After a rather spectacular two weeks, in which Dylan did everything that he was expected to do, consistently and responsibly – including his 1.5-hour study shifts and getting 30 signatures on a signature sheet that holds a total of 30 signatures – he decided to take a break this week.
That’s the only explanation I have.
He is back to complaining about his homework time, that he has nothing to do. Meanwhile, his online zeros have multiplied – especially in Spanish and Foundations of Technology, for no apparent reason. He’s stopped working in Foundations of Technology altogether, and has waited almost three weeks to finish a test in his government class.
“I really need a break,” he texted me, explaining why he couldn’t make up even one test at lunch time. He has play practice after school every day except one – and he said he plans to take the test that day.
His teacher, however, won’t be available that day after school. His case manager, too, won’t be available that day.
It never occurred to Dylan to check their schedules. Dylan just assumed that, since he was available, everyone would be sitting on pins and needles waiting for him to show up and take the test.
They were not.
Luckily, he has me: the mom, the secretary, the scheduler who thinks of such things.
The teacher emailed me about the test, and I got started fixing the problem – with no help from Dylan. He will be taking the test that day, with supervision, thanks only to his case manager, who arranged the whole thing after my prodding.
Dylan’s case manager has saved him more times than he can count – and he doesn’t even know it. I spent a good hour of my day on making this happen, and I’m sure it’s nothing compared to what she did for him.
So now, we’ll see if he remembers to show up and finish that test after school.
It will probably take him five minutes.
Shane came home from school and told us that a friend of his “tested” everyone at lunch.
“Tested you for what?” I asked.
“It was a big word,” he said. “I don’t remember what it’s called. But I was the only one who had it.”
Shane looked a little concerned.
“What was the test?” I asked, suddenly feeling a little concerned myself.
“Well, he asked everybody if they could name colors with letters,” he said. “Like the letter ‘A’ is green, ‘B’ is blue, ‘C’ is red….” Shane listed a dozen letters and their respective colors.
My jaw dropped. I needed to know. “You see colors when you think about letters?”
“Yeah,” he said. “But I was the only one who could do it!”
I read a book a few years ago – a fascinating book called Born on a Blue Day. The man saw the days of the week as colors, and it so happened that the day he was born was a “blue” day in his mind.
It was written by Daniel Tammet – an autistic savant.
After some quick research, I discovered the word I was looking for: synesthesia. Neuroscience for Kids According to the website, “” (which is all the neuroscience I can handle):
Synesthesia can involve any of the senses. The most common form, colored letters and numbers, occurs when someone always sees a certain color in response to a certain letter of the alphabet or number. For example, a synesthete (a person with synesthesia) might see the word “plane” as mint green or the number “4” as dark brown.
I read Born on a Blue Day because ADHD is on the autism scale, and I thought I might get clues into the way Dylan’s brain works.
But I remember thinking that Shane had some things in common with the author, too. In fact, when Shane was younger, I took several online quizzes to see if he might have Asperger’s Syndrome – and at least one of those quizzes was triggered by my reading that book.
Synesthesia is, in fact, associated with various forms of autism. The study samples have been small (200 adults) but the results have been conclusive: this condition is found more often in people diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders. (In England, apparently, “synesthesia” is spelled with an extra “a.”)
The study found one in five adults with autism spectrum conditions – a range of related developmental disorders, including autism and Asperger’s syndrome – had synaesthesia compared with about 7% of people with no signs of the disorders.
Like the study I found about Dylan’s brain years before a larger study confirmed it, these results aren’t making the “big” U.S. headlines – yet. This study is at least three years old – but it’s not quite trendy or interesting enough yet to warrant further studies. Or maybe it’s warranted further studies, but we haven’t gotten the results yet. These studies take an absurd amount of time in our bureaucratic system.
I am testing Shane for synesthesia nonetheless.
There are two weeks left in the third quarter, and an amazing thing has happened.
Some background on this amazing thing:
- When Dylan was in fourth grade, he was in four different math groups. He started in the highest level, because he obviously understood the concepts. But he never finished his work, and seemed a bit spaced out in class. So they kept moving him around, trying to find a place where he could succeed. He could not.
- When Dylan was in fifth grade, he had a teacher who let the kids move at their own pace, as long as they finished the work. They had a chart with star stickers, representing what they had done. Dylan excelled at this, and got a ton of stars. Since fifth grade, we’ve been wishing all math teachers would institute this system.
- When Dylan was in sixth grade, he was at the top of his class. He did so well, in fact, that we all agreed that he could skip the “review” class, Investigations Into Mathematics, and go directly into Algebra 1.
- When Dylan was in seventh grade, he had a teacher who constantly reprimanded him for not paying attention. We invited her to every IEP meeting, but she didn’t seem to understand that he has a biological issue. There were no charts with stars in this classroom. Dylan eeked out a C in Algebra 1, and the school recommended that he take it again for a higher grade.
- When Dylan was in eighth grade, he retook Algebra 1 with a kind teacher in a class with seven kids at private school. He got a B.
- When Dylan was in ninth grade, he took “regular” Geometry. Most of his friends had completed Honors Geometry in 8th grade, but we were afraid, given his math struggles, that he wouldn’t be able to keep up with the pace of Honors math classes. If he had turned in his work on time, he would have gotten an A in Geometry. But he didn’t, so he got a B.
- Dylan is now in tenth grade, taking “regular” Algebra 2. He started the year with a tutor, because we weren’t taking any chances. He barely saw the tutor, and still got a B for his first semester grade.
In other words, math has been a challenge for Dylan. So when I checked his grades online this week, I literally screamed.
“DYL! COME SEE THIS!”
Bill came running into the room. “What?”
“Not you,” I said. (“Dyl” and “Bill” sound very much alike, so this is a continuous problem in our house.) “But look at this!”
Bill started over to the computer.
Shane, too, wanted to know what was going on – almost enough to look up from his video game. “What?” Shane asked.
“Look at Dylan’s grade,” I said to both of them. “DYLAN!”
“WHAT!” he yelled back.
“COME HERE!”
He grumbled all the way down the stairs. Finally, Dylan arrived in the office, where I pointed dramatically at the computer screen.
“Look at this!” I squealed. “LOOK!” And he did.
“Yeah,” he said, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. “I know.”
Dylan has an A in Algebra.
Dylan has been writing a paper for two weeks.
When he was tested in fourth grade, his processing speed was in the 9th percentile. Unlike his height, which has always been above the 75th percentile because he is very tall, his processing speed has always been very, very low.
This means that writing for two weeks is an insufficient amount of time for him to finish a 1,000- to 1,500-word paper.
The key word for Dylan – whether or not he knows it – is tool. For 15 years, we’ve offered him tools to speed up his processing speed. Fidget toys, including his brand new fidget cube, have been great – although rubber bands are equally successful. Chewing gum, mints, lollipops and hard candies are also great motivators for the brain to process.
Unfortunately for the public schools, the most successful tools for Dylan are music and movement. Restraining his movement actually makes his brain process more slowly.
Now that we have the 1.5-hour supervised shifts, I am always sitting next to him when he works.
The music never stops playing. Dylan never stops singing, except to drum on the table. He taps his foot, bangs on his knees, drums his fingers on the desk. He knows every word to every song, and I’ve never heard any of them before.
He sits on a kneeling chair, so he is leaning forward most of the time – or sprawled completely backwards. He sings and sings and sings.
He scrolls through whatever is on the computer screen in front of him. He scrolls up. He scrolls down. He tosses a ball at the wall. It bounces three, four times. He puts the ball down. He sings and sings. He never stops singing. He scrolls up again. He scrolls down again. He clicks out of the scrolling document and goes into the paper he is writing.
He types maybe six words. He sings and sings. He sings while he is typing. He stops typing and drums along with the music. He goes back into the scroll-able document. He sings and sings. His feet move constantly. He goes back to his paper – the 1,000-word document he’s been working on for two weeks – and he stares at it.
To me, he is doing absolutely nothing. He is just singing and staring. He is staring and singing. There can’t possibly be anything going on inside his brain.
I explode regularly. I try not to, but I can’t seem to control myself. It bursts out of me like a comical word balloon.
“What have you actually done?!” I spurt. “How could you possibly be getting anything done at all?”
He explodes back. “I have done ALL of THIS!” he says, waving his arms at the screen. He points to three very short paragraphs. I find it difficult to believe that they aren’t the same three paragraphs he showed me yesterday.
“You aren’t typing anything!” I say. “You can’t possibly type and sing at the same time, and you haven’t stopped singing for one second!”
He continues to sing. He types an entire sentence.
“See?” he said. “Now will you please get off my back!”
“What did you type?” I ask. If I were singing and typing, I would be typing the song lyrics.
He reads me the sentence, which is not a song lyric at all.
I am surprised. Again.
And again, I have to back off, and let him do it his way, even if it makes no sense to me at all.
Shane and I have been playing visual memory games. We’ve played concentration and matching games. He does pretty well.
We’ve also played “how many things can you remember?” I put random items into a box, and Shane looked at each one for a few seconds. Then he listed as many items as he could remember. He got 16 out of 26 – not bad!
And we played some online computer games that are supposed to enhance memory. We played one in particular that matches faces – which is especially good for Shane, who spent the first nine years of his life unable to tell the difference between people who had the same color and style of hair. (This was especially a problem when it came to the color “brown,” which is a very popular hair color. All people with short brown hair looked exactly the same to Shane.)
I downloaded a bunch of these suggestions from the internet, so that I would be able to offer him the best visual memory enhancers. We’ve tried all of them – except one.
We have not played “what moved?” because I am afraid of the results.
“What moved?” is a game in which two people sit in a room. They look around and study their environment. Then one person closes his eyes, and the other person moves something. With eyes open, the first person subsequently identifies what moved. Hence, the name of the game.
But Shane doesn’t see things. He doesn’t know that they are there. His room is often a disaster – but not just a random disaster. Everything is organized – and then there will be a pair of socks right smack in the middle of the floor.
The socks will sit there for nine days.
Or there will be a jacket in a ball on the floor. Shane will step on the jacket, walk around the jacket, throw things on the jacket. The jacket will never again move, until a parental unit prompts him to hang up the jacket.
I am the only parental unit who will say anything, by the way, because Shane’s father’s jacket is never hung up.
Or the CDs will come out of Shane’s CD player and go … onto the floor. No matter how many times I mention that CDs are quite breakable, and that stepping on a CD will result in a broken CD, Shane will not put his CDs in their cases.
It’s like he just doesn’t see it at all.
I realize that this may have nothing to do with visual memory. It may just be the way he is, or the way boys are, or the way people are – in general.
I do not want to face this fact. I want it to be something fixable.
What if we play “what moved?” and Shane can’t figure out what moved? Then what do we do? Do we play until he figures it out? Do we play it for days and days and days until we know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Shane simply can’t observe the things in his environment?
Sigh.
I guess we will have to play it and see what happens.
When dropping off Dylan at school one morning, while it was still dark since the sun hadn’t yet popped over the horizon, a woman approached my car.
“I know this might sound creepy,” she said, “but did your son go to Graceland Preschool?”
Interestingly, Shane did go to Graceland Preschool!
“Not this son,” I said, pointing at Dylan, who was sitting next to me. “But my other son did.”
“Shane?” she said.
“Yes!”
“I was his teacher,” she said.
She was unfamiliar to me, except for her smile. Formerly a large redhead, she was now a 100-pound blond. And apparently, she now teaches at Dylan’s school. We chatted for a few minutes, her apologizing for approaching me after ten years, and me professing my undying love for her. Then she went inside.
Dylan asked, “Was she really Shane’s preschool teacher?”
I nodded. “She changed Shane’s life.”
Then I realized that I probably never told the teacher that she changed Shane’s life. And teachers should know that their work truly makes a difference. So when I got home, I emailed her the following story:
One day after school, you pulled me aside to talk to me. You said that Shane spent his entire playtime with his head in the dollhouse. It was a little, tiny dollhouse – so he just stuck his head inside, quietly. You talked to him and asked him to come out, but he wouldn’t. He was very sad that day, and that was how he handled the emotion. (Someone had told Shane to get off the slide, hence the terrific sadness.)
That was an eye-opening experience for me, as a parent. Shane is the younger brother of a VERY high maintenance child. Older brother has ADHD and other issues that Shane doesn’t have, so Shane got very little attention. In fact, Shane was pretty much raising himself. He was a very easy child.
But when I heard about the dollhouse, I realized that we needed to do something. We needed to look at ways to specifically boost Shane’s self-confidence, encourage him to speak up, and give him positive reinforcements when he was doing something right. Up until that day, we’d just let that good behavior go unnoticed.
As parents, then, we changed. We started paying closer attention to Shane, getting genuinely excited when he did things well, making a point of complimenting him. We created a poster with a huge picture of Shane. We put adjectives all around the picture – words like “funny” and “calm” and “smart.” It was a reminder that so much about him is good. And that poster is still hanging in his room, ten years later.
Shane is still an incredibly “easy child.” He’s in 7th grade now, and he is peaceful, laid-back and kind. Best of all, he feels good about himself. He knows he’s okay, just the way he is. He’s an out-of-the-box thinker and very bright, so he can be a little weird. But he’s okay with that, too.
And that – seriously – is because of you. Because you took the time to tell me what happened, to talk about Shane’s rough playtime, to show me that tiny dollhouse. You took the time to care about what Shane was feeling. Not every teacher does that – even in preschool – and we are eternally grateful to you for that.
I can’t believe I forgot to say all that to you this morning, but I am glad that I can tell you now. Thanks so much for saying hello this morning.
And then I decided the story is worth sharing with the whole world, too.
Written this past Saturday, and shoved under Dylan’s door, where it was subsequently read but otherwise ignored:
Dear Dylan,
Today is the conclusion of what was an incredibly good week for you. This week might have been the most successful I’ve seen in the past three years.
Your grades are – without any help from me – going from E’s to A’s in many classes. Your English grade jumped drastically after all your work on notecards. You have a B in there now! Your algebra grade went from an E to a C, and you still have to finish a test in there. You could have an A in that class! Your hard work is paying off. You have a HIGH B in Technology, and you could get an A in there, too! And your NSL grade is a VERY, VERY, VERY HIGH B – 87%! That’s an Honors class, so if you got an A in that… well, your Weighted GPA would jump a LOT.
This week, you also got an A on your Computer Science test: 23 out of 24 in a college-level class! While I always knew it was possible, I hadn’t seen you do it until this week. You are a brilliant human being. You put that brain into good use this week – and did your “job” (which is school) in a totally awesome way.
But your grades aren’t the only evidence. You did your 1.5-hour shifts of homework, mostly without complaining. You actually worked, even while you were singing. I don’t know how you do it, but I am not going to complain anymore about your singing. You can actually sing and work at the same time. You are an anomaly. (I may still complain when you play thrash metal.)
You came home with a ton of signatures this week. If you keep up this stuff, you will be off to North Carolina for a three-day weekend in May. [This is his “bonus” reward if he works hard and gets signatures.]
Equally important – maybe even more so for you – is that you wore your retainer eight days in a row. You may not know it, but I have been keeping track – and this is the first time in all of 2017 that you’ve worn it more than three days in a row. And you wore it for 8!!!!
I am really impressed with you. It’s been a great week for you, and if you keep it up, your grades will reflect it, your parents will get off your back, and you may even get a trip to North Carolina.
Congratulations, Son. I’m very proud of you. You should be proud of you, too.
Love,
Mom
“Shane,” I said, staring at his online grades. “What happened in English?”
“What do you mean?” he answered, barely looking up from his video game.
“Why are you missing two assignments?”
“Oh, I forgot to turn them in,” he said. “And now it’s too late.”
“You forgot to turn them in?”
“Yeah.”
I thought of Dylan and the many, many, many assignments he has turned in late, especially when he was in middle school. “It can’t be too late,” I said.
I emailed the teacher. The teacher emailed me back. It really was too late.
I couldn’t believe it. Shane had two zeros.
Two weeks went by.
Then, quite suddenly, Shane’s grade in band dropped from 100% to 97.3%. He was missing his weekly practice chart – a paper that represents five days of drum practice – from back in February. Shane has turned in a practice chart, on time, every week for nearly two years.
“Shane,” I said. “You’re missing a practice chart?”
“Oh, yeah,” he said.
“Where is it?”
“It’s in my room. I guess I just forgot to turn it in because there was a substitute.”
“Wait,” I said. “You mean you didn’t turn in your practice chart this week?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I forgot to.”
The missing practice chart on the computer was from two weeks ago.
Something inside me snapped a little.
“That means you have missed two practice charts this quarter!” I shrieked. “And you have two missing assignments in English! What’s going on, Shane?”
“I don’t know,” he said, quite calmly. “I guess I just need to put it somewhere in my binder where I can remember it.”
“I guess you do,” I said.
Since Dylan is the oldest, and first to go through school, I have no idea how I would have handled this with Shane if he had been the oldest, and forgotten four things in two months. Dylan has forgotten way, way, way more than four assignments.
But Dylan has ADHD. He has a biological reason for forgetting.
Shane just forgot to turn in his practice chart.
Twice. In two months.
I have no idea how to put that into perspective. I don’t know if I should worry.
Obviously, I am worried anyway. I am not worried that Shane has ADHD. I am worried that, even without ADHD, the teenage brain is somehow incapable of remembering vital pieces of information. Or maybe it’s the male brain. Or maybe it’s just people in my house. Maybe this is normal human behavior.
I have no idea!
Certainly, I have forgotten things. But I’m not sure I ever – even in my darkest teen years – forgot to turn in an assignment.
So now, just a little bit, I am holding my breath.
Dylan’s decision to drop out of the IB program has not changed our strategy in dealing with the “LD” part of his GT/LD-ness. If anything, in fact, it’s made our resolve stronger.
“You can’t take regular classes and not get A’s,” I told him. “And the only thing you really need to do to get A’s is to turn in your work.”
So he’s turning in his work.
He’s doing it in an unexpected way – but the signature sheet and the 1.5-hour homework shifts every evening are helping. In spite of his resistance to both things, he’s sitting down every evening and actually doing work.
He’s doing it with music blaring, and with non-stop singing. He never stops singing. But he is getting work done. He worked on his “source cards” (which, I assume, means his bibliography) for English for four days. At the end of those four days, all of the zeros he had in English were replaced with A’s.
He is getting A’s in English. It is work, but he is now doing the work.
He is nearly lying down in his chair. Sometimes one size 14 shoe is on the desk while the other is underneath him. He does his work while sitting like a pretzel or a log. But he is doing the work.
Yesterday he texted me from school: “I got an A on my Computer Science test,” he said.
It’s an AP class. And he got an A! He’s been keeping up with his work in the class, so he knows what he’s doing on the test, too!
He’s coming home with signatures on his signature sheet, too. He’s not happy about it. He complains every day about something that happened to make it hard for him to get a signature. But he’s getting those signatures.
He’s being proactive in talking to the teachers. For the first time ever, he knows when things are missing before I do.
When I told him he was missing five assignments – FIVE assignments! – in Government, he held up a folder.
“That’s what this is!” he nearly shouted. He flapped some papers around. “These are the five assignments! Now will you back off and let me do my work?!”
I have heard the term “back off” more times than I can count lately.
I am absolutely thrilled about that.
In fact, I am backing off. Finally.
I can actually do that now.
We have been thinking about IB classes for Dylan since he was in 7th grade. He’s an abstract, high-level thinker, but he’s a hands-on learner. So we decided to put him into the IBCP program – which is perfect for him.
For the IBCP program, Dylan needs to take one two-year IB class, and one one-year IB class. In addition, he needs to take the “pathway” classes, which he’s taken since 9th grade. Dylan chose the computer science pathway, so he’s already taking an AP class in computer science.
For one-year classes, he wanted to take IB music, IB psychology and IB theater. He was very excited about these.
But his two-year classes were less enthralling: IB History, IB Biology, IB Math and IB English. He took biology already and hated it. He’s struggled in math more than anything. So we tossed out those two – which left us with two years of IB History and two years of IB English.
We were still struggling with Dylan’s ability to keep up with the work in a “regular” (Honors) English class. I asked a friend about the History class, and she said it was substantially more homework than the IB English class.
So I sat down to talk to Dylan about it. I showed him the email from my friend, detailing the differences between the two classes. He read it, then stood up.
“I’m not doing it,” he said. “I’m not doing IB.”
And that was it.
Four years of planning, two years of cramming in classes, and all of my IB research – for naught.
In case it helped, I took Dylan’s list of colleges – the ones he picked from our various road trips – and crossed off the ones that would no longer accept him. I showed it to Dylan.
“Really?” he asked. “All of these?”
“Yes,” I said. “You can still apply, but if you don’t take IB or AP classes, they won’t even look at you.”
“Okay,” he said.
And off he went, into his non-IB world.
Surprisingly, the relief I felt was immediate and spectacular.
