Stressbunny, I have some suggestions for you. I'll try to put the in point form, hopefully to make it easier for you to consider and use (or not, as you choose).
The label - ADHD, autism, apraxia - it doesn't matter what we call it, your son is struggling and the overall presentation of how he functions, is what MUST be considered here by everybody, especially his class teacher. While I do agree that it always has to be kept in mind that what we are told about our kids is NEVER ahrd and fast, ALWAYS must be considered to be just an approximation and always has to be open to challenge - right now, you have more urgent things to deal with: you have to get the school to back off on their attitude to him. As I said in my earlier post - it is time for a major mindset change. This time, I mean that THE SCHOOL must change their mindset towards him. You are correct - he is NOT merely lacking motivtion. Chances are he is already highly motivated to do the work, but simply cannot do it under the circumstances.
Here are my suggestions:
1) Request an IEP meeting as a matter or urgency. The reason for the urgency - the class teacher has got things badly wrong and is about to escalate problems to a huge extent, the rages you have sen at home are likely to now explode at school, and if the school is looking for an excuse to throw him out, they're about to get their ammunition. You need to head them off at the pass.
2) IMMEDIATELY, before the IEP, begin using a Communication Book. Even with a difficult teacher, this can make a big difference because the communicarion is immediate, and also less stressful than a daily classroom steps consultation. Think about it - after a day teaching your son, the teacher will be looking forward to getting away from school and heading home for a stiff drink (as we would, in their shoes). The last thing the teacher wants is to have to meet with the parent of the most difficult kid in class, and re-hash the day. But the child's parent does need this information, on a daily basis. The Communication Book is the way out of this.
To set it up - get a fairly standard school exercise book and a plastic cover for it. Write on the cover, "difficult child's Communication Book. This is for staff, family and friends to write in about anything important, interesting, good or bad in difficult child's day. This communication is to help us all find patterns in what works for him and what doesn't."
I actually would type my notes onto a computer diary and print out just that day's entry, then paste it into the book. My handwriting is poor and this also meant that my notes had back-up copies on the computer. My notes have come in VERY handy over the years, when I need to backtrack over an incident or when the book has gone missing (as it does sometimes).
Ground rules - teachers are permitted to vent, do not use what the teacher says to plan legal action, no matter how tempting. ANYBODY should be permitted to say, "I could have cheerfully throttled him today and laughed through the entire process." The aim is to try to support one another. That doesn't mean you can't disagree, but you need to continually work towards a good relationship with the other staff. So if a teacher gets it badly wrong in your opinion, find a tactful way of saying so. For example, "I note that you made difficult child skip recess today because he did not complete his worksheets. Then you mentioned that his behaviour after recess was much worse - I do feel that skipping recess did not achieve anything positive in terms of ensuring a better completion rate in future. It could in fact be aggravating the behaviour problems, as he needs his breaks from the intense focus he needs in class. If he gets mentally exhausted, you will get even less output from him. Perhaps we need to meet to discuss some constructive ways that we can together increase his productivity."
The Communication Book travels in difficult child's school bag, but is NEVER difficult child's responsibility. In other words, nobody should give it to him to put in his bag, nobody should ask him to fetch it. The teacher must remove it from his bag at school and make sure it goes back in. The parent does the same at home.
THIS WORKS amazingly.
2) Change in mindset needed - the teacher needs to be shown that difficult child is NOT being defiant (I really HATE the term ODD because it implies the child is doing this on purpose, just to be ornery - that is so wrong). difficult child is NOT being lazy, but is in fact simply unable to do the work, under the conditions in which it is presented. But there ARE ways to make it easier for difficult child to get the work done, if he is at all intellectually capable. And these ways need to be communicated to the teacher and every effort made to ease the way for the teacher to implement these methods.
To help the teacher's mindset change, you need to bring in some educational experts. For us, there are people employed by our Department of Eduction who have the training in Special Edf to interpret psychometric test results and other test results, and explain it to school staff in ways thta also set up some practical and positive management strategies. THIS is what the teacher needs - someone who she will listen to, who can say "Try this instead." If there isn't anyone like this, then it needs to be YOU. That means two things:
i) YOU need to learn a lot, fast (but you can do it); and
ii) you need to get the school to recognise your vital strategic position as the parent and expert in thischild's method of functioning.
Where do you learn? Here is a good start. We can point you towards good and useful books. We can help you as a sounding board. You can learn from mistakes we have made and grab any positive experiences and use those too. Between us all, there are strategies that have worked, and ones which have not.
3) You need to communicate to the school, fairly quickly and preferably in writing, that punishment is not going to work here. Ask for the urgent IEP but also at the same time, ask for immediate actioning of the following:
i) homework to stop, immediately, except for an allowance of ONE day over the weekend, max, essential learning material only.
ii) NO punishments for failure to complete work. Instead, observation of conditions where work was successfully completed as well asconditions where there was less success. This is an opportunity to observe and learn, both at home and at school. There must be cooperative communiction and learning in order to come to the IEP meeting with combined material to put on the table to work collaboratively to find a solution. The aim is mutual - getting this boy education and functioning in society.
iii) Positive motivation used where possible. Again, notes taken.
4) Some preliminary recommendations to be implemented immediately where possible, and by "immediately" I mean BEFORE the IEP meeting if it is permitted to be implemented:
i) Communication Book (I know, I'm repeating myself - but this one is vital)
ii) Positive motivation only
iii) Find a quite, distraction-free place for him to actually DO his worksheets. A huge problem for the combination of autism and ADHD, is the sensory stuff. A kid with autism is often hypersensitive to even small noises and vibrations, as well as textures, feelnigs, visual distractions, smells - so much can get in the way. Now visualise the typical classroom, where the kids have been given a written task to do and are eagerly beavering away at it. It is still not a silent room. The scrtch of a pen on paper; the hard texture of the desk under the elbow. A chair scrapes. A kid coughs. Another sniffs. Pencils tap. Shoes kick chair legs or table legs. The floor vibrates to footsteps passing outside. Maybe two blocks away a roadworker is using a jackhammer and the vibrations may not be audible but they can be felt by someone sensitive. The teacher stops to talk now and then, "Don't forget to turn the page over when you've done the first side." A kid with autism is often VERY aware of every little thing and each one pulls him away from his work and interrupts his toughts. A kid with ADHD is going to have thoughts which are easily interrupted, until he develops the technique of concentrating with extreme intensity, so that he has to tune out all noises even to the extent of tuning out the teacher's instructions. I speak from experience here - difficult child 1 learned to do this at about 6 years old. He got even better at it as he got older. I remember when he was studying at home and had gone to the spare room to work; when he came back in a few hours later he said to me, "Sometimes when I'm concentrating, the silence in my head is so loud it's distracting."
The quiet, distraction-free place that the local school found for difficult child 3, was the classroom veranda. They put a second desk for him there. During the lessons, difficult child 3 would sit with the class but in a position where there were no other kids between him and the blackboard; every other person in the line of sight, is a potential major distraction. Moving his desk is an easy way to reduce distraction. Then once the teacher had finished explaining the task, the worksheets would be handed out and difficult child 3 would go to the desk on the veranda. That desk faced a blank wall, preferably a corner. No window in sight, no door. The teacher could see his back. To cut out sound, difficult child 3 wore headphones and used a CD player. We chosee the music carefully. A white noise generator would have been great, but we didn't have one, so we chose music with no lyrics (so he wouldn't sing along) and used classical but stimulating music (Mozart, Vivaldi, some Beethoven, Handel, Bach). He actually helped me choose the music and later on found that music from Japanese animé was very effective indeed.
The drawback of this method was that when the class had to stop work, the teacher would need to go to difficult child 3 and touch him on the shoulder or get his attention in some other way. But it was a small price to pay, for increased productivity.
iv) Use praise as positive motivator. Try a reward system, a sticker chart, a points system - points accumulate as he gets small tasks done. Points are NEVER taken away. Points can be cashed in for something he likes, such as computer time.
v) Break tasks up into manageable pieces.
vi) Take note of what he seems to manage easily (and under what circumstances) and what seems to give ifficulty. Do not expect what you find to make sense, some teachers can see the academic equivalent of a kid who can't crawl, but who can run a marathon. They see this and accuse the non-crawler of "bunging it on".
Example: difficult child 3's English teacher last year. difficult child 3 simply coud not write on the topic, "what the other characters thought the main character was thinking about" because it involved too many degrees of separation. But difficult child 3's vocabulary is in the extreme superior range, so the Englsih teacher claimed tat because he had a university-level vocabulary, he should be capable of university-level work when frankly, he was barely capable of elementary level. She would accuse him of being lazy, or not trying, or "trying tp put one over on me, pretending you can't do it." She is a nice person, she just doesn't "get" him.
vii) Arrange meetings at least once a term to discuss progress and also discuss any interesting observations, to see what ideas they generate.
These recommendations can be overturned at the IEP meeting if the meeting agrees; but trialling things now, gives the team a head start in seeing what could improve things. It also buys everybody time, by easing back on the pressure and also using the time to make observations on how he functions best.
Now, to ask for AT the IEP meeting - see if you can persuade them to get an aide to work with difficult child. The aim of the aide is to ease the teacher's workload, to provide someone whose aim it is to help difficult child transition from one task to another, and to also support him in helping him organise his space, his time and his efforts. Sometimes something as simple as "I can't find my pencil" is beyond a difficult child's ability to resolve in time to get any work done at all. A good aide can pick up on this and get his nose to the grindstone, happily.
Another recommendation - playground supervision. We only ever got this for one school term, it worked brilliantly but it was labour-intensive. Our school didn't want it (for too many reasons, many of which I have never worked out) and with hindsight, I should have fought harder for it. difficult child 3's current placement is working well for him and has shown me how it SHOULD have been.
The angle to take with the school - difficult child has an identified disability. He has highly specific needs which must be accomodated if he is to have fair access to the education which is his right. To plan to punish him for failing to do his work, is to first make the assumption that he is CAPABLE of doing the work. Being smart enough to do it is not sufficient indication of capability; a blind child may be highly adept at mental arithmetic, but unable to copy sums down off the blackboard. To punish difficult child at the moment for not getting work done, is the same as punishing that blind child for poor handwriting or failure to copy accurately. It's like punishing a deaf child for failing to answer when their name is called.
At difficult child 3's school, they will modify the schoolwork to reduce the workload where needed, for a wide range of reasons. Some kids need MORE work, asin plenty more opportunity to practice problems and revise. difficult child 1 at this school was given essay after essay, because he really needed to be drilled in how to answer essay questions. difficult child 3, however, needs the work made as concentrated as possible necause he is very slow in getting the work done. Other students at the school, perhaps kids who are actors, dancers or elite sports stars in the making, haven't got the time for too much revision and so they too get a concentrated program.
So it IS possible. And depending on how your son learns, it may well be the most efficient way for him to be educated.
But how can anybody know, if the school is ignoring the effects on his education of his disability and instead automatically treating him as a naughty child who is being lazy?
Good luck with this one. Have confidence in yourself as an expert on your own child.
Marg
