Rigid, Inflexible Thinking

The other day Michael's teacher came to my room to tell me about a little incident.  She was in a meeting, so she didn't witness it firsthand, but the Title 1 teacher that works with second grade did witness it.  Michael has a new boy in his class.  Many of the classes are given a number at the beginning of the year.  Your number is because of alphabetical order.   For example Michael is number 4, because his last name is Johnson.  There are only 3 other students with last names that are before letter J.  Michael has number 4 on his crayon container, and he lines up as the fourth student in line no matter where they go.

The new boy enters the picture, with a last name that starts with a letter before Michael's "J".  Instead of moving everyone down a number (telling Michael he is now number 5 instead of number 4), they give the new boy #16.  This is suppose to help so everyone after the new boy doesn't have to change his number.  So in Michael's mind, #16 is at the end of the line, so the new boy needs to line up at the end.  This is not the case because they still put the new kid ahead of Michael because of alphabetical order.

Make sense so far?

Well, not to Michael.  For an autistic child who thrives on order, this is totally wrong.  If the kid is number 16, he should be at the back of the line.  So Michael said this.  He got mad.  Then he said, "And he is black so he needs to go to the end of the line!"  WHOA!  Wait a minute!  Our family is practically the most culturally diverse family around.  We expose the children to all religions, different cultures and there really isn't a prejudice bone in any of our body.  So why in the world did he say that?

I guess a few days before, they were reading in the kids magazine about Rosa Parks and the whole bus incident and how blacks had to go to the back of the bus.  Yes, Michael they did....but that was the year 1963 or something!  Here is another case of a language issue and the typical autistic child not really comprehending a sense of time.

So the teachers had to explain to him that we do not treat black people like that, that the new kid isn't exactly black, he is Hispanic and they had to show him the alphabet to get him to realize that the boy's last name is close to the beginning of the alphabet.  This was very hard for Michael to accept.

When I talked to him about it yesterday morning, he put his hands over his ears and didn't want to hear about it.  I don't blame him, it is confusing.  Michael's little ordered world is now spinning out of order.  After I told Chris, he went as far to say, "Well, the teachers lied to him."  I asked Chris, "How is that?"  He said, "They really don't base things on their number, they do it alphabetically.  So technically they do not line up by number, they line up alphabetically.  Many autistic people do not tolerate lies at all, even if it doesn't seem like a lie to the "norm".  Things are in black and while for them, there is no "give" so to speak.

Luckily, Michael adapts fairly quickly.  He uses a lot of his strategies and coping mechanisms to move on.  This could have been a real disaster, but instead Michael turned it around.  He even made 2 clay owls in art class, and then when the new kid came and didn't have an owl to paint, Michael quickly gave up his extra owl to the new boy.  He is a sweetie and I'm very proud of him.  Yet this is just another example of how rigid one can be when you are "Somewhere Over the Spectrum."