> He is VERY bored in class all the stuff they are learning now is stuff he learned when he was 3 and four and before school
> started. I feel bad he is bored the teacher will not give him any extra work because she says they are not supposed to and what
> if she gives him second grade work then what will he do in second grade?
The obvious answer is that in second grade, he would do third or perhaps fourth grade material, and so on. Not knowing the teacher, I can't judge her motive for her resistance to giving your son more advanced material. There is the not so reasonable one of disliking the extra work. Two reasonable motives could be concern about classroom discipline and about bullying. Imagine the following scenario. Other pupil: "Miss, this is boring! Why do I have to do this? He gets to do something else when he is bored!". If the teacher then tries to solve the discipline issue by giving the real reason "because he already knows this", which kids can easily convert into "because he's smarter than you", it could set up your son as teacher's pet, and make him a target for bullying.
I have a notion that I am not best qualified to advise on social interaction, but I have a general strategy I tend to use to compensate for my unintentionally upsetting people. I can't judge how effective it is, it's just the best I can come up with, and I hope it works. It is based on the principle that some people are born unreasonable, some are made unreasonable, but some have unreasonableness thrust upon them. Nothing can be done about the first, so the aim is to do something about the second and third. If I can come up with a reasonable motive for what I think is an unreasonable action, and if this reasonable motive can be addressed, my approach is to say something like "I am guessing that you do [whatever it is] because you [insert reasonable motive here]. My reason for wanting [something else] is [insert your own reasonable motive]. Is there anything I have overlooked, and can we achieve both our aims?" That makes it easier to avoid pushing people into being unreasonable, and it may even work on some who are unreasonable and know it, but don't want to admit it. Give them some reasonable motive instead, and they may claim that for their own, perhaps even making it their own. If you can then address the reasonable concern, it makes it a little harder for them to come up with excuses. You stop that strategy from becoming manipulative by inserting the question whether you have overlooked something, so that if you have, it can be brought into the discussion.
Addressing specifically issues of schooling, I am well out of my depth, not having children myself. Keep that health warning in mind when thinking about what follows. I can offer some brain storming, but for useful advice you need someone who knows more than I do.
My primary concern would be that your son gets a firm impression that school is not a place where he can learn anything, never mind something interesting. One of my brothers had that problem, not because he already knew what he was taught, but because he was simply not yet ready for school. After a few months, the school authorities admitted that my mother had been right and told her to bring my brother back in the next school year, but the damage had been done. That is a concern which should interest the school. I have a notion that mentioning AS in that context could be counterproductive, as many people would consider it a disability, and so the solutions they would come up with would tend not to involve giving your son more advanced problems.
A secondary concern is that your son might get so bored that he becomes disruptive. At that point, mentioning AS might get the school off thinking of your son as simply a brat. You could then argue that AS and boredom make for a bad combination, that there is nothing to be done about AS, but that it would be easy to do something about boredom. Apart from the same risk as above, the dilemma is that waiting until that point is not good, but starting out with the argument before your son might get disruptive effectively makes AS, and by extension any aspie kid, into a threat to the smooth running of the school. That would not be good either. People's responses to what they consider threats are often not reasonable.
Depending on how much time you have available, you could try home schooling as either a supplement or an alternative. You effectively use the supplement option already, but if you base it on a home schooling course, you have some ready made material at hand. You could tell your son that this is what the school will do, so that whatever interesting challenge he does get is at least indirectly associated with school.
And if you can find a way of explaining why the school finds it difficult to give him things to do that are new and challenging, without implicitly undermining the authority of the teacher, it might make it easier for your son to wait until school catches up with him. Unfortunately, I have no idea how you could find such an explanation.
You may be interested in the book "The Man Who Loved Only Numbers", by Paul Hoffman, a biography of the mathematician Paul Erdos. The book does not mention AS anywhwere, as far as I can remember (it has been a while since I read it), but Erdos seems to me very aspie-like in his social interactions. His practical intelligence was also not highly developed, but academically he was a genius, and he lived a rich and fulfilling life, doing something that is both fascinating and often enough useful. I doubt that many can count themselves so lucky.
Regards
Gromit
25 May 2006, 8:29 am
Thank you
