I’m always fascinated to hear from parents who are following classical methods with students who are facing particular learning choices. Last week I received the following email from this mother, Annette, who is dealing with a particularly severe challenge. She gave me permission to use the email here, and has invited other parents in similar situations to contact her. She writes, “You may even include a contact for me because for those of us who have to deal with these and similar issues, we feel totally isolated.” You can reach her at black.dirk AT verizon.net.
In your book, The Well-Trained Mind, you mention something about organic disorders in children and being able to read between the ages of 4 and 6. The exact sentence is “Between the ages of four and six, any child who has been read to since toddlerhood and is not suffering from an organic disorder can learn to read.”
I have a daughter, 6 years old, who has been on and off the autism spectrum more times than I can count. All we know for sure is that she has sensory issues. She is both under-responsive and over-responsive to specific stimuli. For instance, she does not know her place at any given moment in the world: she doesn’t know if she is upside down, spinning, or lying prone.
The way it has been explained to me is that she is missing certain key chemicals in her brain, or has a reduced amount of these chemicals and this causes her to be confused about her body position on all 3 axes. The bigger problem here is that her behaviour has deteriorated as she has gotten older. She is heavily resistant to transition or change, easily frustrated with herself, others, and things that don’t work “right”, she throws countless tantrums that can go on for longer than they should, and she has a tendency to scream.
Her brain is unable to process the information it receives from all 5 senses and the 3 motion senses. It all becomes jumbled and confused on her highways and byways through the brain. This is why we have trouble with hot and cold, force recognition, and weighted objects. Even after all the therapy we have gone through, she will still come up to me and ask me to hit her on her back because it feels “good”.
However, in spite of these challenges, something else became apparent with her. She loves language. She loves and is fluent in Spanish and English. We are learning to read in both languages at the moment. She loves to listen to Middle English when I read it to her. I also have her learning Mandarin and the teachers tell me she is coming along.
Everyone in the school systems has told me again and again that she belongs in Special Ed classes, but I have come to know with certainty that there is nothing wrong with her mind and teaching her as if she was deficient in that area would only be a disservice. It is the way that she learns that bothers most people.
When I first read your book and talked to some people in the area about it, at first I thought we would not be able to do it because of her disorder. She does have an organic disorder. There is no getting around that. But from talking to all the parents I have run into at therapy (and some of these kids struggle mightily with their issues), I still believe that on some level, most if not all kids even with an organic disorder, can learn to read and would be able to follow the classical curriculum probably at a slower and less strenuous pace. There just have to be some adjustments made.
I don’t know how extensive your experience is with autistic children, children who are on the autism spectrum, or children who suffer from the attendant disorders that can accompany autism, but a lot of them have a tendency to chant. When my daughter began to do that, I gave her something to chant. It was a long process, but eventually she only chanted “The Lady of Shalott” by Tennyson and to this day, it remains one of her favourite poems. I figured if she is going to be repeating language, what I can do is give her some of the best our language has to offer. She seems to crave the cadence and natural rhythm that occurs in all languages.
And so, we listen to Enya and Loreena McKennitt extensively and calling upon my own degree in romantic poetry, I have introduced her to some of the best poems ever written in English.
As we have gone on from day to day, I have had to make adjustments to the curriculum you have laid out. We can only do reading, math, and Spanish right now because the therapy is a huge time commitment. Our main problem right now is not getting overwhelmed with too much text or problems on a page.
We have to go at a painfully slow pace at times, but we are moving along. She is reading Dr. Seuss at a pace of about 10 pages a day, but a year ago, I was told she would probably not read for another few years. She is sounding out words wherever she finds them. Writing is more difficult because we have a fine motor skill deficit, but even there I can see huge improvement over the last year. Writing the Mandarin characters is proving to be very helpful for that.
We will start history and science possibly at the beginning of the year. I found a programme called History Odyssey and Science Odyssey that I am going to use. It removes the religious aspect from the coursework and it uses The Story of the World in more digestible chunks for my daughter. I have to add things in slowly, so as not to upset the transition for her.