Social issues in homework/classwork

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Hi I'm Bunni!

I'm the parent of a 13 year old girl with Asperger's and ADHD. She is in 7th grade, and her homework is becoming not only an issue due to the amount, but also due to the content.

Recently she has had two assignments I've had to finally just excuse her from. One was a report on her hero. Well, she doesn't recognize anyone as her hero. She came up with several well-known people she thought she could find factual information about. However she could not relate what was special about them to her. The content she could provide wasn't what the teacher was looking for, and I couldn't get the teacher to understand how much of this is a social understanding issue.

Next project was reading Call of the Wild. The reading wasn't an issue at all, however the associated 4 worksheets, study guides, and being asked to apply human emotion to a dog, is a bit of a problem. The issue of Nature vs. Nurture is also a problem. She completed as much as she could, with alot of help from me, and then the teacher made written comments on the work before it was completed. For us to work hours on this type of understanding and hen the teacher to ask for more, has made it now impossible to complete.

We had just gotten Em to the point where she could accept her Asperger's and be ok with it, and over this, she cried and said she wished she could just be like everyone else.

I have tried throughout the schoolyear, to get her teachers to understand my daughter's capacity to understand many of these types of subjects is very limited, yet they don't understand. Instead they compare her to poor performing students, in a "if they can do it why can't she", kinda arguement.

They are very focused on her meeting standards, which in my opinion she may never really be able to meet. She is gifted, and under a gifted IEP, but we are trying to get them to accept a dual diagnosis, and accomodate her other needs as well. They see homework avoidance as defiant willfullness. Sigh. She has in previous years been excused from homework altogether, which is my new goal now, but in 7th grade they have been resistant saying her work load is only going to be greater. She desperately needs her day to end when she comes home. We do have a study hall type period during the day for her to do homework, but she won't work on subjects she can't understand in school, such as those with the social aspects, becasue she knows they at school, don't understand what help she needs.

Has anyone else had this experience with the content of assignments both classwork and homework and what have you done?

I also have a 13 year old girl with similar issues.
I think that sometimes the only answer is to accept the assignments, help them plan them out WAAAAAAAYYY in advance with their planners, and help them develop their thesis statement. After all, they will be expected to do this kind of interpretation not only in high school and college, but later on in life at whatever career they choose.

Work with the teachers to slow it down a bit, perhaps ask for extensions. Make a routine out of working on little bits of big projects every night, even when nothing is due. It doesn't always work, but it's good to remember that the teachers are paid resources, and are there to teach. If you can tap into the teacher in them, into the reason they wanted to teach in the first place, you can develop a relationship with them which is more of a partnership than a struggle.

Teachers have a LOT going on... they have to monitor their regular students and deal with administration, and then try to accomodate for special needs children. They are trained to do it, and will do it, but sometimes they get pissed with us parents because we really never give them a break!

Patience, and keep communication lines open. And hang in there... there's a beauty to the way aspie kids interpret what they see/hear/read/experience. It can be worked to the school program with your help as a moderator.

i think it's something about 7th grade teachers....something about 7th grade, actually.....my son had TONS of problems in 7th grade...i don't have any advice for you, really, other than to keep trying to get them to listen~maybe enlist the school psychologist or your daughter's therapist to help explain the difficulties~it might work better if you tried to work on getting the teachers to give alternate assignments rather than no assignments.

we have tried alternate assignments and a host of other things, the problem is they don't easily see where the social stuff comes in. That's why at this point I'm ready to quit the homework. They just don't seem to understand even though our Behavior Specialist is in school every week, helping them and working with her aides. This stuff still just continues on. It is very frustrating. They see Em as a defiant teenager manipulating us. LOL I'd give anything to be manipulated by this child, becasue it would mean she had some really good grasp on social understanding.

Y'all are scaring me. Middle school is still in Z's future and I'm dreading that transition.

Just cirious, have you ever had your girls do a report on Asperger's, or incorporate it into one of their reports and say "I do not understand this social and emotion crap because my neural pathways work differently than the general population's."? Z understands his dx but still struggles with the concept of tact. When I suggest such a paper his response is "Dad, I know what it is, why should I research it?"

My answer, "It might be fun to stand some of these NT teachers on their ears."

It probably wouldn't go over well but I still think it would be fun!

Actually, Em tends to include it subtly. For instance, when we were doing the nature vs. nurture stuff, she listed among nature and inherited traits that Autism is inherited. On her "About the Author" page for a storybook assignment, she described herself as a 13 year old girl with Asperger's Syndrome.

Em is frustrated by the fact that she can find no websites made by young girl's with Asperger's Syndrome. We have dabbled with the idea of creating one. I don't think she is able to yet communicate what Asperger's means to her. Other than the obvious and easily put "It means I have a hard time making friends."

We are aware the teachers are busy with their entitre class of kids. This is why Em has an aide to help her. This is why we have the behavior specialist in the school weekly. However, they still need to have some basic understanding, and special ed needs to get involved to accomodate Em's needs. They need to stop treating her as though she has a choice to be Autistic or not.

I had the same issue. My teachers liked to assign essays about people, on topic like "which person influenced your life the most and why?" or "which person do you admire the most and why?" Needless to say, I was always at a loss of what to write. For papers about people influencing my life, I wrote about my parents, talking about the values they taught me. It was a simple, let logical (from an NT point of view) solution.

Papers about people I admire were more problematic. I didn't admire people, period. My relationship with my family was near a breaking point, and I had no friends at the time, so the notion of admiration was confusing, to say the least. I viewed celebrities, athletes, and other traditional NT idols as people who were simply born lucky, and therefore didn't need to be admired. How did I solve the problem? I always wrote about Michael Jordan, whenever the issue of a "hero" came up (this was in the mid-1990's, when Michael Jordan was still popular). A lot of students wrote about him, and I didn't want to seem weird during peer-editing. In the end, my essays turned out very stilted and artificial. Luckily, I had a fairly easygoing teacher for my English class. Since the said essays fit the assignment, and were written with good grammar and spelling, she still gave me good grades for them.

Essays about topics not involving people were a breeze. I could write about what I truly enjoyed, along with using good grammar and spelling. One time, we had to write about an animal; I chose hedgehogs (an animal similar to a porcupine). I ended up doing great. Even other students in class seemed interested in what I wrote, possibly because of its connection to Sonic.

Z's grammar and spelling are always excellent except when he rushes through an assignment to do something else, like reading. It's his penmanship that is atrocious, but I understand that is not uncommon with Aspies. Once he gets started he usually plows through to the end, getting him started can be a problem though.

You know I missed the whole thread of this post. Social issues don't bother Z. he writes what he thinks and if the teacher doesn't like it, oh well, not with attitude just matter of fact. Sometimes there is a puzzled, "What doesn't she understand? That's how I see it."

When the standard they expect is a 5 sentence paragraph based on a social issue, it is impossible for her to even start. For instance, Why is your hero special to you? Would be answered: He's not. It's real hard to get beyond that. She is very literal. In 4th grade she was asked to answer the following:

Describe a time when you had to solve your own mystery. She answered: That never happened to me. She was marked wrong.

I talked to the tacher about the fact she couldn't understand abstract ideas. He said she'd have to in order to pass the PSSA. School has become prep for standardized testing. This is their focus. Everything else is out the window. This is why we need accomodation, because if we don't get changes in place now, she won't be able to fulfill requirements for graduation!

I can understand the literal part, some of Z's biggest arguments with teachers come from definitions and word usage.

Sounds to me as if the teacher needs some education on Autism Spectrum disorders.

With Z we have to literally each him that this facial expression means this or this body pisition indicates that emotion. He then has to choose from a list of possible responses.
not an easy task but he is slowly getting it.

Have you tried taking a 2 by four to the teacher{not one ofZ's options}

You know, that thought has crossed my mind, especially when the same teacher referred to Asperger's as a disease. She then explained she'd only been required to take two special needs classes in college, but certainly she'd be willing to offer support.

I quickly corrected her that this is not a "disease". Yes there needs to be alot more training. We are having this meeting on Thursday, and I swear if one more person asks us what consequences we have for her behavior...I'll scream!

Bunni, we have run into teachers who seem to think parents are by very nature ignorant. Kar and I are older than most parents in our kids classes and actually older than most of their teachers. I get very frustrated by the "Oh yes I took a class on that in College" comments. Please! What actual experience have you had in dealing with this situation. Book learning is a helpful start, but hands on experience is the better teacher, it shows you what the books can't. Reading about a meltdown or anxiety attack but have to deal with them as they come. This year's teacher is great and seems to understand our juvenile Vulcan. As has been said before his IEP has been a great help. Keep working with Em and try to educate her teachers.

I really do my best to support the teachers and teach them. Don't get me wrong. It's just when I meet such resistance over time that I get frustrated. By leaps and bounds this school system is so much better than the one we left. I know change is possible, it's just getting there. We are comingto the end of the school year, and it seems to be a pattern that we never get anything significant done until school is out for the summer.

so sorry that you're having to go through this....didn't mean to sound harsh before~just BTDT..regular ed teachers are often clueless.I can't even count how many times we were called to come get our son because they "couldn't handle him", and he was being "willfully defiant"...
even with an understanding school psychologist, things were impossible. hope it settle for you soon

Same problem here. The teachers just don't get the literal language concept at all. Sometimes rephrasing the question or looking in the thesaurus for alternate terms helps.