4 Apr. 2022
Autism Day. How much do we know..
Today we had a discussion about the Autism Day, celebrated on April 2nd. I heard the word, knew a few things about it, but I never thought I would be challenged to start behaving as an autistic child..
I was asked to act indifferently and focus on my tasks - sorting out my puzzle pieces- while a party was going on. My concentration span was very limited, after a minute or so, I started gazing at the kids around me…failure.
My second challenge was a set of jumbled, fluorescent, colorful Christmas lights that needed to be perfectly sorted out in a circular folded way and placed into a rectangular drawer. Why would someone be that precise with the lights that when you can unfold them and place them again in a jumbled way on a tree? I was asked to do this while I couldn’t handle the fluorescent lights’ sight. How would I do this?
The next one was the worst for me. I enjoy playing with the buzzers when we have a game like “who know what a ..is” . We’re looking forward to hit one first, we have great laughs on the whole game.
But now I had to be very sensitive to the sound of the buzzer, I had to cover my ears in terror every time a student would hit the buzzer…
I was more chocked when my teacher told me that these happy, yelling students around me, the beautiful, fluorescent lights that give me a thrill every time I see them, the familiar noise of the buzzers are all overwhelming for children with autism. These sensory stimuli as we found out they call them, can be overwhelming and they trigger extreme anxiety on autistic children. An extra thought the teacher suggested we think about was the expressive and figurative language. When we say for example “ try walking a mile in my shoes” to an autistic child, the only thing he won’t get is the fact that you ask for empathy…
We didn’t want to end the lesson, we learned so much about autism, things that we can understand, we can feel. We’re looking forward for the next lesson on how to act on such circumstances, we may bring in a specialist as well.
And all these started from a text in the book where we had to read about when we celebrate Days around the world..
Irene V.