Friday 3 July 2015

School Life Part Two

It's been so long! Welcome back (hopefully via AuKids' new and improved website).

So, to business, Bobby's practice day at his new secondary school.

Bobby's first concern about leaving primary school is losing touch with the entire universe.

For most people who aren't on the spectrum, it's a case of keeping touch with your best mates and 'so long, have a nice life' to the others.

Bobby can't do that. This is because he sees all 30 of his classmates as his friends and although there is a slight differentiation between best mates and others, to him they all deserve hooking up with.

To be fair, they have down to the very last child been extremely supportive of my little dude.

Pointing out the practicalities of keeping in touch with 30 people would not help and I know Bobby well enough to know that this isn't really the point.

His fixation with keeping in touch with his classmates is really about the bigger picture - losing touch with a whole life that he's been comfortable with for the last six years. Losing them represents being plummeted into an unknown abyss.

The way he expresses this scarey feeling is: 'I must not lose touch with ANYONE.' So don't take it literally folks, just address the fear it represents.

Although I know that he will certainly lose touch with a lot of the pupils, as he did with his nursery friends - and not only that but it won't especially bother him when he has new friends - I am not going to point that out. I just tell him that he'll have lots of new friends as well as old ones and that we'll be certain to keep everyone's details.

M'lanie (heaven-sent teaching assistant extraordinaire) is on it, too. She has helped him to create a book featuring every single one of his classmates, their contact details, what they want to be when they grow up and which school they're going to. He is aghast that some of them don't know their email address by heart. I'm more aghast by some of their career choices...still since my own son wants not to be married/not to have kids/spend entire life being a You Tuber, I guess I shouldn't comment.

The rising panic about leaving primary school is evident in Bobby's notes to himself for his Leaver's Assembly: 'Be brave. Pretend it's nothing'.

The height of my rising panic roughly resembled his own yesterday, even though I knew that the mainstream secondary school I've signed him up for is HOT on autism.

I tried not to straighten his hair as we waited outside for him to begin his try out day and my fingers were itching to tuck in his vest, but although Bobby's young for his age I felt it would be unwise to show it in front of the burgeoning gaggle of pre-teens hanging around in clusters around him, so I left him to it.

He didn't seem too nervous - that's where ten years of telling him he's marvellous have paid off.  I was glad of his confidence as he waved goodbye.

Mid-morning I received a text from his teaching assistant saying that he was actually working and really enjoying himself. I nearly fell off my chair.

He emerged smiling amid reassuring noises from his teaching assistant that it had all gone really well. On closer inspection, his bag contained a welcome book. In it, he'd descibed his day as 'Cool and awesome' and after filling in a page titled This is me... he'd put 'LOL - Like it!'

They got a LOL. Praise indeed.

Stuff not asking autistic kids too many questions, I delivered them like a machine-gun in the car. Back in his comfort zone, playing his 3DS to chill out, he wasn't especially bothered about answering them. He just said it was a cool school and he'd obviously eaten well because half of it was still round his face.

Although Alec has many more difficulties than Bobby, his transition will be a lot easier. His small special secondary is the natural progression to his primary school, they already know him there and it's all very relaxed.

Bobby, on the other hand, will be an autistic fish in a mainstream pond of social sharks. But they will take good care of him, I know that, and I can only see a bright future ahead. Full of LOLs.





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