I love Legos.

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This is a cool article from the signature of "gbollard." Thanks.

Life with Aspergers ~ http://life-with-aspergers.blogspot.com/
Article: Using Lego Therapy to Help Aspergers Children with their Social Skills

Finally. This article is very encouraging.

Everyone talks about treatment and early intervention, but without specifics, and with an attitude that makes me suspicious. I reflexively recoil, and want to scream, "Just leave the kid alone!" No intervention at all would be better than bad intervention (abuse).

Personally, I love Legos. I instinctively see the value and encouraged it when my kids were little. Who needs some fancy theory when the benefits are intrinsic? Just leave it alone and let the magic work.

But I was wrong. Sanity is not instinctive for everyone. After my son had extensive experience playing with the stuff, I watched him trying to play with Grandma. It was not pretty. Her pervasive authoritarian mentality invaded even this simple little activity, and it degenerated into an argument over the correct way to build the project, including ridicule. How dare he ignore her advice and do it his way? What's the point of playing if she can't create and win a power struggle?
Did I mention that I'm a basket case?

Reading this article, I was getting ready to cheer out loud. Then the author wimped out. Rather than simply saying, "don't be rigid and oppressive," it describes how to look at this one little activity in a way that is not rigid or oppressive. Rather than simply throwing away all the pointless power struggles, this authority figure gives permission to lesser authority figures to let go of this one little power struggle, just this once. We wouldn't want to undermine their authority in any meaningful way. Just a little -- you know, lighten up on the kid, but in a rigid, controlled sort of way.

Well, I certainly am. Not just change the curriculum for everyone, but the whole structure and mentality. Tear down the brick building itself and get rid of the whole factory-model system, from kindergarten through eighth grade. (I would leave the high school alone. The building itself is not inherently evil, even if all of the occupants are.) The whole western culture mentality is harmful for everyone. It just happens to be most harmful for Aspies.

Sorry. I really liked the article. It's going in the right direction.
But once I got started, I just had to keep ranting.

never really messed with them. But, if you like 'em, look for a program on the Web called 'Leocad'....

If you had to take Algebra 2 THREE times in a row because it was the highest offering that the school had (the plight of one of the other mods on Cogito), you'd certainly say differently.

Yep, schools need to be changed. My calling is as a teacher.

Last edited by orngjce223 on 12 Oct 2008, 9:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I used to LOVE them, then something happened to all of them, parents got rid of em or something when I got older and I lost interest.

Wow... thanks for that

Leocad link
http://www.leocad.org/

My kids are going to be thrilled.

Also, they already love the online lego person builder

and there's an online program too..
http://ldd.lego.com/

and this is something my kids absolutely love.

Lego Person Creator
http://www.reasonablyclever.com/mini/flash/minifig.swf


Tahitiii,

I'm stunned by that story about playing with Grandma. It's evil but no less evil than I'd expect from the many people who just don't understand.

Do I think that the entire curriculum should be changed for a single individual - no... because I'm a realist. If you start there, what's to stop you dismantling the entire world and remaking it in your own image (as you almost suggest). The problem here is that there comes a time when the person dismantling the system becomes indistinguishable from the builders.

There's no such thing as a perfectly balanced system, only a permanently swinging pendulum.

On the one hand, I can feel like society needs to be lenient - and especially as a parent, I'd like my kids to be given chances - on the other however, as someone who has just had their car vandalised for the fifth time in about 8 months, I want those little suckers to go to jail.

The same is true of both teachers and students.... there is no balance. Children often benefit from early intervention while at the same time children are often victimised by the remedial effect of early intervention (amongst other things). Does that mean that early intervention is bad - no... I think it just means that some people should be involved and others probably shouldn't... but it gets more complicated... Some children benefit from a militaristic approach while others do not.

One child's great intervention is another child's poison.

In the short-term, yes. It keeps them in line and makes life easier for their caretakers. In the mid-term, yes. Some kids are actually happier when you relieve them of the burden of responsibility. For the severely disabled who have no hope of ever living an independent life, MAYBE. Desperate times call for desperate measures. In the long-term, for the masses, no. It creates a creature that does not consider personal responsibility and can't imagine that self-control is humanly possible.

Anyone who would say, "But we have to have rules!" is brain-dead and is not fit to command. Unfortunately, that is exactly the kind of person who usually goes on to become a teacher or a cop. It is a self-selected group, and this is exactly why school (and the world) is so awful. (Yes, I see the catch-22.)

I can’t find the first half of my favorite quote, so I’ll have to do it from memory:
Will Durant, concerning the prohibition, said that it “shows the amateurish weakness of a government that can’t control the fools without making fools of us all.”

From at least as early as third grade, probably from kindergarten, I was consciously offended by all the rules that implied that I was a stupid little kid who couldn’t control myself in the simplest situation. Tell me again why I need to stand in this line when we are not going anywhere?

Even after I figured out that most kids were jerks, I still couldn’t figure out what that had to do with me.

A lot of adults are basically amoral and can’t figure out the difference between right and wrong – have no basic sense of decency – have no idea of what to do with themselves – unless they have someone standing over them with a stick. I still haven’t figured out what that has to do with me.

How to tell when I’m dealing with an idiot who is not worthy of my time:
When I ask why we have this or that rule, the answer is something along the lines of “Because that’s the rule.” This is someone who is incapable of understanding and believes that the question itself is insane. That’s my clue to walk away. This person will never say or do anything that makes sense because there is no sense in him.

A reasonable person would understand, acknowledge and answer the question. Failing that, he might say something along the lines of “I don’t have time right now to explain” or “I don’t know, but…”

Sorry. I just felt like ranting.

Wish I could figure out why everyone hates me.

Surely that depends both on the rule and the rulemaker.

As an aspie, I recognise the value of rules - generally not anyone else's rules, but certainly my own.

I don't expect anyone else to follow my rules but for me, they provide a good structure for my day.

For example; I've got a rule that says I can't sleep during the day. This doesn't stop those around me from having naps but it means that I cannot possibly relax during the day. Is it a good rule - no, probably not but it's a rule that "made itself up" somewhere in my past.

Then we get onto rules like the 10 commandments... I'm not saying that they're all great rules - I still don't quite see what's wrong with coveting things... (eg: I wish I had a body like Arnold Schwartzenegger - I obviously can't steal it after all) but there are a few good ones in there - especially the rule about not killing people. It would be a better rule if everyone followed it.

Rules for rules sake aren't great - particularly when the rules are dangerous, demeaning or downright evil but they're part of today's society. I've often said that one of the main reasons that my son is going to a Catholic school is to learn passive resistance to unwieldy authoritarianism. I went to one when I was little and I fought them constantly (and in those days, schools were much harsher places than they are today). The experience of fighting the whole way has made me a stronger person and enabled me to handle the kind of stupidity that occurs in everyday business. Hopefully my sons will get the same benefits (though I'll be supporting them all the way and monitoring them in case the school gets out of hand).

I have my own morals, don't need a church to tell them to me, don't need the idea of God or the Devil to keep me in line, don't need a government to draw the boundaries for me. Most of my morality is accepted by other people, although, generally, for different reasons.

I'm not that kind of teacher, and I see the same problems everywhere else. The same problem, in many forms - maybe more rules would solve it, maybe less rules would solve it, maybe teaching the New Math would solve it. But the problem isn't in the rules, or the curriculum.

It's in the teaching.

That may be true today but we're several thousand years on from having had it drummed into us (our cultures) that it's apparently quite naughty to kill people - yet we still do it.

Who knows, without that early (mis)guidance(???) would we have developed completely different morals? Would they have been better or worse?

Absolutely. This sick culture has been slowly building for about a century, but it's been snowballing lately. Aggressive/psychotic behavior is modeled and rewarded at every turn.
It's possible to run a school with a different model, like "Positive Discipline."