Documenting communication with school staff

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I've had the usual garden variety nightmares with my son's school experience. One thing that I have hard time understanding is when I explain something to college-educated people (ie school staff), even if it's not the first time or it's something considered "common knowledge" in autism, I get a blank look or "we weren't aware of that".
Currently, I'm dealing with my son getting into a bunch of trouble again. I can tell by reading the emails that the school staff is reacting to his behavior and not possible triggers. They also are practically illiterate. Here's a sample from a teacher's aide last week:

The special ed teacher is not much better. This weekend she replied to my email-I had discussed "discrete" learning styles-with the word "discreet", a totally different word and she completely misused it in terms of definition and context. These are key issues with understanding autistic traits and she is completely ignorant. We have used the word, "discrete" in every conversation we've had with the autism team since August.

Back to my point. I beseech everyone to document everything. I'm dealing with issues that have been verbally discussed and are very common issues with "high functioning" autistic students. Yet, I'm being told continually, "I wasn't aware, if I was, I could have. . . ."
Now, I'm searching high and low in my email records about name calling but can't find anything, so I'm afraid I don't have back up. It's hard to assume a teacher would lie. It's hard to assume that people aren't more interested in SOLVING THE PROBLEMS rather than defending their lazy, ignorant selves.

Given how common the term discreet is and how uncommon "discrete" is, your better off not using it. It will confuse people who don't use the term frequently. Your better off using words like "distinct" that won't be confusing for the average listener

I'd agree when dealing with lay people, but it's a trade term and very common. "Discrete" is to autism like "metabolism" is to weight loss. You have to understand it. The fact that I used the term, defined it and provided an example, only for the teacher to reply with the misspelled substitution and completely irrelevant context is baffling and inexcusable.

Its a common term for people familiar with autism and who discuss it regularly. Thats not the case with a general ed teacher or even most teacher's aides. It is perfectly understandable that teacher would be confused by it, and I say that as a teacher.The context she used it in is what you can easily expect 99% of the general ed teachers to use it in, and think you mean it in. As for it being a special ed teacher, that rather depends on the school. A lot of schools have a life skills teacher that deals with almost all autism cases, so a sped teacher who got her degree more than ten years may have little to no prior autism experience aside from the occasional speech or two given at a workshop

You can't expect people to help you if you are going to refuse to help them understand the situation. Why do you feel it necessary to use a term that you know the teachers are going to be more than likely to misunderstand if the message you are conveying is something you want understood and feel is important to be understood?

Teachers are human. Treat them like they are human and they'll work with you. Treat them like encyclopedias who can easily recall a strange term you used with a definition different from a common word that they are overly familiar with and you can't be surprised they aren't working with you - They have no clue what you are talking about and you aren't making any effort to help them understand. You know the term will be misunderstood - your post here shows that.

Its inexcusable that you have that knowledge that your term has been and will continue to be misunderstood, refuse to present your material in a way that isn't clouded in confusion, and then complain because the teachers are confused. The first step of understanding starts with you. Until you are willing to work with the teachers and not cloud them with highly autism specific terms, you are going to have these problems. if you care about your son, you'll stop using terms that only those who have researched autism will know. If you don't care, you'll continue using those terms, and you'll continue having these easily avoidable problems related to your choice of terminology.

Furthermore, it astounds me that you find these things very important, but yet only verbally discuss them. The average person forgets as much as 70% of something they have only heard.Why have you not gathered all the information into a typed packet and provided the teachers with that? Then the teachers can go back and check, plus they'll retain the information better in the first place because they'll be able to see it, rather than just hear it. And of course, having things in writing will keep the teachers from thinking you have no clue what you're talking about because you keep using "discreet" in the wrong context.


*Ps metabolism for weightloss cannot be compared as discrete for autism because of how much more significantly popular knowledge of metabolism is - thats something you could reasonably expect a person standing on the street corner to know. A better comparison would be the term aura for seizures. yep, you have to know what an aura is to prevent someone from having a seizure ina dangerous situation. But that doesn't mean you go into a parent-teacher meeting, define aura once, and expect the teacher to know it every singly time. Rather you describe the feeling, and use terms you know the teacher will recall like "funny feeling." After all isn't the goal for the teacher to be an expert on your son rather than a dictionary of terms?

I can tell you didn't read my post thoroughly. I'm not speaking about general ed teachers. My son is autistic and is enrolled in special ed. A special ed teacher in an autism clinic is someone who is "certified" for and professes knowledge of autism in an educational setting. In this setting, the term "discrete" learning is very common.

I don't know how you possibly glean this perspective from my post. I stated that we use the term in every conversation we've had in every meeting held. That's a lot over the course of the year, with professed "autism experts". I also stated in my post that in my email, I used the term in an unmistakable definition and context. In a reply, said teacher mispelled and misused the word, which showed me that not only did she not understand the word, but wasn't reading my letter.

The rest of your insulting accusations are based in the fact that you didn't read my post and don't understand my situation. Expecting a professional to understand basic terms of the trade isn't inhuman. Expecting a teacher who has 8 students to remember conversations we've had (over and over and over) isn't inhuman. Expecting a teacher to be honest isn't inhuman.

Understanding "discrete learning" style is key to understanding autistic kids. And we bring up every time (as I've mentioned ad nauseum). It means to learn things in particular context and not be able to carry that knowledge to a different context. It's necessary to remember that. For instance, an autistic child may learn that he may not hit in anger. He hits a child and says that he wasn't angry, he was pretending to be a villain. Someone needs to understand that that child has to have more explanation about hitting and touching.

My point was about documenting conversations, not arguing over trade knowledge.

Nope my post is based on the fact that I'm a teacher, and given what you wrote, I find it absolutely ridiculous that you would even consider a general teacher, or teachers aide, to know and correctly use the term "discrete" regardles of whether or not they were present at all your meetings. And if you aren't talking about such people than why did you begin by complaining about "school staff?"

And where does needing to know the term discrete fit in? You have yet to say anything that even slightly shows a reason for why the teachers need to know the term discrete. Again I ask, why use an easily confused term when you can use terms that won't be confused? Say "he won't be able transfer his knowledge to other context." the teachers will understand that and you can be guaranteed they'll be able to recall and understand it far more easily than some scenario you used "discrete" in.

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You need to make an effort on your part to convey understanding, which you aren't doing when you are using rare, easily confused terms like discrete. The fact that the teacher misunderstood even once should be more than enough proof for you that you need to change the way you are presenting your material. If you want to use "discrete" fine, but don't complain when the teachers misunderstand you. Again I ask, "is your goal to make the teacher a dictionary for autism terms or is it to help your son?" you only need to use terms like "discrete" if your goal is to make the teacher a dictionary. if its to help the the teacher understand your son, then you should present your information in a way that will help the teacher understand your son, not confuse her

If you aren't going to make an effort to present material in a way that isn't confusing to the teacher, than don't complain when she is confused. Teachers are human. Whether you like it or not, they learn like other humans. They don't magically gain superior skills just because they are teachers. Keep that in mind and situations like this will be rare, not the norm

And personally if I had wanted to insult you I would have pointed out the conversations teachers have about "terrible" parents sd I can pinpoint quite a few examples that your situation would fit into

I find this infuriating, but you probably know that already. This thread is about documenting communication a parent has with school staff. I gave two different examples about their communication styles.

Once more, in case you're at all interested and not just responding to attack me. My complaint about the misunderstanding about the term, "discrete", is AN EXAMPLE. I never used the term knowing the teacher wouldn't understand it. It's a very, very common term with autism professionals. Maybe in your teaching experience you aren't required to understand it but it's a very common term where I come from. Yesterday in this recent email exchange, I realized the teacher did not understand it. I would never knowingly use a term that was above and beyond the teacher's knowledge. I made that pretty clear in my posts and I don't know why you are persisting on this irrelevant and digressive attack.

We do say that and often. In fact, that was close to how I phrased my son's issues in the recent exchange. She still couldn't display that she even understood that. She replied that, "because your son is a discreet learner, he didn't understand social cues." Which had nothing to do with the conversation or the context of my son's problem. That's my point. My point is that we say this stuff over and over and each time we say it, we get this response that it's the first time they've heard it. No matter what it is. It's the first time.

I will agree that autistic students are different but they have particular traits and issues in common. To deny ever seeing a child that has poor receptive language skills is ludricrous. To deny seeing a child that has sensory integration issues but can't explain them is ludricrous. These are the very frustrating issues we deal with. We were sent to this school because we were told these were the "experts". It's a joke.

Please, if you are genuinely interested in my story and why I'm writing all this, you are free to search my old posts. I don't attack teachers on a general basis. I'm only describing one. One that is dishonest, belligerent and lazy. Please stop persisting that a specialized teacher need not understand educational terms in their field. Would you excuse a CPA for not understanding the word audit? Really,

alrighty then....back to the topic at hand.....

document, document , document....i too have been through the routine: " i didn't know....", " i never said that..."

once i caught on to their ways, i began to document everything. keep hard copies of emails. as far as the email that you can't find, did you check your sent box ? what about your recycle bin?

Well, it's a topic that I thought I had emailed about but I'm thinking now it's been verbal. "Name calling", both being on the receiving end and mimicking. Pop has complained that people call him gay and weird. That was months ago and the special ed teacher is now saying that she never knew that and if she had she would have helped. She's lying. She also put it back on the regular ed teacher, saying that she was unaware, even though that teacher has only been here less than two months and Pop has revealed he won't tell her about his problems.
There are events where Pop was teased that were witnessed by all and discussed at length in meetings, so saying, "I wasn't aware" is just BS. I"m tired of this. I really am. My husband and I believe Pop might be gay or bisexual (or transexual) and we are trying to teach him that while gay isn't a bad word, it's not appropriate to call other people that at school. It has a dozen meanings and we aren't going to say, "It's a bad word, don't ever let me hear you say it" like my mom did to me. So, now Pop is turning it around and calling people, "gay" and claiming it's not a bad word, "It means happy!" "It means you have boyfriends!".

There was a long phase where I was physically going to school a lot and having conversations. For about 3 months I really liked and trusted the special ed teacher. It wasn't until some things were uncovered in mid-October that I realized we had been schnookered. We tried for another 2 months, despite being lied to and falsely reassured, to work with the team. It wasn't until December that we got "ugly" and realized we had to play hardball.

I agree - you have to document everything.

I have a folder in my email program for each year of school. I am able to pull up anything that is discussed. I make sure I cc myself, just in case I don't automatically delete my sent messages. About once a month, I print them out and stick them in my binder. If I'm at a meeting, I easily pull up an email where the issue was discussed.

I try to never, ever discuss issues over the phone. If I do, I follow up with an email about our discussion and prompt them for a response so I have a record of the conversation.

Thanks for putting this out there as a reminder to parent's who might not be in the school system yet.

I'm sorry - I also thought you meant your son was enrolled in special ed at a mainstream school.

In my experience, unless you are in a program that only deals with autism, special ed means "any learning difference" and they are generalists in learning differences, and don't know much about autism.


Using the word doesn't mean they won't think you're referring to something else. For example, I had no idea what specifically you were referring to. Once you explained, then I realized what you meant, and my reaction was: "oh - she means we can't generalize. why didn't she say that?"


I would phrase that as "can't generalize" and use that terminology which most people can understand. Discrete is too easy to confuse with discreet - and since discretion is often required of teachers (i.e., the parents don't want it known widely that the kid has learning disabilities), it doesn't surprise me if they're assuming that you're meaning that. (People hear what they want to hear.)



Take a tape recorder to your meetings. Print out everything and keep hard copies of it. Expect that the teachers and admins you're dealing with are idiots who can't remember anything you told them. Put as much as possible in writing. Remind them promptly if you hear of anything that implies they're forgetting stuff that's important - like his inability to generalize. Use simple descriptions like "he can't generalize instructions or rules" rather than "he has a discrete learning style" which they probably hear as "he blahblahblah".

Good luck with it.

Anna
--
Aspie mom of Aspie son

there's nothing so terribly draining as having to deal with incompetent school staff.........we had an entire year of it when our son was in 7th grade. the stress it put on me was unimaginable. caused lots of health problems. during the following year, we were able to get him out of the school he was in & into a therapeutic day school. we went from school A where we were getting multiple daily phone calls & multiple daily emails about son's behavior to school B where we are only getting phone calls once in awhile~and when you get a phone call from school B, you know it's pretty bad. school A would call and complain about how they couldn't handle our son....like there was anything i could do at the time to magically make things better. HAH!

look ahead to next year's grade....is the teacher any better ? should you consider other schools ?

btw, glad to hear of your response to Pop about using the word gay.....not a whole lot of resources out there for GLBT people on the spectrum....at least that i know of.

Just to reiterate what I've said about "discrete". We phrase things like, "Pop, like other autistic people, has a discrete learning style. That means he has trouble generalizing/taking one lesson and applying to the next. He needs to be retrained every time and accomodated for this." I tried explaining that above, that we always apply a context and definition to our words. Besides other very common autistic traits that they display ignorance of, they should be able to understand the situation and be working towards examining how to better serve Pop.

He is enrolled in special ed, which is specifically for autism, an autism clinic, within a regular school. He is also fully included, which means he attends 2nd grade with grade peers but receives pull out services. He gets two distinct report cards, one for academics and one for his IEP goals.

Ster-He is actually place with the 3rd to 5th graders in the special ed room. So, he'd be likely dealing with the same teacher there. I'm not too worried about the regular ed teacher. The district is planning on closing an elementary school with an autism clinic and likely sending those students to our school. I don't know what the ramifications of that will be.

so the bottom line is that he'll still have to be dealing with the same special ed teacher ?

yeah, that's likely. When we were still on good terms, she told me that she and her husband are trying to relocate out of state. At the time I was upset because we were investing a lot of time "educating" her and sharing ideas. Now, I'm all for her leaving tomorrow.