is really hard.
Maybe give him some sort of reward for doing homework. I know that in theory you should do the work to learn, not for rewards, but at that age and when you can see no point to it some other sort of motivation might help. Perhaps if he got a gold star or something for finishing a piece of work, and a certain number got him a reward related to his special interest?
Just trying to think back to what I found helpful. Good luck.

How is he about the tests? Does he clearly know the subject matter? The homework might simply be boring for him. My backstory (in this regard) is entirely identical. I tended to ace tests but I refused to do "busywork" homework because I didn't need it. Some teachers understood this, some didn't (Asperger's did not officially exist back in my day). For the most part, this led to "C" grades in most high school classes.

If this is his issue (refusal because he is bored with the busywork aspect), don't stress over it too much because he is going to utterly blow away college. A double-major may not even be enough for him.

I never did any homework at all. Period - and being a girl I didn't have a diagnosis. I just used to smile and get away with it. It never occurred to me to do it. As soon as I was at home I was at home and all thoughts of homework were forgotten. But it was different in those days.

Now, I have this problem with my son but it is all the more pressing because it sometimes seems like all the important academic stuff is done for homework and they spend half the day at school planting flowers in the garden and rehearsing for plays. My son refuses and I can't blame him.

Try visual schedules - try rewards - if you keep to this it will eventually work for you. Make sure it is done in the same place every day in a quiet room etc and he will accept it at some stage. After all, this issue is not going to go away and you don't want him to fall behind. Think of me. I will be doing the same. Good luck.

You're suggesting that his special interest is interfering. I'm going to suggest going in the opposite direction. Follow the special interest.

When I was young, my special interests were Doctor Who and Star Wars.

I only read Doctor Who novelisations - and the school tried very, very hard to get me to read more widely. I didn't. They banned me from getting Doctor Who books out of their library and made me take two books per week on some other subject. I used to sit in the library and read their Doctor Who books, then pick two random books to take home and bring back without reading. Eventually, I started buying all the Doctor Who books - and today I have about a thousand.

My mother eventually realised this and would offer rewards, like buying a doctor who book for me if I could read my school books.

I used to write essays based on things I'd learned in Doctor Who. I wrote pretty amazing science and history related essays but never cited my sources - for obvious reasons.

When I did maths, I'd find a doctor who reason to be calculating. I'd imagine that I was counting daleks or trying to defuse a bomb etc...

Follow the special interest - find ways to make it part of the homework and the homework will follow.

I'm 15, and I have some trouble doing homework too. I basically only do projects/assignments, I skip the everyday homework, because it stresses me out and I just find it useless.

What I've found for doing projects and things, is that it's easier to do it if I'm not at home. Staying after school to work on an assignment helps, or even just going to the library. At home there are way too many distractions, and I can't get anything done.

Is it possible for him to stay after school to finish his homework? Staying in "school mode" until he gets it done might help.

I used to be the same. I never did any homework for nine years, and my grades sucked, but the teachers realised that I was gifted and weren't too hard on me for it.

When I reached Secondary School, however, my Aspie "concentration" skills kicked in. I still don't do a lot of homework, but I'm more "open minded" to the idea of school, in the way I am to my special interests, so it all just floats in now, and I get A's and B's

Remember that low motivation (or low tolerance for BS as I call it) is an autistic trait, so no matter how much you push him I doubt he'll do his homework consistantly. I can't say your son is the same as me, but I unlocked my instant learning ability through my special interests. You might think that his special interest are useless, but on the contrary they are probably the best thing going for him. If he learns everything about one interest, and moves onto another, and another, then he is going to be extremely gifted at learning by the end of it, perhaps gifted enough so that he doesn't have to put in any effort to get good grades. That's just my 2c, that's how it worked out for me and I can't say your son is the same, but a lot of aspies tend to think in the same way.

This was my life growing up. My grades were perfect until I began to receive homework. This, I typically ignored until the last minute, or left undone while pursuing other interests at home. My parents were typically agravated with my procrastination, and it certainly hurt my grades. I developed some coping techniques more as a means to get through school than through any deliberative process. I was already in high school before any real awareness of AS could be found within the educational system, and my "giftedness" tended to obfuscate any problems I experienced. I did the following, with varying results:

1) Complete homework at school. This usually happened during another class, lunch, or between classes. It worked for most assignments, but was somewhat stressful, and left me with very little extra time if the assignments required any kind of research or preparation.

2) Complete isolation from everything. I locked myself in a room without access to any books, media, or other people in an effort to minimize distractions. This helped sometimes, though I have a tendency to talk problems through in conversations with myself, and these can distract from the completion of assigned work.

Years later in graduate school, I experience the same difficulties. Ironically, I should be modifying a research article for submission for a journal at the moment, but am allowing myself to be distracted by this forum. I hope you and your child have better luck in developing strategies to deal with his difficulties than I did as a child. Good luck.

I haven't done a single home assignment since third grade I think..
If you find a way that works for him to do it without issues, do give me a poke, I still need that skill.

what my parents usally did when i was 11 was usally say you cant *insert my speical interest here* until you do your homework, it didnt really work for me cause when i was 11 id throw a tantrum but idk might work for you but eventually the school just sent me to a county program for kids with the diagnosis of e.d. (emotionally disturbed) (you may not want to give your child this diagnosis but its the only way to get to this kind of program) the one i went to (in roseville ca) was called vista creek and its a whole school with 2 classrooms for high school and middle school, and they focus on behaviors in and outside of school, and they give incentives for doing schoolwork and homework like theyed have a field trip every friday to somewhere idk if theirs a program like that near where you live but its worth looking into

It sounds like there's a lot of homework for an 11 year old. I was either in the last year of primary school (no or little homework) or the first year of high school at that age and I don't remember the homework load as being heavy in first year high school either. I used to have a very good memory so I just whizzed through it, it was usually pretty easy at that age anyway. I don't think it's a big deal this homework thing, it's just repetition which isn't the best aspie learning method.

Unfortunately things have changed and my son was getting a ton of homework when he was in Kindergarten.

It was bad enough that he had a lot of homework but his learning difficulties (and general unwillingness to do it) made it take about 60-90 minutes per day.
These days he has tutor homework on top of that.

We talked to the teachers about it and they said that they really didn't like setting any homework for primary school children but that because there were some overachiever parents who hassled them when it wasn't set, they had to comply. They told us to feel free to not do it.

These days, we do what we can with my son's attention span but if he seems genuinely unable to concentrate, irritated/bothered or otherwise restless, we drop it. Sometimes we write notes to the teacher to tell them that he hasn't done the homework - and occasionally, you get a teacher who gets annoyed when things aren't done. He's been told that if the teacher has a problem with him about homework, she needs to be referred to us.

We stand by our decisions.

In my opinion, any socialising, chores and other activities which he does after hours (such as playing on the computer, scouts and tutoring), more than make up for missed homework. He learns school work at school and life skills at home.

yeah, very sound advice there, seems like they're overloaded with unnecessary homework these days.

I don't precisely know how much aspies like sameness, how important routines are, but for me they are very important. If i am to do homework, i need to do it every day of the week from monday to sunday.

My routine is not weekly based, it is daily based, i have to do similar things every day. Having a different homework assignment daily causes a routine change daily, having a different order of subjects at school causes a daily routine change. It can be very hard to do anything out of routine if there are no perceived benefits, especailly when it's not my fault i have to do homework.

Homework for a 12 year old seems like punishment, you are forced to goto school all day and then in your free-time someone has the audacity to give you work that should have been done at school? In my classes there were many slow people, of course they deserve an education, but they should not be in the same classes as me! I understood most of the concepts first time around, if the other people wouldn't waste so much time asking stupid questions and recieving the same answers OVER and OVER again, i wouldn't have to do homework because it would have been done in school.

Yet again, why should i have to PROOVE i know something? i know i know it! Telling other people i know it should be enough. At a younger age i didn't realise the negative aspects of such thinking. You start to tune out, because the information is no longer stimulating, we got taught nearly the same stuff yearly. It was just being regurgitated with a few "extras" added in each year. Of course, because i was so understimulated by it, i was starting to stimulate myself in other ways, tapping my feet, looking out the window, i wasn't paying any attention to the "extras" being added in.

This is very sound advice and i suggest you follow it . However if it fails you should never take a special interest away from someone.