Article: A School Example - The Bad Day.

Here's something that used to be on my now-retired Family blog. Normally I keep my blogs quite separate but I think this instance is relevant here.

In this case, it's an article about my eldest son's bad day at school. He is about three weeks shy of being 10. He has Aspergers Syndrome, Non-Verbal Learning Disorder (NVLD) and ADHD-Inattentive.

School is a real struggle for him both in social and academic terms because although people with aspergers often have social but not academic issues, the NVLD and ADHD-i components ensure that he has both.

I don't have any sage advice for his bad day. It's not his school's fault - they really are a good and caring school. It's not his fault either. In both incidents, a child with better communication skills could probably have understood and communicated the problems to reduce the impact.

I guess, it's just a good example of how things can spiral out of control much more quickly for children with difficulties.

If you want to read it, it's here;

Accidental Escalation

Last Thursday, K had a bad day at school. He missed out on his Concerta (day-strength Ritalin) two days in a row and consequently was a little "off kilter".

At recess, he and his mates were "pretend fighting". This involves doing slo-mo karate kicks and punches which don't actually make contact as each other. A little girl wandered past their group and K threw a kick at her without actually letting her know that it was a game.

She ducked and then decked him one - and the fight was on.

Again, not K's fault, not the girl's fault. It's all about poor communication, one of the hallmarks of Asperger's syndrome. It's not uncommon for a person on the spectrum to assume that others understand their thoughts. 

Luckily, they were "saved by the bell" and had to return to class.

Retaliation

At lunch time, the girl's big brother paid K a visit and a more serious fight began. Eventually the vice principal managed to pull them apart.

After a while the vice principal got the story out of them and the two boys who were really good friends said sorry. Apparently there was a very cute "If we'd known it was only pretend, we would never of hit each other ..." type apology.

My wife got a call at home about it but this was good. It meant that she was ready for K to burst into tears when she picked him up after school.

An Unrewarding Experience

As it turned out, the day wasn't over. At his school, they award points for good behavior. Naturally, with his ADHD and learning difficulties, it takes him a long time (much longer than most kids) to earn enough points to get anything. He'd been saving his points for the whole year and eventually he got enough to get the lowest prize... a lollipop.

It made his day to finally get it. -- and that should have made the other problems of the day simply disappear.

Image by WikimediaImages from Pixabay

Unfortunately, he started eating it immediately after school, while he was waiting to be picked up. A teacher saw him and told him to put it away or get rid of it. Obviously anyone who's ever sucked a lollipop knows that there's no way to put these things away neatly once they're wet - and there's no way he was going to throw it away... ...so instead, he just tried to suck on it more discreetly.

It didn't work. (BTW: The teacher on the line had no idea that this was a prize he'd worked towards all year).

The teacher came over and grabbed the lollipop off him and threw it in the bin. Not willing to see his prize stolen, K tried to get it out of the bin only to be told that it was now "rubbish" and that he wasn't allowed to get it.

Intentional Escalation

Then he got his school bag and threw that in the bin too. The teacher told him to get it but he told her that it was "rubbish" and he wasn't allowed to get it out of the bin.

I think the teaching staff were all a little shocked - after all, he's normally quite well behaved. 

When my wife drove up, the teacher handed K's bag to her, plus the lollipop. She tried to tell Joanne her personal sob story but Joey just replied that "he's had a really bad day and he's probably a bit over it".

The Aftermath

It took K most of the night to calm down enough to tell us exactly what happened. We told him to "go and apologise to the teacher tomorrow" because she didn't know that the lollipop was special.

After a lot of explaining, K finally understood her point of view. In the meantime, I think that the yard duty teacher talked to K's teacher and found out about his terrible day. 

K did remember to apologise and his room teacher told him that the yard teacher was in tears.

We haven't yet figured out if she was in tears over the incident itself or over the sincerity of his apology but we hope it's the latter.