The Po Show

A New Tale

As all the headlines have trumpeted, it's a new beginning.

For Matthew, this fall has been his own new beginning, with a new school, a new therapist, a new chance. Today was his parent conference (which included his teacher, Mr. Fox (very sharp dresser, very white teeth, nice hair), the supervisor of the classroom unit, Mrs. McGrath (classrooms are divided into units, 4-5 classrooms each, with a supervisor), and Matthew's therapist, Pat (all teachers and staff are called Mr. and Mrs., but the therapists all go by their first names), whom I see once a week for our private session.

I can't quite think of what to say. He's doing so well. He's made so much progress in all areas, and they all just think he's wonderful. He's participating, he's contributing in class discussion, he's doing his work in class (with a lot of prompts still, but he responds right away when he's redirected, rather than getting upset about being told to refocus). He's doing fine in all subjects.

They are scribing for him when it comes to paragraph writing, and he has an Alphasmart to use for shorter writing, but they are trying to get him to try and manually write out single sentence answers. We talked for a long time about his processing disorder and I think I got them to understand what's at the root of the issue (as I see it). Mrs. McGrath said that she had another student with a very similar set of processing issues. We talked about figuring out how much to back off and how much to push, and that it might really be unproductive to push all the usual methods of sounding out letters and developing phonemic awareness. It might really be better to figure out methods for circumventing his disability, like giving him more word lists to copy from. This is so much better than last year's special ed. consultant teacher, who kept telling me that she didn't want to stop pushing him to write because she didn't "want him to get to be an adult and not be able to write a grocery list." OMG, like that's what's really important. So they are so on the same page with me on this.

Socially, he's still holding back a lot, but at least he's getting along okay with all the kids in class (with the exception of one kid, but apparently that is true for all the other kids in the class as well). During the daily free time period, he used to grab a book and sit by himself everyday, refusing to talk to anyone or play games (he was choosing to read textbooks, which his teacher found very amusing). Now he sits on the couch and watches the other kids play games. I asked if he's really watching, or if he was in his own head, and Mr. Fox said that he was clearly watching and following what they were doing. So maybe he's preparing, figuring out which kids he may want to play with or which games he may want to try playing with them. He's also probably still getting comfortable in the class, period.

One area that's gotten a lot better has been specials, which started out very difficult at the beginning of the year. He was refusing to participate, would go into art and put his hands over his ears and make high-pitched sounds to drown out anyone talking to him. Now he's participating in everything, art and music and gym, with no hesitation at all. He's actually eager to go to gym, which is just worlds away from the last two years. I said that I think that the problems he had at the beginning of the year were probably residual trauma from all the horrors he had in specials last year, and it looks like he's adjusting and accepting that things are different here. Just wonderful.

I asked if they thought there was a difference since he went back on meds, and it isn't clear if there is or isn't (he started back on Abilify during the second week of Dec.). But he's had a lot fewer outbursts than in Nov., and they said it's been quite awhile since he ended up "in the hallway" (which is what happens when a child really loses it and needs extra help, so then the supervisor can assist). It's so hard to know, and his dosage is so slight, and there are so many confounds, like the fact that there was the long break. But I think we're sticking with the current dosage, since there doesn't seem to be any reason to change.

One of my favorite moments of the conference was when Mr. Fox said that during the inauguration (they brought all the kids in the whole school into the auditorium to watch on a big screen TV), one boy had complained that it was getting boring, and Matthew immediately chastised him by saying, "Don't you realize what an historical event this is? This is wonderful!" OMG, that's my boy :). It seems that I've not only turned him into a science fiction geek, I've turned him into an historian :).

So there it is. Matthew's best conference, well, ever. I can't express how happy I was when I left.

Of course, I got knocked down a peg when he came home in a total rage because there had been an accident on the road and the bus was really delayed (they came home about 45 minutes later than usual, which freaked me out a little, so he was on the bus for an hour and a half). He calmed down eventually, but it did remind me that while things are much better, and I'm inexpressibly grateful for that, he's still Matthew, and the work continues. But this was not a Tale of Two Conferences, as it has been every year since Tessa was in nursery school. It's a new chapter for Matthew.