When I was a child, I showed many signs of autism. Of course, this was the 1970s, and few people were thinkings about autism when looking at verbal children who showed high intelligence (as defined by in general doing great in school, showing a high IQ from testing, and doing better than most other students on achievement tests). But some of my behavior and ways of learning were very odd.
One thing that stands out to me is my first day of kindergarten. Like many children of my era, I remember that day well. I was prepared. Our school had a comprehensive orientation program, and my parents had assured me that I would be going to a fun place where I would have opportunities to learn new things. Being highly curious, I was pretty happy about this.
When I arrived, my teacher greeted me. There were already many students in the room. I may have even been the last one to arrive. My bus was a long rural route, and it was often on the verge of being late. After she gave me a name tag, I stood completely still in the middle of the room watching the other students. I don't know how long I stood there. I had no desire to do anything else. I didn't feel worried or anxious. I didn't know that there might be expectations on me. I watched other students playing in pairs or small groups with toys in the room, or sitting on the floor and talking. One student was throwing a tantrum, and everyone was ignoring her. She was pretty loud so I was working hard at tuning the sound out as I stood there.
Eventually, the teacher came up to me and said something like "Don't you want to play with any of the toys?" I politely said no and continued standing still. Then she said, "Why don't you go over there and try on those hats." It was not said like a question but like an order. There was a hat rack of various career hats in the room, and I walked over to it and methodically took each hat down, put it on, then put it back. It seemed pretty inane to me, and it was boring. I started wondering what this was about and when the learning would happen.
A second thing that really sticks in my mind is when we learned about using question marks in first grade. We had language arts work books, and our teacher explained that sentences that asked questions had to have a question mark at the end. I already had a good idea what a complete sentence was. I already knew how to put a period at the end of a sentence or an exclamation mark if it was an exciting sentence, such as "The house is on fire!" But I didn't understand what a question was. Everyone else in the class seemed to understand this very well. The only kids who had trouble with this were a few who couldn't read well. And they did fine when talking to the teacher, just not when adding the punctuation marks to the work book sentences. I decided the best way to handle it was to do every other sentence period and question mark. I was a really good student. The teacher could not remotely understand my block in this matter. How could I not get what a question was? How could I not understand when a sentence was asking something? About a month after the introduction of this concept, it just hit me how to know the difference, and I never had trouble again, but I really think this lack of understanding was definitely related to autism. The worst thing is that my teacher, who I did quite like or at least respect, seemed to think I was goofing off on purpose, when I really had no clue.
In other news, it is my 56th birthday today.
Happy happy birthday to you!!! ♥♥♥
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