Please Hold

While the teenager situation appears to have plateaued for the moment (and if we’re being positive, I’ll take a plateau over a continued descent any day), my little Owen has mysteriously developed an aversion to school.

He used to be all gung-ho about it – he’s even been known to throw his extra two days of school per week in the face of his more-typically-but-still-exceptionally-brained brother, who has developed a rather intense jealousy over the possibility that Owen might be learning more than him. But for the past week or so, it’s been nothing but “I don’t love school,” and “I’m not going to school.”

So I’m trying to figure out what’s bothering him, because my little concrete-thinker doesn’t tend to make things up, nor does he manipulate – if he says he doesn’t want to go to school, there’s a reason.

I tried speaking to his teacher about it today. She didn’t seem to get that I was trying to determine what had caused this attitude switch. Her assumption was that there really wasn’t any explanation, so why not just try to incent him to go to school with stickers or some such nonsense…the kid has gone to school happily for two years, so it’s not like this is a new concept he needs coaching on.

She also suggested maybe a social story* would help but then added, “I’m not very good at writing those, but I could try to put something together.” You’re the person charged with teaching children with autism and you can’t put together a social story? But again, that assumes that he’s somehow having trouble with the idea of going to school, when I still think something at school is bothering him.

All of this serves to further my belief that my children and I would all be better off just traveling the world and learning as we go. I am all for education, but the more I experience the public school system, the more I think that it more closely resembles a holding cell than a place to learn. I just don’t ever want my kids to confuse obedience with intelligence. I don’t want them to get bored and mistake that boredom with school for a disinterest in learning.

If I could just travel back in time and become an heiress of some sort, we’d be all set...Maybe I can get Owen into Physics; he'll have that whole space-time continuum thing cracked before he hits middle school.

*For those not entrenched in autism jargon, that’s a narrative exercise commonly used to help kids with autism learn what to expect in a situation