We started with the school psychologist. By a strange twist of fate, she’d taught Little Bear many years before and was now charged with evaluating our son. She said it was plain that Cubby had a reading problem, but she did not believe Cubby was “slow.” Cubby was able to solve complex problems, and everyone who heard him speak agreed that his command of language was extraordinary for his age. The psychologist seemed stumped about the cause of the problem. All she could recommend was more testing.
That was the last thing the school wanted to hear, because they had to pay for the evaluations. As far as we could tell, they preferred to simply label Cubby stupid or obstinate. But since the psychologist told them Cubby had a reading problem, they were stuck. Public schools have a legal obligation to make education accessible to kids who are impaired or have learning disabilities. The two things they don’t have an obligation to remediate are “dumb” and “stubborn,” so that’s what they wanted him to be.
To us, it was the school administrators who seemed stubborn and obstinate. Getting them to pay for a first-rate evaluation of our son, as the law required them to do, proved very difficult. In fact, it was one of Little Bear’s greatest challenges as a parent. As they dragged their feet, the school year passed and his grades got worse and worse. Richer parents might have paid out of pocket for the testing, which was quite expensive, but we were barely making ends meet, so we were forced to wait for the school district to live up to its obligation. Some parents in our situation take the school district to court. Others give up on public education and homeschool their kids. It’s a shabby state of affairs that’s come about because our society hasn’t given schools the money to do what needs to be done.
Finally, as Little Bear got ready to take them to court, the district agreed to pay for testing. But by then we had lost faith in the capacity of our local school to educate Cubby. We held the school district to its obligation to pay for tests, but we withdrew Cubby from public school. Little Bear had been looking into alternatives for several months and had settled on a Montessori school in Amherst. She was very impressed by the staff and its teaching method. Even better, the school had a sliding scale of fees, which made it affordable for us.
Cubby embraced the relaxed environment right away. The South Hadley school was huge, and filled with unfriendly people with formal-sounding names: Mr. Parker, Miss Williams, Dr. Halpern. At Amherst Montessori, his new teacher knelt down, took his hand, and said, “Hi, I’m Julie, and this is my assistant, Karen,” and he smiled at her right away. We knew that we’d found a place our little boy would feel happy and safe. Finally, our son liked going to school.
The first step, though, was to take Cubby to the Yale Child Study Center in New Haven for his evaluation. It took a number of visits over a three-month period for the doctors there to make their assessment, but in the end they painted the first clear picture of what Cubby could and could not do. No one had done that for us before, at least not in a comprehensive way. They showed us how he differed from other kids his age, and where his strengths and weaknesses lay. They didn’t give a name to Cubby’s differences, and they didn’t call him disabled. They just identified his difficulties and suggested strategies to help him improve.
That was a real eye-opener. For me, the biggest surprise was the difference between how Cubby processed what he saw versus what he heard. To demonstrate, the psychologist drew a tic-tac-toe board on a blackboard and asked Cubby to copy what she was doing. To my surprise, Cubby couldn’t do it. He looked back and forth from the blackboard to his paper, struggled visibly, and finally got it wrong. I didn’t understand how that could happen. It was a simple grid.
And it didn’t end there. When the psychologist filled in the Xs and Os and asked him to follow her lead, Cubby did that wrong too! With nine boxes to fill in, Cubby was seeing top left on the blackboard yet marking a totally different box on paper.
His mom wondered if Cubby’s difficulty with this task was a sign of dyslexia, but the psychologist’s answers just confused me. “Dyslexia is a very broad term,” she said. “It can mean many different things, like reading words backward, recognizing shapes as letters, or not being able to make sense of the words. We want to be more specific about where your son has trouble.”
Cubby could follow spoken instructions with no problem. The psychologist could hand him a sheet of paper and say, “Draw a tic-tac-toe board,” and he’d do it correctly. She could say, “Put an X in the top right box,” and he’d get that right every time too. What went wrong in Cubby’s head when she drew on the blackboard instead of talking to him?
My mind kept circling back to another of the Yale evaluator’s comments: He said Cubby had “near-normal” intelligence, which I took as a euphemism for “not very smart.” Good as Cubby was with puzzles, language, and math, I could not help worrying that maybe the evaluator was right. He was, after all, the professional, and I imagined every parent was sure their kid was a genius even though logic tells us most are not. How does a parent distinguish marginal intelligence from a learning disability? I’m sure the answer would be obvious today, especially to a special education professional, but it was not at all evident to me.
Cubby was such a study in contrasts. He could barely read, and he couldn’t write. Yet he solved math riddles intuitively, with nothing more than a brief introduction to the problem. That was obvious when Julie handed him a trinomial cube. The cube is one of the puzzles Montessori uses to help children master the skills of solving algebraic and numerical equations. It can be very difficult and frustrating for children to put together, so they’re introduced to it very slowly.
Not Cubby. Julie introduced him to the puzzle one morning soon after he started at Montessori. His eyes never left the cube when she took it apart and told him to put it together. She looked away for a few minutes, not expecting anything much to happen. When she looked back a few minutes later, it was sitting solved on the table.
Seeing his interest, she showed him the second step of the process. He figured that out in a matter of minutes too. Finally, she began making random algebraic equations with the cube, and he solved them all, as if it were an entertaining game. In the space of twenty minutes, he mastered a puzzle that takes most kids an entire year to learn.
But he couldn’t read or write. Yet. That was looking like a major problem.
There were times when I wondered whether Cubby was like the Peter Sellers character in the movie Being There—a fellow who was totally illiterate and uneducated, but still gets tapped to run for president of the United States because he’s sweet, polite, and nods sagely at the right moments.
As I worried that my son might be on the borderline of intellectual disability in some areas, another evaluator revealed how Cubby concealed his comprehension problems. “He’s very good at changing the subject away from something he has trouble with or doesn’t want to do. He’s also very stubborn,” he said. This cheered me greatly; Cubby’s skill at distracting us sounded like another sign of intelligence. I had described him as a future barrister on more than one occasion.
Before Yale, I had assumed Cubby was just strong willed. It was extremely difficult to make him do chores like cleaning his room or cleaning up his dishes. Larger-scale tasks like raking the yard were well-nigh impossible. Those weren’t things that appealed to a kid, but they had to be done. We were never surprised when he resisted and tried to divert us; we knew we just had to persist and make him do the work.
When he showed the same kind of resistance to reading a book for school, I assumed the reason was the same—that he just wanted to play and do what he wanted. Now I understood that he resisted reading because it was hard for him and he didn’t want us to know. Until that day, his behavior around books hadn’t made sense. He said he liked books, but when I set one in front of him, he’d put it aside as if he wasn’t interested. Yet he loved hearing us read to him. I had never understood how he could love the stories yet show no interest in reading them himself. It had never oc
curred to me that he was being obstreperous or acting indifferent to hide weaknesses.
I still didn’t know how he came to be that way, since I read encyclopedias at his age and his mom was a better reader than me. Was it genetics, dropping him on his head, or something he ate? That was one of those questions that just never got answered. Eventually, I concluded that knowing he had the problem was enough. The why didn’t really matter.
With all the testing the Yale people did, no one looked at his social skills. If they had, I am sure the psychologists would have diagnosed him with Asperger’s syndrome. Looking back, his social ineptitude, his rigidity, and his unusual special interests make it pretty obvious. Yet at the time the word Asperger’s was barely in the medical lexicon and no one thought to test for it in the context of his school problems. My own diagnosis was still a few years in the future, and Cubby’s diagnosis would not come till some years after my own. But it didn’t matter. The name wasn’t what would help us to help him. What we needed was insight into where he was struggling and how we could support him in those areas. The Yale specialists did a fine job with that, and his mom and I will always be grateful.
Little Bear took the Yale results to the Montessori school and reviewed them carefully with his teachers. The Montessori staff nodded in agreement at some things in the report, while other findings came as a surprise. It had only been a month, but already our son was happy in school and doing well. For the first time, he was excited about going to class. He made friends with the younger kids at school, and they all looked up to him. Inspired by my example, he told them stories about Gorko, Zeke, Pete, adding his own twist: penguins. I’d made up Gorko, and now he invented Fishy, the King of the Penguins. He might have struggled with school, but he was already learning to entertain his classmates.
Once we knew a little more about Cubby’s difficulties we saw him in a whole new light. I was relieved; I’d been afraid they would find some kind of major cognitive impairment. To me, a mere reading challenge was nothing. Of course, Cubby still had to solve the problem. We could help, but he was the one who had to overcome the visual problems and learn to read. That was essential if he wanted to get ahead in this society.
Julie and the others at Amherst Montessori worked very hard to bring his skills up to where they needed to be. To her credit, she did get him reading, but there was one thing she could not do, and that was to make him like it. She taught him the mechanics of reading, and how to sound out and say words. He learned what they meant, too. But it didn’t catch fire in his mind. He didn’t want to do it, didn’t like to do it, and didn’t do it unless he had to.
As it turned out, the thing that changed all that, at once and forever more, was the power of Harry Potter. That was the one thing that finally made our son want to read.
As much as Cubby loved my tales of Gorko and his lizard pals, I have to concede that his all-time favorite story was Harry Potter. He was enraptured with the characters, the magic, and all the fantastic places. The only problem was, the books themselves were daunting. They were thick, heavy, and bereft of illustration. For a third grader who struggled to read picture books, they were overwhelming.
I didn’t know what to make of that, because I was reading at a high school level when I was in third grade. By that time, I had gone from Dick and Jane straight into Encyclopaedia Britannica. I could not understand why my son hadn’t done the same. “He’s not like you,” his mom would say defensively.
Meanwhile, he could not get enough of the stories. “Read Harry Potter,” he would say, as he handed us a book from his collection. “You read it,” I would answer, and he’d look annoyed and hand the book back to me as if I were an uncooperative dummy.
He had better luck with his mom. She was much more likely to read on demand, and he’d sit there for hours, watching the pages turn as words flowed from her mouth. He’d look at her, and look at the book, but he struggled with the next step. Sometimes she’d put her fingers on the page to highlight the words as she read. She always hoped Cubby would chime in and read aloud with her, but he never did. Listening seemed to be enough. Even after three years of class, the testing at Yale, and the first steps with a tutor, reading remained very hard.
That spring Cubby’s mom completed her master’s degree. To celebrate her graduation, my brother bought the two of them round-trip tickets to Mexico, and they rented a house in San Cristóbal, Chiapas, for six weeks. They planned to head south just as soon as Cubby was out of school. I didn’t like the idea of Cubby being away for so long, but I knew it was a great opportunity for them. It turned out to be one of the best experiences of their lives.
They took a circuitous path to Mexico, driving our old Mercedes station wagon to her mother’s place in Florida, and then flying from there. Little Bear brought the first three Harry Potter books on tape, and Cubby listened to them on the way down. The books were so long that it took a journey of that length to hear them all. We hoped hearing the books might get him reading them, but it didn’t. He listened happily and held the books in his hands, but the pages didn’t turn.
The fourth Harry Potter came out while Cubby and his mom were in Mexico, and I bought it so Cubby would have it when he came home. This time, we didn’t give him the audio version. We handed him the printed book, and he carried it everywhere. He still wanted us to read to him, but something was changing. He sat there alone, struggling with the words himself.
Later in the summer, he brought Harry Potter with him to Chesterfield Scout Camp. The scouts camped in tents, and when bedtime came, the kids lay on their bedrolls, reading by flashlight. Cubby followed their lead, as hard as it was, because other scouts were talking about Harry Potter and he had to keep up if he didn’t want to be left out. The peer pressure must have provided a push we grown-ups couldn’t, because the results were visible as soon as he returned from camp.
Now he held books and actually read. He read at lunch. He read in bed. I’m sure he was struggling mightily at first, but something clicked in him on that book, because he got faster and faster, almost before our eyes.
Looking back, I think that the process of Cubby learning to read was similar to how I learned digital engineering when I was in my early twenties. I knew analog audio engineering, but I had to master its digital counterpart for a potential job. To do that, I picked up several textbooks and read through a few years of focused classroom curriculum in a two-week marathon, soaking up the knowledge. The process of reading the text, examining the examples, and looking at the result of my own experiments somehow did the trick.
Some people call that kind of sudden self-directed learning a savant ability. People with autism often have an unusual ability to concentrate. Sometimes we get fixated as a result, and that’s a disability. Other times, we lock in on something that captures our interest, and then our concentration can be an extraordinarily powerful advantage.
No one knew how that kind of learning could be possible when Cubby and I were young, but neuroscientists are getting a glimpse of the answer now. Advances in functional magnetic resonance imaging allow us to see the activation of tiny chunks of brain matter as we think and perform tasks. Recent studies have shown that one hundred hours of concentrated study and practice can change brain activation patterns enough that researchers can pick up the differences using fMRI. Even better, they are correlating changes in brain imagery with tangible improvements in skills. Other studies have shown that the brains of people with autism are more plastic, or changeable, than those of ordinary people, so some of us may have a unique advantage when it comes to acquiring skills.
If only we knew more about how to harness this ability! Even so, as the experiences of my son and I show, we autistic folks may be able to reconfigure ourselves in ways others find incredible.
That’s surely what happened for Cubby. When the school year finished he was several years behind his classmates in reading. By the time that summer ended, he’d passed them all and moved close to college level. And it didn�
��t stop—he was improving every day. It was almost as though someone from Hogwarts had waved a wand.
It wasn’t just Hogwarts, though. Cubby’s progress at the Montessori school was almost miraculous. To this day I don’t know if it was the method, the people, or both. I do know that Cubby has stayed in touch with Julie to this very day. She’s one of those teachers who’s made lifelong connections with a small army of kids, one at a time.
In an ironic twist of fate, her assistant, Karen, would be called for jury duty years later when Cubby was on trial. She was actually interviewed as a potential juror, but excused when she revealed their Montessori connection.
Cubby’s reading breakthrough wasn’t the only momentous thing that happened that spring. While Cubby and Little Bear were in Mexico, my “partner” came back from Florida, looked at the books, and said, “I can’t believe it. You paid me back fair and square.” I almost choked at his seemingly casual comment, but the meaning was clear. I was done with my obligation to him. I had already been looking for a new home for my business, but now my search kicked into high gear. With my servitude done, I wanted out of that place as fast as possible. I found a promising building less than two miles away and signed a lease for fifteen hundred dollars a month. I had twice the space of my old shop, in a nicer building, for less money. I was psyched.
I rented the new building, hired workmen to get it ready, and went there every day after work. Each day for a month, I brought over more parts and tools. When the last weekend of the month arrived, I moved everything else and swept the floor clean. I called the customers who had cars at my shop and told them where I was going. That weekend, I called everyone with appointments for the following week and told them the same.
Raising Cubby Page 12
