Re:What do you think of this teacher's reply?

[Guest guest]

Dear Jan --

About the teacher who wants you to go through the guidance office instead of discussing his relationship with your son directly with you -- my son had a geography teacher in eighth grade who said the same thing to me. I have to admit that my son was behaving very badly in his class. I had mistakenly agreed to have him placed in that class because I was told that a resource teacher would be there along with the regular teacher. What I didn't know is that the resource teacher would be there mostly to help kids with learning disabilities who spent most of their day in a self-contained classroom. This meant that my son (who is gifted, but socially inept) was in the same class with kids who were struggling to understand the material. Owen was very bored, and showed it by turning his back to the teacher, sitting on the floor or with his head on his desk, and when the students with learning disabilities made presentations, say a poster talk, he would loudly point out their mistakes with unintentionally cruel comments like, "Why did she spell it like THAT??" The geography teacher was mortified, and very put off by Owen's terrible manners.

I called him on the phone several times to try to explain about Asperger's syndrome and why Owen was behaving that way, but he finally sent me a message through another teacher that he could not talk with me any more except through the guidance counselor. The problem was that this guidance counselor was a former psychiatric social worker who would take Owen to her office and earnestly ask him if he had any problems relating to his father! You can imagine how helpful that was!

What finally happened is that the eighth grade teachers started meeting as a group to discuss teaching problems with Owen and other students. One of the other teachers, as well as the resource teacher, figured out that Owen was bored and that much of his behavior could be explained by that. They discussed teaching strategies with the geography teacher, who came up with a really ingenious plan: instead of holding review sessions the conventional way, he decided to turn them into a quiz game, with teams of students trying to answer test questions. The winning team got extra credit on the next test. Since Owen had a near-photographic memory and usually came up with correct answers, he became a very popular teammate, and whichever team he belonged to usually won the quiz game. The teacher -- a former Army ranger who started out with a somewhat rigid attitude, but changed during the course of the year -- had a number of other techniques I would recommend to any teacher. For instance, if a student got a low grade on an assignment, he or she could re-do it as many times as necessary to get a higher grade. He also put funny answers into his multiple-choice quizzes, and had the students bring foods from a particular region to school when the class was studying that region. They were even given a chance to invent a geography board game. Of course, this was a lot of work for both the students and the parents (ahem!) who were helping them, but it worked a lot better than having them memorize lists of countries and their capitals.

I tried to help this teacher as much as possible, to show him that we were part of a team, not adversaries. At the end of the year, he told Owen that he would miss having him in his class, and that he had learned a lot from him!

As for the guidance counselor, I tried to avoid her and keep Owen off her radar screen as much as possible. If you can find one teacher who understands your child and get that teacher to advocate on his behalf with the other teachers, that might work better than going through the guidance office -- unless, of course, your school has a guidance counselor who really understands!

Good luck!

Jill