problem-solving
The Peter Principle
Oh, the holidays are coming. Mostly, they stress me out, but I like the making of the presents and the baking of the things. Recipes I don’t dare make any other time of year because I’d blow up like Violet in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory if I did.
Things such as fruitcake — the kind people love because you douse it with rum once a week — has to be started this month.
When the kids were little, we would make a gingerbread house that they could take to Cornerstone Cooperative Preschool for the Christmas party and break it apart and eat it.
I took a class from Sacramento County parks and recreation that was just Christmas cookie recipes. Got lots of good ones there — little sesame thins, which are about as addictive as sables, and one of those early versions of death-by-chocolate cookies that were more brownie or candy than cookie.
We always make cinnamon rolls for Christmas morning.
Those little guys were really tender the years Mark was able to score two 50 pound bags of Peter Pan flour. The bags were damaged in a delivery he was making. The flour was fine.
Oh, I loved that flour. We became baking fiends. Scones, biscuits, artisan-style breads, homemade pizza. As the bags emptied, I begged Mark to ask them next time he was trucking for Morrison (he drove a regional run for JB Hunt) to ask them where to get it. They said those big bags only went to restaurants and bakers. They couldn’t sell him any.
I know I should be able to find the little bags of Peter Pan in the stores, but I never see them. I buy King Arthur, which is good, too, and Albertsons “O” Organic.
Sigh.
I’ll go on the hunt again, but it’s going to be another Christmas without Peter Pan.
Good thing Sam’s favorite cookie doesn’t need flour. This one came from the Sacramento class. It’s called Unbelievable Cookies
1 c. crunchy peanut butter
1 c. sugar
1 egg
1 c. chocolate chips.
Mix peanut butter, sugar and egg in a bowl. Stir in chips. Shape in balls and bake at 325 for 10 minutes. Do not over bake.
Happy Halloween
My good friends at Texas Parent-to-Parent sent out their fall newsletter with some tips to help kids with disabilities, and particularly those with autism, Aspergers and sensory dysfunction to make the most of Halloween.
I asked Sam tonight if he remembers when it got easier for him to wear Halloween costumes. He stopped eating his Blue Bell Christmas Cookie ice cream long enough to say “high school.”
So, long past the trick-or-treating days.
Here’s a tip sheet for costumes and activities.
And here’s a tip sheet for the rest of us to help make Halloween special for all the kids.
Remember what Lucy Van Pelt said: Never jump into a pile of leaves with a wet sucker.
Cleanliness is Next To Impossible
The problem with putting your house on the market is that people come over. And before they do, you have to clean it.
A lot.
And not that Erma Bombeck way, where you just give it a sweeping glance.
Opening our lives this way has been traumatic for Sam, but he’s getting better. I got just a little ptsd leftover from when we sold our home in California in 1993. At the time, I was pregnant and chasing two preschoolers. We lived in a 1,100-square-foot house with a forest of tubas in a “hot zip.” Real estate agents were supposed to call and schedule a visit, but they would sometimes pull up to the curb and “call.”
After a while, I gave up. They could just tour a messy house — dirty diapers, toys, dishes, tubas, and all.
Here, we live too far off the beaten path for people to take a chance on pulling up and getting permission to see the house. But I am tired of always being “on” with the cleaning. This market is a lot tougher. I’ve got the place priced competitively, so we have too many people coming through. Some rooms in the house have taken on a museum-like quality.
My mother has that kind of tidiness in her house. My sisters do, too, at least in certain rooms.
I’ve not ever been that way. It’s not like I don’t know that I should clean the refrigerator once a month to discourage listeria, but it’s amazing how long I can go when I think no one is looking.
I vowed to get better the day that Michael and Paige came running into the office — I was writing something — to announce that a spider nest hatched because there were a thousand baby spiders on the living room ceiling.
They thought it was really cool, but decided that leaving it to nature wasn’t a good idea. And there really were a thousand baby spiders on the ceiling. I vacuumed for about an hour.
After that, we worked out something called Hour of Power. We put about two dozen small cleaning jobs on slips of paper in a bowl, the kids would roll the dice and take turns picking jobs on a Saturday or Sunday morning. Mark and I would do the tough stuff, like mop the floors or address whatever disaster had been waiting all week (the refrigerator, for example.) By the time we were done, it looked good and lasted almost til the next Hour of Power.
Those were the good ole days.
Well, back to cleaning.
Things I Never Knew I Was Waiting For
I’m fond of telling my kids that their grandkids will be in awe of their childhood experiences — all of what a computer couldn’t do, how crude a smartphone was, how brutal medical practices seemed (that last idea comes courtesy of Star Trek IV The Voyage Home).
I tried to apply that perspective to all kinds of situations in raising Sam. Being aware that you are in pioneering territory is helpful. Lots of people have come before us to do the Lewis and Clark equivalent of defining the landscape of accommodating someone with a disability and laying the groundwork with the public policy that opened up this new frontier of living with a disability.
I try to remember this journey as the Wolfe family Conestoga wagon settling the autism frontier. Nearly every day something new, something without precedent. Sometimes it’s exhilarating. Sometimes the risks are clear and present. And always, always, exhausting.
The pioneering days of speech therapy are behind us. If someone in the discipline was interested in a exit interview, I have things to say about what worked and what didn’t. I would imagine Sam does, too.
Never was that more clear than when I read the following line in Diane Ackerman’s book, One Hundred Names for Love (a book about her husband’s stroke and continuing recovery from aphasia, which has some interesting similarities to Sam’s speech impairment). She describes a scene where her husband, Paul West, also an imaginative writer, struggles with fill-in-the-blank worksheets meant to help him regain his ability to talk.
“Choosing the correct answer could be as tough as herding cats. But, like most people, I did know the accepted answer. Selecting it, I had to ignore all other answers that spring to mind or were truer to my experience.”
Correct is not the same as accepted.
Furthermore, we cannot ascribe too much meaning when a client cannot come up with the accepted answer.
I tried to explain that in my book, when I relayed Sam’s experience of confronting vocabulary cards with images of things he’d never seen before. Diane absolutely knocked it out of the park, explaining the inherent social context of many speech exercises.
I think it could be a much bigger problem than those working in speech therapy might realize.
Throughout the book she describes “deliciously ambiguious words” and takes us on verbal joy rides with them. She sprinkles phrases without context and then gives us a fun house worth of perspectives to show how much we depend on context for meaning.
I wish I knew that two decades ago. I can only imagine how much better his speech therapy would have been. I wish I knew that a month ago when we were hit again with this problem.
I wish I knew these things I never knew I was waiting for.
Buh-Bye, PFY 478
I stood in line at the tax office for a reasonable amount of time, about 15 minutes, which was made merrier because Monte Borders came in halfway through the wait. Monte lights up every room he enters.
Then, I told Sam’s sad story to the clerk, handed over his registration sticker and $7 — again, not too bad — to get him on the road again without having his license plate pop up in every police scan he drove by.
This was something Sam could have done, but I didn’t want him to miss work and I’m just down the street. I’d already planned on spending the day addressing other people’s screw-ups (this means you, Bank of America), so I was ready to make a party of it today.
I asked the clerk whether this happened very often, whether she had given anyone else new plates because their plate number was in the warrant database. She said not very often, but it wasn’t uncommon either.
And she agreed, this was the best way to fix the problem.
Sam got a new 7-digit plate. I remember when California went from six digits to seven digits on their plates.
That’s about when we left California. Too many people.
Hmm.
Explaining the Unexplainable
Throughout Sam’s life, the things he’s needed to learn had to be taught directly. You cannot imagine how important learning from context is until you are confronted with the inefficiency of hours and hours and hours of direct teaching.
As Sam has grown, he’s learned to generalize. He’s picked up more from context — but he had to be taught how to do that, too. Taught to imitate, taught to read context, taught to recognize idioms, taught to generalize.
I get tired just thinking about it.
Now, Sam is struggling mightily with a new problem. And I have to figure out how to explain what civil rights are. Do you know how often we toss out that phrase and we have no idea what it means?
That violates my civil rights.
Read him his rights.
They marched for civil rights.
Google it yourself, and see what a mess you get. Dear readers, can you help?
When a test is a barrier
Sam is taking two online classes this fall, one in word processing, another in spreadsheets. I’ve written before about the requirements he needs to “upgrade” from a certificate to an associate’s degree in computer technology. He’s just four classes away. It’s very exciting.
Both of this fall’s classes are in another department at the community college, and both required him to thoroughly read the syllabus and take a quiz over its contents. The students have to get a 100 on the quiz (they have unlimited attempts) before they can start the class. In a way, its a brilliant way to underscore the importance of reading and understanding the course requirements. In some of the larger lecture classes I’ve seen, professors spend the first day of class reading the syllabus to the students. And I’ve seen students drop once they realize the expectations.
Sam sailed through the syllabus quiz for one class but not the other. We’re not quite sure what has happened — we suspect, actually, there is a scoring problem — but it is yet to be resolved. I sat with him yesterday as he tried, again and again and again and again, to secure that perfect score. Before I helped him devise some evaluation strategies, he had no idea how to figure out what he was doing wrong.
It was like being thrown into the ocean with no clue where to swim to safety. You can imagine how wild and panicked a person’s thinking might get. And then, when you consider the true stakes how angry you could get.
He can’t get the keys to the rest of the online kingdom of the class until he does. An email to the professor about the problem has brought only the suggestion that he drop the class.
And that brings me to the point of this post — there is testing and then there are barriers.
When I was in junior high school, a gymnastics unit was added to our curriculum, probably in part because of the wildly popular Olga Korbut and the amazing things she did at the 1972 Olympics.
I saved those Seventeen magazine pages with a story and photo about her for ages.
Our instruction was pathetic. Our teacher couldn’t do any of the moves, and was continually recruiting a student to demonstrate a move to the others (with that student likely demonstrating that move to the teacher for the first time about 90 seconds earlier.)
Once “demonstrated,” we could practice on the equipment, serving as spotters for each other. At the end of the unit, we had to perform the different moves for our grade. We were scored on our ability to do the moves — nothing about the rhythm and composition of a routine, our body poise, or other criteria used to evaluate a gymnast.
The test was sequential and, theoretically, based on difficulty. Our teacher had no idea what was a hard move and what was easy, in my opinion. But, you couldn’t test for a B if you couldn’t do all the moves needed for a C.
Because I couldn’t go from a crouch on the beam to a standing position using only one leg — a “C” level move — I was not allowed to test for any other grade levels, even though I’d been working on all of them, as were my classmates, for six weeks.
Lots of girls didn’t get the grade they deserved for having taught themselves gymnastics.
That’s not instruction, and that’s not testing, so don’t make like its the bar exam.
Overheard in the Wolfe House #126
Sam: I have some shocking news.
Peggy: What’s that?
Sam: I have my first quiz and I have to get a 100.
Peggy: Really? How many chances do you get?
Sam: It’s unlimited.
Probably Not Probable Cause
Sam started asking me a lot of questions about when might a police officer pull you over, so many that I asked him whether he got pulled over recently.
He had. In Flower Mound.
As far as I can deduce, he got pulled over because the kind of car he was driving and his license plate closely matched someone the police were looking for.
And what was the probable cause, you ask?
Sam still has a frame around his license plate.
He wondered if his identity had been stolen and whether he should turn his car in. We had a long talk about first amendment rights, and private property rights, and who the police work for. I have no idea how much of that sank in.
But tomorrow, we’ll pull the frame off the plate.
Overheard in the Wolfe House #122
Sam (as Microsoft Office 2010 gets loaded on his Dell via the digital river): …. and so if you need to chat with them, here’s where you turn that on ….
Peggy: I’m sure it will be fine. I’m happy to keep an eye on it for you so you can go to work.
Sam: Well, I’m very sorry I got you into this, Mom.