Question for Dad

Dad — something where your knowledge and expertise may help

I am working off and on with an eighteen-year-old student who is believed to have some autistic-spectrum disorder, something like PDD. He was never diagnosed formally as a child, and not much point now. His schooling largely warehoused him.

His family sent him to adult education to try to get at least a basic Grade 10 certificate so he can go to job training plans. The adult ed was a failure; he had no idea what was asked of him and reported that the teachers just yelled at him. I was hired to try to upgrade his skills so he can get *into* adult ed.

First the good news, then the bad:

I was asked to work on his reading. I’ve worked through Phonics Book 3 with him and have now started Book 4; we are working on multisyllables and vowel patterns and vocabulary. I’m also using some excellent ESL materials for general information, basic grammar, reading connected text, and writing assignments.
When we started about eight months ago he was at a very very inaccurate Grade 2 reading level and now he is at a so-so level of accuracy around Grade 4 level. Formerly he could only write and spell the few hundred base words that he has memorized, and now he is spelling most very common words and is doing fairly well at finding a phonetic spelling for others. He still leaves out some internal sounds especially blends and doesn’t always guess the right vowel, but what he puts on paper could be understood. He can write a page-long connected report if I guide him with “what next?” “and then what did you do?” every clause, and then re-dictate his own words back to him at his writing speed. So this is going quite well although it’s still in itty bitty steps.

He does seem to remember pretty well; after over a month away from tutoring, he remembered the short and long vowel terminology with just one reminder. He reads better and spells better every week, little backsliding.

At first he told me he knew hardly any French (bilingual area, where he must speak it and read some to move around the city and to work). Now he’s being more open and I’ve heard him speaking on the phone and sometimes he gets in a mood and speaks it to me, and he actually is quite fluent, seems about as good as his English in fact, so that’s a wonderful sign. I think his father is a French-speaker. I’ve offered to work with him on French reading but so far he doesn’t want to, and with all the other stuff going on I don’t want to force the issue. Schooling in this was probably not a good experience (the district’s language teachers have adopted “whole-language” in the *second* language, and yes it’s a disaster squared.)

Another weird thing: he sounds and acts *much* more mature and organized on the phone than he does in person.

His listening, attentiveness, and general attitude are hugely improved.

More important is his gain in confidence. He is willing to talk and open up a bit to me. He tries to tell jokes (very badly) and he tries to make me laugh and to find out what I like. He clearly wants to be my friend. A real breakthrough, he has asked a few times about appropriateness of behaviour and has made comments about something being “not mature” when I reacted badly to it. He is dressing more neatly and keeping things cleaner. A couple of months after I started with him, he went to work as a part-time “gofer” at his father’s company, something he could never do before, and he is very proud to be a working man. He even drove long trips out of town and once across the US border to make deliveries, jobs which improving literacy help a lot. He said he also helps the secretary with filing — he can alphabetize so what the heck. Unfortunately they have a downturn in business and heisn’t working now, but we hope he will go back.

I don’t know how to describe this but you have probably had the same experience: I am dealing with a young man who gives every sign of being a slow learner, but I keep getting a sneaking suspicion that there is a fairly intelligent person lurking inside there and watching me.
You know what I mean?

I had a similar experience some time ago; two brothers, one Kleinfelter’s and driven into Emotionally Disturbed class by his school, younger undiagnosed but looked a lot like the list for PDD. The younger had confused speech that at first seemed just so much babble, but if you listened for a while oddly enough a message came through; school was warehousing him in MR. The only way I could describe my diagnostic impressions to his mother was to say that I could see that yes, there was somebody at home inside there.
The present is a somewhat similar situation.

OK, what I need to ask for ideas on:

His social skills are not good. He tells the same “joke” over and over. He says sentences starting with “It’s like …” and comes up with something that cannot possibly be connected to the conversation. Two of his favourite “jokes” are “a chicken and a bear” and “driving a Ferrari.” I greatly fear that in school and in his surroundings he got a lot of laughs for saying dumb things, so this has probably been rewarded.
When I say something that he finds funny, he squeals and flaps his arms like a chicken. He gets on one track and won’t get off it.

I try to react appropriately; when he does say something nice or amusing I do smile, can’t see my way to being deliberately dour. The trouble is that a smile tends to encourage him to go off on one of his things and it’s hard to rein him back. When he does something inappropriate I say so, and he usually takes it OK but sometimes tries to be funny and goes on and on.

He is obsessed with cars and driving. His mother said that when he was little he would just sit in the car in the garage for hours. I try to answer reasonable questions and conversation openers as I would with anyone else, and sometimes it goes OK but sometimes he gets on the repetition track.
I want to encourage a real interest — he can work happily as a gofer in the garage and driving deliveries, for example — but I also have to get him back to the topic of our reading and writing.

Once he gets on one of these tracks, we seem to lose most of the hour of work because he keeps going back to it every two minutes.

In speech, he uses tenses and plurals quite correctly, and speaks quite normally, for a poorly-educated teenager.
In reading he tends to ignore the endings although I am getting him to pronounce more (There is a very large divide between his speech and anything he does on paper, two different worlds.) In writing, he doesn’t seem aware that endings are supposed to be there. I get the feeling that he was taught what little he learned by pure rote memorization, rarely wrote sentences, and those he wrote were not corrected. What is really weird is that he will say “I ate” and write “I eat” — this is one reason why I suspect pure rote.
The endings issue could be why he resists doing French, but I hope to turn this around.

There are certainly textbooks and long long research studies out there and I know you can point me at them, Dad, but what I need now is not a lot of reference material, rather additional tips and techniques. I think we’re on a good path but want to find out any practical ideas that will smooth out some of the bumps. All suggestions welcome.