rants
Documentary coming soon
Where are the heroes?
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.
Higher Ed Could Do More
There are thousands of kids with autism coming of age, and Sharon’s comment tells me Sam’s experience — while a first for him — is not unique in higher education and many in higher education need to do more to get ready.
Read on:
Thursday when I picked Adam up from class, he didn’t want to talk, at all. He seemed sad. Finally, late in the night he told me that his philosophy professor asked the class who had read the assignment. Adam answered that he had but, fearing he might get questions he couldn’t answer, he added that he was not sure he completely understood what he read. His instructor ridiculed him and got the rest of the class to laugh at him. Naturally, he felt horrible.
But, that’s not all. Tuesday he went to the music department to get advice about the possibility of majoring in music. He wants to do soundtracks for movies and he is pretty darn good at it too. He was told that he should stick with engineering because he should have started his music career a long time ago.
He is 16 for crine out loud! Sixteen, with 18 college credits and a 3.8 GPA. What’s wrong with the jackasses who are supposed to be teaching our young people.
Higher education has come a long way to accommodate students with disabilities, but there are still problems. This is what happens when you build an educational system that has built-in assumptions.
Oh, and because my past life was in music, I can say this with complete authority: Any music professor who thinks music training needs to begin in childhood, like you do with gymnasts, isn’t a true musician and artist, he is a gymnast.
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.
Summer of ’11
David Minton shot this in the livestock barn at the North Texas State Fair and Rodeo. You do what you gotta do to stay cool. Today was officially the 63rd day of the summer over 100 degrees.
Meteorologists say we could see relief this weekend, unless a tropical storm forms in the Gulf.
If so, we’re cooked.
Breaking the Other Tape
Credit: National Weather Service, Fort Worth
Out Like a Lion
Sam got sidetracked with his plans to write an app for iPhone that restores some contact-sorting features he used to have on his Nokia.
Sam works on an old Dell a dear friend gave us, so any app work is going to happen on my Mac. He started amassing the resources he needed and then came to me to say the final step was this: we need to upgrade to Lion OS.
I consented to this upgrade without asking probing questions — completely, utterly stupid on my part.
Ever since I got my first Mac in 1988 and we made the leap to System 7, I’ve known it’s never simple. System upgrades are like taking off down the autobahn without tying down a bunch of your stuff in the back of the pick-up.
(My mind is in funny loop just now, imagining pick-up trucks on the autobahn racing past Benzes and Beemers.)
What flew out of the Wolfe family pick-up, you ask?
All my financial records (yes, Intuit let the weenies rule over Quicken). Sam’s amazing fixes for our family computer network — including a peripheral switch for our printer and our portable back-up drive. The entire Microsoft Office suite.
I sooooo knew better.
Major backtracking today.
But I’m proud of Sam. He downloaded Open Office. That’s fixed. And knowing Sam, we’ll be true contributors to the community.
Then, we pulled the Quicken data off portable back-up and he’s going to use Paige’s laptop to help me convert to iBank. That should be fixed tomorrow.
Right now, he’s writing the manufacturers of that peripheral equipment and asking for patches.
See Sam Go.
No Surprise Here
Stanford has come out and said the environment is a significant factor in autism causation.
This is not a surprise in the Wolfe house.
At one time, Mark and I hoped that we could be included in a class action suit being filed against those who had polluted on the east side of Sacramento, including Aerojet and Mather AFB. The same law firm that had pursued the hexavalent chromium case against PG&E, the story that become the movie Erin Brockovich, had found a cluster of autism and thyroid disorders there.
The problem for us was, we were living in an apartment complex one street too far west. We couldn’t be in the class because we weren’t living in the Rancho Cordova zip code when I became pregnant with Sam — or so the pre-screening went.
I pushed back hard on the legal clerk who interviewed us. Really, just one street over?
Really.
I learned that day that science and law are two very different things.
That All May Read
Yesterday we mailed back the digital playback machine from the Texas State Library. Sam has been a client of the Talking Books program since elementary school. Many nights the boys put in a Harry Potter book, or Hank the Cowdog, or Lemony Snicket, and fell asleep as the story unfolded.
That doesn’t really work for Sam’s life anymore. He’s working two jobs and, come fall, will be taking two classes online — just 12 more credit hours, four easy classes — and he’ll have his associate’s degree.
I bought him a Kindle two Christmases ago, in hopes that the Kindle — which has the capability of converting text to speech — would fill the gap in his life.
It helps when a textbook is available as a Kindle edition. The book can be read to him and that improves his comprehension. We can’t expect the Talking Books program to keep up with that kind of need.
But book publishers don’t want to cooperate with the e-reader formats. They likely consider what happened to the music industry as a cautionary tale. His most favorite books aren’t available, probably because the most popular authors know that where they go, is where the e-reader goes.
We’d pay for the damn books if they play nice with Kindle, which had the decency to offer text-to-speech. We’d buy another e-reader if they would quit buckling to the audio book market and enable text-to-speech.
While everyone else waits for market dominance — or, in the case of JK Rowling and PotterMore, apparently positions for the continued chaos — people like Sam can’t participate.
It just shows how little we really think about people when our vision is clouded by money.
They Just Don’t Get It
I called DARS today — that’s Texas Department of Assistive and Rehabilitative Services to you non-Texans out there.
I reminded the counselor that we had talked more than six months ago, looking for help finding an internship … but if not, soon he would be graduating and, in the eyes of the state, “underemployed.”
Well that day is here, and could they help with a job search and a coach, like they did with Albertsons, only with a tech job?
She said just about every way she could that she couldn’t help, and I listened and listened. Then when it was my turn to talk, I said, I’m not sure what all I just heard here, but essentially I heard that you can’t help.
Oh, no, she said, that’s not it. I just don’t want you to have any expectations that we’ll be successful this time. The providers they work with don’t have contacts in the tech world. The best network will be the one I can make for him. Besides, the job market is really soft, no one is getting hired. We could be at this for a very long time.
Essentially, repeating herself, but objecting to my characterization of what she says.
Yeah, I get that at work a lot.
But, I kept my mouth shut on the characterization and went searching for common ground.
Sam needs help navigating this alien world of job-searching. He needs help searching and applying for jobs. He needs help with the interviews. And once an employer is ready to take a chance on him, he’ll need help for a little while — and so will the employer — understand the expectations and learning how to communicate with each other.
Mercifully, at some point, before she could reply to me with another round of negativity, either my phone hung up on her or her on me.
The guys at nonPareil have seen it — Sam understands and works hard. He loves to solve problems, and he has a lot of stamina and thinking power to do it.
I called Gary Moore, who collects stories like these because he hears from parents every day, just to add to the pile. The pile know as “DARS just doesn’t get it.”
He called back and did some brainstorming with me. Lots more than required, but I appreciated it. He reminded me that Sam built a bunch of computers during his internship with nonPareil, computers meant for DARS clients.
But DARS can’t help him find that employment.
Duh.