Outfitted For World Autism Awareness Day

Can I just gush a bit about how I ADORE this population? I have worked with this population for the last 7 years with my experiences ranging from work with toddlers to post-secondary young adults. I cannot even begin to describe the multitude of lessons my students have taught me throughout the years. My students have taught me the simple joys in life. They have taught me how wonderfully healing a genuine hug can be. They make me envious of their abilities to see the beauty in colors and lights like no one else. My students are resilient, perseverative and brilliant. They come up with the ultimate life hacks (ask any parent of a child with autism and they will tell you just how that child perfectly negotiates their environment).  My students are the reason why I go to work every morning. They challenge me day in and day out and make me a better person. As a teacher, nothing compares to the feeling of pure elation and accomplishment than when a child who once use to have hour long tantrums now uses functional communication to request more time on the computer. Or when a teenager who at the beginning of the year use to have an average of 3 word utterances per sentence now has 6 to 7 utterances per sentence.

My students show me things about our society. Chew on this for a sec: we all experience life very differently, Am I right? The society we grow up in dictates to us how to “appropriately” cope with our life experiences. Throughout our lives, we are conditioned to respond to certain life events in a socially acceptable way. But what if we do not pick up on society’s hidden curriculum? What if we don’t pick up on the fact that it is not socially appropriate to sneak a whiff of the cashier’s coconut pomegranate shampooed locks because it smells so tantalizing? Or that it is not socially appropriate to request squeezes from strangers because they just feel so darn good? Or that it might not be deemed acceptable to laugh hysterically when grandpa comes around because his life lines (i.e. wrinkles) are so wonderfully amusing? How differently would we view autism if autism was not juxtaposed with society’s definition of “appropriateness”?  In no way am I attempting to mitigate the daily plight some individuals with autism struggle to cope with. I work with students who are dangerously self-injurious and aggressive to no fault of their own but think about the senseless battles we pick and expectations we put on individuals with disabilities in an attempt to make them “normal”. Go ahead, I’ll let you think on it….