Substitutes

Recently, Riley’s mainstream first grade class had a substitute. The kids were… being kids with a substitute. They were going nuts.

Now, I have to ask: Do you remember what it was like when your class had a substitute teacher? Do you remember what your most frequent sub was like? I remember that there were a couple of boys in one of my classes who always told the sub the wrong name when he/she was taking the roll. This always created a major distraction as the substitute waffled around trying to decide what to do with the two new students. Some substitutes just wrote the fictitious names on the bottom of the roll and kept going. Others went through an entire litany of questions to us and then to the front office (in which case the two boys in question were suddenly in trouble–MORE drama). We had one substitute named Mr. Lupo who was a very large man with lazy eyes and greasy-looking hair. He hardly looked at us during class unless we started acting up, and then Mr. Lupo got very LOUD very quickly. Mostly, we didn’t mess with Mr. Lupo.

Sorry for the detour, but as I was thinking about Riley’s experience, it struck me that we all have salient memories of substitute teachers. Those poor, unfortunate souls!  Over time, substitutes have had to put up with so much chaos that I have no idea how school systems still manage to find warm bodies to walk into classrooms when teachers are absent.  This particular occasion was momentous because while all the other kids were going nuts for the substitute, my beautiful autistic daughter (whose disability literally compels her to follow all rules at all times) turned around in her chair, and put her legs up over the back of it. She was giggling with all the other students! When the teacher’s assistant asked her to turn around in her chair, she hissed at her. Yes, hissed!

Now, normally you’d think I’d be irritated with my daugher for misbehaving. Blessedly, I can see that those days and that discipline is coming! For an autistic child, misbehaving with her peers is a wonderful sign of developmental milestones reached. So, this time, after I hid my glee and said firmly, “You don’t hiss at your teachers, Riley,” I smiled deeply and gave a silent but victorious cheer.  Riley was being a “typical” kid!

Just this Thursday, Riley broke her routine independently and went straight to her mainstream classroom instead of going to her AU classroom to check in first.  This scared Ms. Michelle (one of her AU teachers) to death because it was unexpected, but it’s yet another sign that Riley is losing some of the rigidity that is so much a part of autism.  It’s hard to explain this to a “typically functioning” person, but this rigidity is much stronger than what we feel if we just tend to like predictable routines.  Many, if not most, autistic people feel compelled to follow the same routine over and over and must work to change to a different one.  They suffer extreme anxiety about encountering the unexpected (Temple Grandin–a very accomplished author, speaker, and designer of farm equipment and processes who has autism and a PhD—says that when she travels by airplane she spends hours rehearsing every possible scenario related to changes she might encounter or things that might happen unexpectedly in the airport so that she can travel with minimal anxiety.), and so they almost never choose something different.   The neat thing is, this was a next step that Ms. Heidi (Riley’s primary AU teacher) had in mind for Riley.   We just thought she was going to have to train Riley to do it, and instead, Riley has made the transition all by herself.   God is so good!