Sir Ken Robinson (one of my favorite educators) speaks about events that changed the direction in his life and inspired his work in education.



While I seldom write about it, I think my own brush with cancer was a turning point in my life. At twenty-two, I was undergoing major surgery and the strenuous treatments that accompany a cancer diagnosis. I had it easier than many, but my time with cancer was by no means fun. It shook my view of the world and the way I prioritize my life.

So many things that seemed important to me before cancer suddenly became irrelevant. I started noticing people around me more – their lives, how I affect them, how they affect me. I remember one of my managers at the bookstore for whom I worked criticizing me for spending more time talking with coworkers and customers rather than shelving. What I didn’t know how to express then was that, for the first time ever, those people were suddenly more important to me than the objects I was shelving. I never returned to retail after leaving a month later.

Cancer had a humbling affect on my life, and it inspired me to see such a large number of people come together to help one person. Some of my fellow patients awaiting daily treatments were constant discouragements, but others were an inspiration. They looked to each day as a new day full of opportunity for recovery. They helped me see what a blessing life is, what it means to be thankful for every new day – even if that day brings a barrage of needles, radiation, and hair loss.

While I would never wish my experiences on anyone, I do think I came out the other side a better person.

Tags: education, memoirs

As I crossed the threshold from the bustle and controlled chaos of the hallway, and my right foot touched the carpet of my Analytical Geometry classroom, a sharp sensation shot up my spine and nestled into my neck and shoulders. It was a familiar feeling. I knew exactly what it meant. I was about to remember something important about this class.

I was supposed to do page 156, odd numbered problems 1-19. It was another assignment for which I would receive half-credit or nothing -- more likely nothing. There was little chance I would remember to do the makeup work once I left the room. I had a D in Analytical Geometry, not because the subject was difficult (nothing could be further from the truth), but because I was missing grades for most of my assignments.

Chances are, similar triggers would occur with each class I entered that day. Assignment notebooks were useless. I'd fill the pages out and forget to look at my notes later. As soon as I walked out of school, most things that happened that day simply disappeared from my mind. The next day, memories would flood back of various tasks and assignments I forgot to complete.

In school, Student Resource Time (SRT), became my salvation once we switched to block scheduling. As long as nothing interfered with my SRT time, I could remember to check on my schoolwork there. Slowly, i was able to broaden the context of my memory to include the entire school building ­ not just the specific classrooms in which the assignment originated. College was less difficult because there was enough downtime on campus for me to work on my work in a school setting. As long as I was on campus, I could remember to do my work.

I was accused of being lazy, of only remembering what I wanted. How could I consistently remember the specifications of the Enterprise NC1701-D or the order in which Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote his musicals, but I couldn't remember something simple like homework? The question baffled me. Truth be told, it still does. I'm always walking into work and feeling that old, familiar sensation of an important memory itching to suddenly resurface.

Contextual memory and the retrieval thereof is a challenge of autism with which I still contend. One solution I've found is to email myself things I need to accomplish. At home, I'll inevitably spend some time on the computer, at which time I'll see a message from myself about something I need to finish for work the next day. Also, I do a great deal of work-related stuff on my personal computer (a late-2006 MacBook Pro), thereby giving the machine a dual context.

Regardless, I find the workings of my memory a challenge that I haven't quite figured out yet. I'll let you know when I do.

Tags: asd, memoirs

I was able to get out of the house for an extended period of time for the first time in a week. Bronchitis has been keeping me down, but I was able to make it into work today. It was exhausting, but the kids’ smiles make it all worthwhile. Both the wife and I are back on our feet, and I’m very thankful for that simple fact.

In other news, this happened too.


Today is a new day. I hope it brings new beginnings as well.

Update: Boston.com has a collection of some amazing pictures of the event.

Unfortunately, the appendix in question was not part of a book so much as it was part of the wife. In short, Friday brought the wife severe abdominal pain to her right side, though I was known to mistakenly refer to it as "abominable" pain. I think both descriptors are correct.

Saturday brought her an interminably long visit to the ER with no occurrences of a natural disaster, a hostage situation, a quarantine, or any other jumping-the-shark plot points.

Eight nurses, something like eighteen failed IV attempts, and a CT scan later, a swollen and "angry" (surgeon's words, not mine) appendix was successfully removed from her body and sent to whatever fate is reserved for good appendices gone bad.

Sunday brought home and rest. I hope the rest of the week brings her recovery. Please remember her in your thoughts and prayers right now.

Update January 11: Thanks for all the kind notes, emails, and calls. She’s doing very well, and she hopes to be back to work by Wednesday.

Tags: family

As another year passes, I see another Completion Ceremony video firmly in my rearview mirror – a video that almost didn't happen due to schedule constraints. In all, the Keynote file that served as the project's base was 123 slides with some 240 photographs included. Five days before the ceremony, I only had about forty of those slides completed! It was nuts finishing up the rest, leading to many near-sleepless nights. Still, I'm pretty happy with how things turned out this year, so allow me to take a moment to look back at highlights as well as problems with this year's video.

Let's Start With the Bad News

The time crunch led to one major issue: no opportunities to troubleshoot or tweak. In the end, my soundtrack (composed by a friend and myself) was about thirty seconds shorter than the video. I had no time to write new material, so the video opens in silence. It only looks intentional! Additionally, framerate was an issue. I haven't had problems with this since my first attempt six years ago (using nothing but Keynote 1.0 and QuickTime Pro). Again, given just a few more hours, I know I could have worked this out.

I also felt limited in my adherence to Mac OS X 10.4 technologies. I really wanted to upgrade to 10.5 before working on this video (explaining some of my own procrastination), but it just didn't happen. This hampered my vision to some extent because some of the tools I wanted to use require 10.5 functionality. I still think the video presentation was pretty good. It just wasn't what I had in mind.

On to the Positives!

I ended up following a design philosophy (for lack of a better term) I used last year – that is all backgrounds and objects had to feel tangible and real. No swirly abstract PowerPoint-like backgrounds allowed! The end result is very organic looking, and both parents and kids have an easier time connecting to the static images.




I also used some extracted Keynote elements and Hemera Photo-Objects to add some more depth to the slides, adding small touches to compliment the images. These turned out to be a nice addition to the formula.

iMovie and iDVD worked like champs on my MacBook Pro – which I was grateful to have since the G5 didn't fare so well this year. We will not be replacing it this year, but the PowerMac is beginning to show its age. It produced seven DVDs to the MacBook's thirty, and two of those were coasters.

Covetous Desires for Next Year

• Photoshop Elements 6 - because switching computers just to use Photoshop is a pain.
• OS X 10.5 Leopard - because my favorite quick-and-dirty image editor has picked up some cool new features that rely on Leopard.
• Sibelius 5 - for the same reasons as PS Elements 6. Rosetta is not kind to previous versions of these apps.
• iWork '09 and iLife '09 - because…well, just because.

That's really it for this year. Except for the time crunch, everything went fairly smoothly and predictably. I look forward to trying to diving into this project next year around this time again!

Tags: keynote, iwork

I don't often post negative experiences invloving people I work with because I don't want to embarrass anyone or cause trouble, but I want to write about my feelings toward a specific event that happened at work. Therefore, I'll just treat those parties involved anonymously. Like Dragnet. You know, to protect the innocent.

This last week was a rough one. I had to take a couple of sick days, and I hate taking sick days. Understand, an unanticipated change to my routine is never a Good Thing. Most breaks, half-days, and days-off are met with a certain quirkiness of behavior, but completely unforeseen sick days are the worst. My brain goes into this strange feedback loop of white noise and repeated patterns on sick days. I may lay in bed all day and get no sleep the night after – leading to further problems.

Wednesday, I felt like I could go back to school. I still was very hoarse and was speaking in a very manly register that sounded like a Caucasian Barry White. (Later in the day was worse. I began sounding like Michael Bolton!) I had stayed up far too late the night before, as I am doing right now, and I had a hard time getting myself around in the morning. Mornings are rough in general as it seems to take twenty or more minutes for mind and body to come to any kind of consensus as to what they are doing, but I think that is a familial trait more than anything.

I glanced at the clock as I rushed out the bedroom. I was going to be late – no question about it. A social seizure surfaced, but I managed to postpone it, so I could keep moving. Then, as I was on the road, I realized I had forgotten to put the trash out. Social seizure number two surfaced. I shouted at myself some, but I still had to stifle the meltdown for the sake of driving. (It's not like anyone else was in the car listening.) Shortly thereafter I realized I was going to be late to a meeting I was facilitating. Meltdown number three begins to boil. All of these surged through my brain within about twenty minutes of each other. This was not a Folgers morning.

Fast-forward to the conclusion of the meeting. Things went fine. Afterwards, a coworker asked me, "How are you feeling."

"Physically fine," I answered, immediately regretting my candor in responding.

"How are you mentally?" the coworker pressed.

"Very autistic today," I replied.

The coworker looked at me with an unreadable expression and said, "I'm moving away."

Cue repressed social seizure number four of the morning. Saying that reaction hurt would be like saying Les Misérables is kind of long. It would be like saying Alpha Centauri is a few miles away. It would be like saying Beethoven was slightly troubled. My brain screamed. My muscles ached. For a split instant, I wanted nothing more than to climb inside one of the room's cabinets and huddle away for the rest of the day.

But I didn't.

I postponed reaction again, so I could do my job. That's what you do when you are an adult with autism.

A highly-functioning autistic adult in the workforce – even one who works in education – gets no one-on-one help, gets no intervention strategies, has no access to a cool-down area, a weighted vest, nothing. Compassion can even be hard to come by. In this scenario, it was particularly devastating. My coworker is an educator! This is an individual who is familiar with IEPs and with accommodations. In theory, I could have confessed this to no better person. Still, all I received was a cold shoulder.

When an autistic individual manages to verbally communicate to you that he or she feels autistic, it is not meant to be a conversation-stopper. It is a cry for help – or at least understanding. Don't ignore that. Don't brush it off. In such an admittance, the autistic individual is attempting to reach out. Rebuffing such an effoort only serves to discourage such overtures in the future. It encourages social detachment and isolation. Don't be dismissive.

Tags: asd, education

Some time ago, my father-in-law very generously donated his six-string acoustic guitar to my classroom, asking that I give it to a student who seemed interested in learning guitar. For some reason or another, no one ever took me up on the offer. Many of the kids wanted an electric guitar rather than an "old person's" guitar, and, quite frankly, the thing was just too big for most of them.

There was also some sentimental history associated with the guitar. He had purchased it shortly after returning from Vietnam, and he always speaks with such joy about playing guitar, even while he was actively serving in the military. Something just seemed wrong about getting rid of it. Anyway, I had other guitars in my classroom I could give away, so I brought it home.

The most striking thing about the guitar is its manufacturer. Tama. As in Tama the drum manufacturer whose sets are/were used by such groups as Dragonforce, Nirvana, Slayer, Primus, The Police, Styx, Metallica, Black Sabbath, and you get the picture. Tama – who lists no guitars of any type on their website. Some time passed before I discovered any more.



Anyway, I decided to learn to play it, but the e' string broke as soon as I tried to tune it. It was very brittle as it had been in storage for literally decades. (There's a funny story about that broken string that I'll save for another time.) This led us to eventually take the guitar to a local Sam Ash to buy a new string, and I wanted to learn how to take care of the instrument properly. Once there, Ryan came to our aid.

He was quite surprised at the name on my guitar, and he confessed to have never seen a Tama guitar before. Neither had the other individual working with him at the counter. Ryan was very helpful and friendly in explaining how to take care of the neck and frets as well as change the strings, and the instrument looked brand new by the time he was finished. Fortunately, it was already in pretty good shape.

x

After some more researching, I have discovered that Tama did, in fact, produce guitars during the mid-1970s. Digging through mailing lists, and message boards has provided me with the insight that those who have them like them, and Tama guitars on eBay can fetch a decent bid. Truth told, I care little about the value, but I am happy to find out that Tama guitars are good instruments. I'm excited to start learning. Perhaps those many hours playing Guitar Hero can actually count for something!

(Updated with image links to higher quality photos of the guitar.)

Tags: guitar

After checking in with many locations, we finally found an XBox 360 Elite at our local Circuit City. I was truly surprised how difficult it was to find and XBox 360 after the holidays – well, except for the XBox 360 Arcades. (As an aside, my wife facetiously noted in several locations, "There seems to be no shortage of PS3s around here." I love that my wife is a closet geek!) Honestly, I held out no hope of finding a Wii, but I believed purchasing a 360 would be no problem. How wrong I was.

Fortunately, after some mis-adventuring, we got the 360 home and proceeded with the unboxing ceremony. I have to admit that it wasn't quite as fun as unboxing a new Apple product, but I was shocked by just how much stuff was in the box!


It even has an HDMI cable included!

Getting Started

Hooking the XBox up was no problem, but creating an XBox Live Gamertag was another story due to the Live outages that have been going on. It took four tries over two days to successfully create an online portfolio, and, even then, I ended up with a typo (probably because I was rushing through the process by my final attempt)! This wouldn't be such a big deal if it didn't cost 800 MS points ($10) to fix this.

Additionally, in the middle of the glitches and my typo, I lost out on my free month of XBox Live Gold. This isn't too big of a deal, but it was still another early frustration. I had to wonder if this was going to turn out to be another stereotypically Microsoft experience.

Playing Games and Demos

Fortunately, the rest of my experiences have been much more positive than the setup. Our first two games were Burnout Revenge and Viva Piñata. Both look fantastic. The wife has been tending her piñata garden with much enthusiasm, and I've been trying to unlock as much as I can in Burnout. In truth, we already own the PS2 version of Burnout Revenge, but it would be hard to go back after playing it on the 360.



I should also mention that a fee puzzle game called Hexic HD came on the hard drive, and that has proved to be extremely addictive. Furthermore, when compared to the smaller PS2 controllers, the XBox 360 controllers are much more comfortable to hold.

Additionally, we've tried several Arcade titles and demos, including Doom, Catlevania: Symphony of the Night, Double Dragon, TimeShift, Perfect Dark Zero, Quake IV, Amped 3, Burnout Paradise, Beautiful Katamari, and quite a few more. There wasn't much I didn't like, but I'm wondering where the XBox 360 answer to Ratchet and Clank or Jak and Daxter is. I guess that's why we will also be picking up a Wii when we find one!

The Marketplace

From the previous paragraph, it's pretty apparent I've become addicted to the game downloads. Both XBox Live Arcade and the Game Demos section are fun to peruse, and much on the Arcade seems pretty reasonably priced, though I do wish MS Points did a better job of reflecting real world value. Fortunately, the Microsoft Point Converter comes to the rescue in this regard. As far as add-ons go, some are priced okay, but other things seem a bit steep. I especially wonder why pictures and themes (which are essentially promotional items) cost anything.

I probably won't be downloading any TV shows or movies. iTunes already fills that niche nicely.

Wrapping Up

Despite a rocky setup, I think the XBox 360 is going to fit into our home quite nicely. There are a couple original XBox games I want to check out that I know work with the 360, and we might also pick up a few PS2 titles we own that have 360 versions (like Guitar Hero II & III and Lego Star Wars) because I have to admit these games look quite poor on a 1080p television! (Not too surprisingly, GameCube games fare better.) In the end, the XBox 360 is a good console, and I'm sure we'll be enjoying many hours together both competitively and cooperatively in games. Here's to hoping I never get a Red Ring of Death!

Tags: video games

My wife and I went out on our first date twelve years ago today! We saw Sabrina starring Harrison Ford, and neither of us went into the movie considering ourselves on a date! We were just a couple of friends, but over the years our friendship and our closeness grew. Now we've been married for over six years, and I couldn't picture sharing my life with anyone else!

Keep us in your thoughts and prayers as my grandfather is going through some very rough days. My skin crawls every time the phone rings right now.

As I've overhauled much of the "behind-the-scenes" stuff here on the site, I've been feeling some stabs of nostalgia about how far the site has come – so much so that I've thrown together some mock-ups of the site as it existed in various stages of its short existence thus far. After this post, I think you'll come to the same conclusion I have. I redesign this place way too much!



The first version of the site landed in April of 2005 and used a CSS template called BlueBall Simple that came with RapidWeaver 3.2 (I think) as a free theme. The site was non-creatively named "Mental Wanderings" (a name used by approximately twelve gajillion other blogs I later discovered), and it had a few other pages for photographs, sermon notes, and an obligatory "About Me" section. An element I forgot to include in the mock-up is the home page that existed at the time. Visiting the index URL would direct a visitor to a static portal that would direct him or her to the various sections of the site. The layout was very spartan and did not last for long.



Sometime during the life span of version 2, the home page disappeared, and my blog became the site's index. The design was another RapidWeaver default theme. Nothing much else changed other than I finally added some links to the sidebar along with an entire separate static page of sites I or my wife found interesting. During this time, I was still operating under the delusion that she would also take up bogging, so there was a hidden page dedicated to her. Needless to say, this never came to fruition. I think one of the worst decisions of this design was that I used completely different visual styles for every sub-page of the site.



I'm very fond of this version of the site. As the other's, the CSS style is built into RapidWeaver, but I did a lot of tweaking to the design, specifically with colors and fonts. Unfortunately, an extremely wide layout and a bug that appeared in IE resulting in paragraphs not being displayed correctly led to a short life. I would quickly revert back to the version 2 design for another few months. However, during this time, I began putting some of my presentations online, and I began blogging about presentation tips – a category which grew into its own section a few weeks later.



Version 4 of the site represents its existence at the most convoluted. The site was beginning to bog RapidWeaver down as its file size spiraled beyond 100 MB, and the various parts of the site were becoming difficult to keep up with. I removed the static links page and replaced it with a Daring Fireball-esque Links Blog that I would update frequently as various sites, blog entries, and stories would catch my interest. Though I liked this design the least, it was very reliable in multiple browsers, and it lasted the longest of the previous designs.



Here is the site as it exists today. The design is a new RapidWeaver theme with 3.6, slightly tweaked and modified. The links blog has converged with my main blog as a category. Everything extraneous has been removed, specifically the page of my presentations (which I plan to integrate into the presentation blog as I have time to redo them with voiceovers) and the "About Me" page. I've added some Flickr and Twitter goodness to the front page, and this design came with a new naming scheme for the site. The three remaining pages became Simply Robert, Simply Presentation, and Simply Gospel. Finally, this revision also encouraged me to offload all images from the RW3 file onto my [dot] Mac public folder, reducing the file size to about 8 MB (with a few images still to go).

The site is still very young, not even three years old yet, but I feel I've gained a lot from working on it. Besides the technical aspects of learning to embed HTML objects, editing images for use on the web, and modifying CSS stylesheets, the site has been a source of therapy and comfort to some extent. Hopefully, along the way, I've managed to touch someone else throughout its existence as well.

This piece was a little harder to write than my previous reflection, and it was even harder deciding whether or not to post it. Unlike the story that reflects common issues I had in elementary school, this story is very accurate. Some very minor details have been fictionalized for the sake of narrative, and names have been changed, but this one is a very vivid memory. This narrative takes place nine years later than the first, and I was a sophomore in high school.

***

My mouthpiece is missing. The case for my mellophone is in its locker -- bay number 64, past all the woodwind lockers and next to the low brass. My instrument is in its case, but there is no mouthpiece in the case. I take fourteen steps to my French horn locker. It’s empty. Today is a gold day, no band or orchestra on gold days. They are both on blue days.

Marching band rehearsal begins in eighteen minutes. I cannot play without a mouthpiece. I cannot participate in practice without a mouthpiece. Conclusion: my French horn is at home. My mouthpiece is in my French horn case. My mouthpiece is at home.

Mom is at work. Dad is at work. Even if they could get off neither could make it to the house and to school in eighteen minutes -- now seventeen. I can feel myself starting to shake. My breathing becomes shallow and rapid. I know what’s coming, and I can’t stop it. Cold sweat beads up on my neck and shoulders, and the world becomes eerily silent around me.

Mom would take 12 minutes to get home (assuming she misses the light at 106th street, which is timed poorly) and up to 19 minutes getting back to the school -- more if the light at 98th street’s sensor is acting up again. That equals 31 minutes total drive time, not counting the time spent looking for the mouthpiece in the house. Dad would take almost 40 minutes to make it home -- completely out of the question.

Sixteen minutes. If I’m going to be on time for practice, I have to leave in one minute, and even that will cut it close. My friends have already left. I need to ask if anyone has an extra mouthpiece, but my voice has gone missing again. I hate that.

My hands are shaking so hard that I catch my finger in the latch when I close the instrument locker. I slip to the floor and begin rocking. How can I go to practice without my mouthpiece? I hate forgetting things! I hate how my memory seems to rely on location to work. I remember the mouthpiece in the instruments storage room. Why can’t I remember it when I’m someplace else?

My arms have scratches on them. I don’t remember those being there earlier. Scratches always appear on my arms when I’m upset. I look at my watch. Practice begins in two minutes. I’m too late.

I see the angry eyes in my mind of other band members and the directors as I imagine showing up late. I imagine the insults that will be hurled when they realize I’m not prepared to play. I’m immobilized by imagined cruelty, and my tumbling mind silently cries on the cold tile floor of the storage room.

I take 67 steps to the stairwell that leads to the practice rooms. I need to isolate. Now. 24 steps lead to the second level. Room 4 is small and has a piano in it. That’s the best room. The piano barely fits inside, but the strings vibrate very noticeably if you are playing in tune. I like that.

My trembling hand fumble with the door handle, closing it behind me as I collapse to the blue carpeted floor. I place my sweating face against the cold texture of the wall and try to slow my breathing. My mind is empty of thought yet full of fears, full of self-loathing. How can I be so stupid? How?

My head begins hurting, and I realize I’ve been hitting it against the wall. Pulling back, I clamber up onto the piano bench and begin playing chords. Harmonic intervals of two octaves, one octave, a fifth, a fourth, and a third produce the most calming vibrations. I hold the sustaining pedal down with my right foot and create the various major chords following this structure while I set my face against the piano’s smooth face board. I do this for a long time until I stop trembling, and my breathing returns to normal.

When I find my voice, I use a phone downstairs to call the band director I trust -- the one I’ve known since middle school. I leave a message for him saying I think I’ve had a breakdown, and I hang up. I don’t know what else to call it. I look at the clock. Practice will be done in 18 minutes. That’s where Dad will go to pick me up.

I stare fixedly at the ground as I take 3,154 very timid steps to the practice field, trying to be as small as possible the whole way, wishing I could somehow fold into myself and disappear…

***

The next day at school is terrible. Mr. Pike, the band director I don’t really like, tells me he never wants this to happen again, so it never happens again before marching band practice. On the upside, I’ll never forget my mouthpiece again because I’m not taking my French horn home anymore. If I leave it at school, I can’t forget it.

A saxophone player says that he’s sorry, but I don’t know why he’s apologizing. He didn’t leave my mouthpiece at home. Other students (and some adults) call me selfish, self-centered, irresponsible for not coming to practice anyway. The band director I trusted asks me how I think he felt getting that message at home, and how did I get his home number anyway? (It was in his own Rolodex on his desk next to his computer in his unlocked office.)

I know I’m not self-centered. I know I’m not irresponsible. I know I’m not selfish, but I have no answers. I don’t know what I am.

***

Asperger Syndrome was defined in the DSM-IV for the first time this very same year, but it would do me no good at the time. However, this incident was a turning point in that I finally became acutely aware of just how different I was from other people around me, and I began to develop the public character that I still rely on to this day. Great growth came from this one terrible event, and I finally began developing friendships and social circles through which I would later meet my wife.

Still, it would be another eight years before I really had myself figured out.

Tags: education, memoirs, asd

I wrote the following memoir as an assignment for a literacy conference session. It has received some minor edits (listed at the end) from the original but remains largely unaltered. This was scribbled in my notebook over a period of about twenty minutes in the middle of the night while my roommate snored loudly. This is actually fictional, but it is typical of my early school experiences.

There are twenty-two desks in the classroom, eighty-four ceiling tiles plus or minus a few (based on perspective, light arrangement, and wall irregularities), twenty-five cubbies with coat hangars, and one sink with a step stool in front of it.

Nineteen students (counting the author) occupy twenty-two desks. It takes three hundred eighteen steps to get to the cafeteria, eighty-six steps to accelerated math, twenty-eight to the sink, and fourteen to the right cubby – except a direct fourteen-step route makes for a bad day because “14” (like the letter “N”) is uncomfortable.

Teacher Miss Hiles is five feet, four inches (which equals 64 inches in all or 162.5 centimeters). She has been reading for four minutes or 240 seconds. Thirteen words have already begun with the letter “N.” If one more happens too soon – before the brain loses count – this won’t be a good chapter.

“Robert, are you listening?” Teacher says. That is not part of the story. It makes no sense. Ramona was just trying to convince her father to stop smoking after being caught throwing away his cigarettes. Ramona books are by Beverly Cleary who is a better author than Judy Blume because Fudge is annoying. There are three Ramona books at home, and “Robert” in not a character. Did Teacher mean “Ramona?”

“Robert, what did I just read?” What. When. Where. Why. They all sound the same. They are okay in writing, but they aren’t good out loud. They are okay in a book because the book gives the answer. “Romana, why did you throw my cigarettes away?” And Ramona gives a reason. “Why,” in this context, looks for motivation, but why can also mean different things. “Why, look at that rainbow!” Teacher says to listen for something called “inflection.” She once said sentences using different inflections, but they all sounded the same.

“Robert.” There is no Robert in this chapter! Romaona’s dad is Mr. Quimby. Here sister is Beatrice, but she calls Beatrice “Beezus,” and Beezuz is friends with Henry Huggins. Ramona was first introduced in the Henry Huggins books, and she got her own books later. This is called a “spin-off.” This fits Ramona because she likes to spin. She also likes to make curls go “BOING,” and she likes to make noise with Howie. Maybe Howie will get a spin-off.

“Robert, have you listened to a word I’ve said?” Teacher says louder to … to me. She takes some glasses out of a pair of hands. My hands. She puts the glasses on my face. “Robert, you’re daydreaming again. Can you tell me what we’ve been reading?”

Of course I can. I can tell her all about Ramona and her father, but my voice has gone missing. So I just look at my desk. I don’t expect to find my voice on the desk, but looking at the desk avoids all of the frightening faces looking in my direction.

Teacher shakes her head and says she will have to talk to my parents about my daydreaming again. It will be the fourth conference this school year. This is September. September has thirty-one days. Today is the twentieth. A Friday. Birthday was on August twentieth – number six. Six-years-old means kindergarten for some born in August, but I went to kindergarten at five. Something called an I.Q. (or “intelligence quotient”) is 135. I know that “intelligence” means how smart someone is, but “quotient” is a mystery.

I tried to find out by reading every “K” word in the dictionary (American: of or associated with the western hemisphere; Heritage: background or history) – all 2,180. It took five days to read them all. Anyway, it is likely that a quotient has to do with daydreaming. Dad says it has to do with division. “Division,” “daydream,” and “dad” all start with “D,” and you can use the letters in “daydream” to make “dad” as well as “yard” and “dare” and “made” and “ram” and “mare” and …

“Robert!”

I stare harder at the desk. Still no voice.

“Robert, if you are not going to listen, just go sit in the corner.”

I sit in the corner and try to be small. I’m very good at small. You’d be surprised at some of the places I can fit into. When I’m small, my voice comes back, so I count to feel better. Numbers (except for 14) are nice. “1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, …”



The next day we are supposed to write about a favorite book. My paper is about Ramona. I use a pen because pencils give me the bad kind of goose-bumps. So does chalk and velvet.

I write more than anyone in class. My voice was on my desk all along. It was hiding inside my pen.

Alteration from the original:

• The classroom originally had more ceiling tiles, but I felt a smaller number was more accurate. A part of me wants to go back and count.
• I double-checked my Ramona facts. Nothing to fix.
• I changed my teacher's name to keep her anonymous.
• In the original manuscript, I counted by fives. Though I liked fives, chances are I would have counted by odds if upset. They required more concentration and would have better served to take my mind off things. Primes serve that purpose well nowadays.

Tags: education, memoirs, literature, asd

I remember being told by an ex-girlfriend way back in the days of high school, "Leave me alone, and don't talk to me anymore." Several years have passed now, but I've run into her on very rare occasions. Each time, I've had difficulty engaging her in conversation – not due to any ill feeling or bitterness but rather because of that long-standing order of "don't talk to me anymore." Even half a lifetime later, that imperative statement lingers in my psyche, and while I have a rational understanding that her statement is no longer binding, the part of my brain that latches on to it overrides said rationality.

How does this apply to our working with autistic children? Well, how many times have we caught ourselves saying something like...

• ...I don't want to tell you again to follow directions?
• ...I don't want to hear about dinosaurs anymore?
• ...Never sharpen your pencil without my permission?

All of these statements have weight in very specific timeframes and contexts. Unfortunately, our autistic child may be unable to make the distinction, and you may find yourself dealing with a meltdown during a later project about dinosaurs or the next time you give any directions. The child may end up doing no work when you have a sub because he or she cannot ask you to sharpen a pencil if it breaks.

An autistic individual can potentially be extremely literal and will apply statements made by teachers, caregivers, and parents in every context. When teaching children with autism, we need to be conscious of how we say what we do and how that child might apply our casual comments.

Tags: asd, education

Happy Anniversary to us! It's number six!



Crystal and I both comment that it feels like we have been together forever, but in a good way. We have been in each other's lives since high school and started dating when we were sixteen and seventeen. Personally, I'm glad to be spending my life with her!

Tags: family, home, events

Another year has past, and another memories DVD is finished for our outgoing fifth graders. This year's video project followed very much the same workflow as past years', and the entire process was very smooth.

The Good

The new MacBook Pro performed like a champ except for when I was overtaxing memory. I think it's already time to add a couple of gigs, but I only experienced one application (iDVD) hang throughout the entire process. Also, after burning 110 copies of the video, only one coaster was produced that I know of. Again, the results were good overall.

Keynote Pro's Barcelona theme and Keynote's own shape drawing capabilities came in handy. The drawing tools in Keynote enabled me to create "tabs" that helped make photographs in the video look mounted as if in a scrapbook. Barcelona helped create a very unique feel for the slides about a class trip, and I'll definitely be inclined to purchase additional themes from Keynote Pro in the future.

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Finally, Lemkesoft's GraphicConverter gave me a good alternative to PhotoShop Elements (which is not yet a Universal Binary for Intel Macs). I was impressed with this software overall, but I may still get a new copy of PS Elements whenever a Universal Binary is released.

The Less Than Good

I wanted to use a song our children recorded as the background music to the video, but the sound quality of the recording was so poor, it really wasn't an option. The only other complaint I have is that a second Keynote theme I purchased, called Rounded Corners by PagesUser, wasn't as useful as I had hoped. (Also, the purchasing experience was pretty poor.)

I also have to continually remind myself that the transitions Push Up, Push Down, Grid Left, and Grid Right do not export to video correctly and should be avoided when building the slideshow in Keynote.

Final Note

This year's project was done with the same versions of iWork and iLife as last year, so everything went about the same. The better hardware smoothed out the process, but this year was really a refinement of last year's techniques. Hopefully, new versions of iWork and iLife will come along about the same time as Leopard, and I'll have some new features to play with for next time.

If you want to see a more detailed description of how I put these slideshow videos together, read this post on my Simply Presentation page: From Keynote to iDVD.

Tags: technology, software

So my wife saw this placemat at Kohl's the other day.



We had to go to a couple of different locations, but we tracked down enough cloths and napkins for our needs (which aren't much), but it didn't stop there. Oh no. This placemat was the harbinger of much larger things. Indeed, before long, the placemat spread beyond its textile confines and onto our barren walls.

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There you see my wonderful wife in full inspiration mode. This wasn't any ordinary placemat we acquired. Indeed, it contained the Color Scheme to Rule All Color Schemes. At long last, the wife had the focus for her creativity, and the great Painting Project of 2007 was born.

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Feet got messy, and the corgi was even intrigued by the process. Actually, he was surprisingly good through our project! No paint ended up on corgi paws, a corgi nose, or even in a corgi mouth. He stayed cleaner than either of us! Here's how things finally turned out!

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We aren't quite finished, but the house looks much more welcoming without endless seas of eggshell white to greet us or guests. I managed to paint parts of our ceiling, so that'll have to be fixed, and the entryway still needs a lot of work. It won't take long, though. As I've learned with other rooms, once the wife gets her painting bug, she has a hard time letting go until everything is squared away!

Tags: home

Way back in January, we picked up a shiny MacBook Pro to replace my aging PowerBook G3. I finally managed to get ahold of my wife's digital camera to take some quick pictures comparing the two laptops. The quality of these pictures is evidence as to why the wife doesn't let me touch cameras often...



First up, here we have the two laying right next to each other with lids closed. Even in its old age, the PowerBook has some nice curves going for it. By the way, if you look closely, you'll see that the MacBook Pro is facing the opposite direction! I made this mistake because...



... the PowerBook's logo is upside down when opened! Incidentally, my model of PowerBook was the last laptop Apple built with the "flipped" logo. Also, you can see that the PowerBook has a much taller screen, and the MacBook Pro's hinge is flush with the bottom of the computer.

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Stacked atop the MacBook Pro, the PowerBook exceeds the depth of the former but is not quite as wide. In the close-up of the hinges it's easy to see how much thinner the MacBook Pro is – only about as thick as the bottom portion of the PowerBook. (And the PowerBook is slimmer than many other laptops around!)

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The MacBook Pro's screen is much brighter and crisper, and the illuminated keyboard is great for working in low-light environments. Unfortunately, this picture doesn't quite show off the keyboard as much as I would have liked. Additionally, if these pictures were larger, you would be able to see damage on the PowerBook down by its smaller track-pad. (It took seven years for the case to finally begin to crack!)

That wraps up this picture post. The amazing thing about the PowerBook G3 is that I'm still using it to manage audio files for my music classes, programs, and choir. I wonder if my new MacBook Pro will still be useful that far down the line!

Tags: home, technology, macintosh

I wasn't planning on blogging about this, but here I go. I'm going to warn you now that this post may be quite a bit more negative than you are used to reading here.

Steve Jobs and Michael Dell, this weekend, spoke very candidly about the needs of education reform in this country. I agree with much of what they have to say, and, even though neither probably have any clue what it is, they both advocated project-based learning in many of their comments.

From the Statesman.com article:

"Dell also recalled how, as a seventh-grade student, he was fascinated by his school's teletype machine. He and Jobs said it's that sort of passion and fascination that is critical to get students engaged and do their best work."

"Simply through a deep interest in something, students will learn how to work through problems and find ways of solving them, Jobs said."

This is fantastic material, and this is also the type of stuff that no standardized test can measure. However, neither Dell nor Jobs spoke to the travesty that is standardized testing and Adequate Yearly Progress.

Where things come apart is with this statement by Jobs:

"I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way," Jobs said. "This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy."

First off, at least in Indiana, lifetime employment is a thing of the past. Your license has to be renewed every five years if you are going to keep teaching. However, I don't have a problem with that statement. His information is just out-of-date there. My problem is with his calling out teachers unions. I'm sure there are plenty of examples of poorly implemented unions and sub-par teachers taking advantages of the security of unions, but let me tell you something you may not know about teachers: They put others before themselves.

This is the whole point of becoming a teacher. Teachers want to help others reach their potential and excel in life. They sacrifice of themselves to make sure their children are provided with what they need to learn. The type of person who will become a teacher is the type of person who will unquestioningly go above-and-beyond in making sure the learning and developmental needs of the children he or she works with are met.

"Why does this matter?" you ask. I didn't say that to merely blow my own horn. The fact is this type of person is easily exploited. School administration and politicians know what kind of people go into education. Administrators and politicians know they can get away with taking advantage of these employees because the employees, for the most part, will not retaliate in any meaningful way. Why? Because if they do, it is the children who suffer! I could easily provide numerous examples from both my wife's job and my own to support this. Unfortunately, if I get too specific, I could probably lose my job – despite our union.

Just from a financial standpoint, both my wife and I spend literally hundreds of dollars a year on our classrooms. We spend hundreds of unpaid hours doing school-related work, and all the while I've been watching my paycheck get smaller due to the imbalance between pay raises and hikes in fees like insurance. It's ridiculous how much teachers are stepped on by those running education in this country, and, without any unions in place, it could be much worse.

Unfortunately, these comments seem to be gaining some support in the tech circles they are being discussed in most. Favorite blogger of mine John Gruber says he completely agrees with Jobs, and some of the comments in this Infinite Loop post just turn my stomach:

"And, by the way, no teacher has a class with "two or three" times as many students as recommended. Classes are held to 34 students, except for very rare, and special circumstances. Then, a few more might be added."

I can't believe anyone actually thinks 30+ students is an acceptable class size. Perhaps it would be fine if every child came from a perfect family, had an average IQ, and all had similar experiences, but in reality this doesn't work. One colleague of mine has 30 students this year. A full third of them have IEPs, of those she has three or four with serious behavioral and emotional problems, specifically with aggression. She has students who are reading two grade levels above their current grade and student reading two levels below. She has kids who are very advanced in math while others have problems with simple addition and subtractions. Yet somehow, basically by herself, she has to meet all of their educational needs and get them to pass our state's standardized test next year.

"Teachers are rarely held accountable for their performance because schools don't have any particular need to excel. Jobs simply understands that a business needs to adapt and excel in order to survive. Throwing more money at schools is not a solution. We should be getting a far higher return on the investment we are already making."

Well my friend, perhaps you've never heard of an act called No Child Left Behind or, as I prefer to call it, No Teacher Left Standing. However, this person is right about the money. It shouldn't be thrown at schools. It should be thrown at teachers.

•••

In all of this, there were a couple of individuals who seemed to get it:

"That situation makes for the truly dangerous teacher: the apathetic one that only does enough to escape notice by parents and school boards, and does little but pass little Joanie to the next level. A teacher that challenges the students, truly educates them without attempting any politically motivated indoctrination, is a great teacher, but vulnerable and exposed."

Regarding "that situation," this person is speaking of all the negativity geared toward teachers from parents, administration, and politicians. Here's where apathetic teachers come from: they are the good ones who burned out.

"Steve forgot to note is that it isn't sufficient to fire bad employees. You also have to reward the good ones."

Unfortunately, the way the system is set up, the negative is much easier to focus on and react to that the positive. The entire AYP system in punitive, and that atmosphere trickles down from the politicians to the administration. This is the atmosphere that contributes to teacher burnout.

"Nearly all the problems in schools today are due to capitalistic ideals, and education should not be a contest."

Amen.

•••

When it comes down to it, unions are very necessary to the well-being of teachers. The fact is, politicians and businessmen run school systems – not educators – and they would exploit teachers for all they could if unions did not stand between them and the teachers. Right now, teachers have to play the roles of educator, moral compass, counselor, nutritionist, and sometimes therapist with our children. We have to teach the three "R"s while putting out behavioral fires and differentiating our instruction for the various ability levels in our classes. We have to appease administration and parents while trying to do what is best for the children. I can't imagine how things would deteriorate without a union there to help hold back the floodgates.

I'm all for education reform, but, just as I believe in student driven learning in the classroom, I believe education reform should be teacher-driven. No CEO, lawyer, politician, Hollywood producer, or pundit can determine what is best for the children of our country without getting into the trenches and actually teaching in a classroom for several years, and I would challenge any individual to work in a low-income school like many I've had experience with and not walk away a changed person.

Yes, there are a lot of problems with education. However, advocating the removal of the one entity that actually stands up for teachers' rights is not a solution to anything. Maybe Jobs wasn't really speaking to the actual removal of unions, but that is how a lot of people could take it, so that is the issue I decided to address.

Tags: education, opinion

Do you remember Susan Colvin – the woman with sever cancer I wrote about in late December? She passed away last weekend. Her viewing was today, and her funeral will be tomorrow at Randall & Roberts in Fishers, IN.

Please keep the Colvin family in your thoughts and prayers at this time.

We just purchased a new MacBook Pro today! I don't have any unboxing pictures, but I will post some comparison shots in a couple of days. In this post, take a look at the difference seven years makes. In the middle column resides the specifications and price of my PowerBook G3 back in 2000. The column on the right reflects my new MacBook Pro.

I have to admit that I will miss the possibility of using both bays for batteries, but that's a small price to pay. What I can't get over is how different the prices are. Even if I had bought a top-of-the-line MBP, the price would have been $700 less! I wonder where laptop prices will be when it's time to replace the MacBook Pro in a few years (hopefully fewer than seven).

Disclaimer: I did not pay full price for either machine. Also, my PowerBook G3 has been upgraded to 512 MB of memory and a 30 GB hard drive.

Tags: technology, macintosh

A woman I've known for several years has been fighting cancer over the last several months, and now she has suffered a stroke. We've been out of touch for several months, but I still care about her and am very concerned. Please keep Susan Colvin, her husband, and her children in your thoughts and prayers.
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12/07 Update: It appears the cancer has spread to her brain. I can't imagine what she and her family must be going through right now.

12/10 Update: I'm bumping this to the top for now. It appears insurance will not cover treatment at a specialized facility she is being recommended to in Texas. I hear her family has set up a special fund for donations to cover treatments, but I don't know the details. I'll update again when I know more.

12/23 Update: Anonymous donation can be made at:

Community Bank
830 Logan Street
Noblesville, IN 46060
(317) 845-0800 or (317) 773-0800

I'm not publishing the account number for donations for obvious reasons, but both branches whose numbers are listed will know where to direct funds if you tell them its for the Colvins.

Those of you who have been with this blog for a while know about my trusty PowerBook G3 that has been serving me since 2000. Six years is a long time to keep a laptop, but its been a hard worker. I also have some sentimental attachment to the machine due to it being the first Macintosh computer I ever owned. Unfortunately, I fear it's life of usefulness is coming to an end.


It all started about four years ago when my laptop shorted out due to a damaged power converter. Actually, it kind of fried. If you've ever smelled the lovely aroma of burnt electronics, you know what I mean. Strangely enough, the machine booted up about an hour later, but, with no power converter, its usefulness was obviously limited. We talked about replacing it that night, but all we could have afforded was an iBook G3 – not much of an improvement.

Instead, we bought a new power cord and converter. Shortly after this, we bought a new battery because I was only getting about 45 minutes to an hour of battery life at a time. We never did replace the laptop. The iBooks moved from G3s to G4s. PowerMac G5s were released (which we got one of). The Intel transition was announced and completed, and my PowerBook G3 kept chugging along as it passed its sixth birthday and approached its seventh.

In the last couple of months, though, things have been going downhill quickly. My PowerBook has been regularly locking up while running Pages, forcing me to change my workflow to include MS Word on my desktop, so I can be reasonably sure I can work on my laptop on a document if I need to. Keynote is basically inoperable, and PowerPoint runs with all the speed of a snail caught in molasses going uphill. To top things off, I'm only getting about 30 minutes of battery life per charge, and the battery monitor doesn't seem to know exactly how much charge its carrying.


Apple's current laptops look very tempting, but I'm much more interesting in the MacBook Pro end of the lineup due to the inclusion of dedicated graphics cards (which I think could make a big difference within the next couple of Keynote releases). Unfortunately, my wife is adamant that there is no way we can afford a new laptop at this time. It's possible that I could bump the memory in my G3 to 1 GB, and we could get another new battery, but that's $300+ spent on a machine that probably wouldn't fetch that amount on eBay.

Last year, I lucked out on a big presentation I gave downtown, but I've been having to rely on luck or borrowing other people's laptops (which brings up a whole separate set of issues) for too long. I don't want to spend any more money on maintaining my G3 at this point. I don't even know if those purcahses will really help the problem, but I don't see what choice I have.

In the face of so many global problems and issues I know others are dealing with, I know this must seem insignificant, but it does matter to me that my laptop is quickly becoming essentially useless – especially given the amount of public speaking I'm going to be doing in the coming year. Oh well. Here's hoping that some more luck rolls this way in 2007.

Tags: macintosh

Here it is – My new Nintendo DS Lite!



I wanted to get a DS back when they came out but could never justify the $150 for the little system – especially since Mario 64 was about the only game I would have wanted at the time. Eventually, however, some more titles came out, and the system became more and more attractive. Then, when an improved version came out for $20 dollars less than the original, I was sold. Fortunately, thanks to Animal Crossing: Wild World, my wife agreed.

Now, I have had a GameBoy advance for some time. In fact, my GBA harkens back to the days prior to backlit screens, so, needless to say, the DS Lite is quite an improvement in our portable gaming.



In the lovely picture above, the DS Lite is running, as you can probably tell, Metroid Prime: Hunters. Can you tell me, though, what game is playing on the GBA? If you said Metroid: Zero Mission, then you know me well because there is no way you can see what game is playing on that screen. As you can also see, the DS Lite is thinner than the GBA (even shut), and it is about the same height as a GBA when closed. Using only my hands, I can't really tell which is lighter.

Overall, the DS Lite is very compact, and I have carried it in a few different pockets with no annoyance. It is comfortable to hold. The touch-screen reacts well to the provided stylus, and I haven't successfully killed its battery yet, but I did recieve a low battery warning once after playing Animal Crossing off and on all day. Furthermore, the DS Lite looks like it would smudge very easily, but I have not found this to be the case, and what marks do show up on its shiny exterior are easily removed.



One slightly unfortunate side effect of the DS Lite's slimmer profile is that GBA cartridges inserted into the bottom slot stick out ever so slightly. Also, I am finding it annoyingly easy to accidentally press the shoulder buttons. These complaint, however, are very minor and do little to tarnish the experience I've had with this little console. The games we have (Animal Crossing: Wild World and Metroid Prime: Hunters) have been enjoyable. The screen is visible even in daylight, and closing the DS Lite puts the system to sleep just like a laptop. Open it up, and you can pick up exactly where you left off.

In parting, I'll leave you with one last wonder of the DS – the size of a DS card. The shot below has a GameBoy Color cartridge, Super Mario Bros. DX, a GBA cart, Metroid: Zero Mission, and a DS card, Metroid Prime: Hunters, all next to each other. Cool, huh? The DS card is about 1 inch wide and 1 1/4 inches tall!

Tags: video games, technology

May is the long dark tea time of the soul around here, resulting in the site pretty much going dormant for a month. Well, that is all over, and it's time to write about this year's DVD created for our fifth grade's completion ceremony.

The Process

Just like last year, no souls were tortured with Microsoft products throughout the duration of this project. Well, that's not quite true. I tried to burn a photo CD at work, but the computer kept crashing mid-burn. I still think the paltry 256 MB of memory on those things is the root of all evil.

• All photographs of teachers and children were dumped into iPhoto where they were organized and enhanced. This year's school album contained over 600 images at one point.
• The slideshow of images was assembled in Keynote and exported as a QuickTime file.
• All music was handled by Sibelius 3.
• The children were recorded using Audio Hijack and organized in iTunes.
• Everything gets put together in iMovie.
• iDVD finished everything up.

The Good

iPhoto never missed a beat, and the new editing features (coupled with Keynote 3's image enhancement options) allowed me to entirely remove Photoshop Elements from my workflow. Furthermore, with all of my media being stored in iPhoto and iTunes, nothing was more than a click or two away thanks to the Media Browser built into all of Apple's iWork and iLife applications. Have I ever mentioned that I love Keynote?

Sibelius 3 worked very smoothly this time around. Christine's emotional melodies once again provided great inspiration, and I was able to create more original content to compliment her material.

iMovie HD was great to work in, and it saved my bacon too. (More on that later.) Finally, iDVD was as simple and intuitive as ever. The Drop Zones Editor was a great addition to the interface of that product.

The Scary

iDVD (surprise) did cause one scary moment when it repeatedly crashed while encoding audio. Fortunately, I went back to iMovie and saved the whole package as a self-contained QuickTime file. With that done, iDVD had no problem burning the final DVD.

Life Lessons

Again, I allowed things to get rushed because I wanted to include some school functions that were just a couple of days before the completion ceremony. Consequently, I couldn't finish up the music until I knew for sure how long the slides were going to last, and I allowed myself no time to account for major glitches like the one I experienced. Because of this, I had no copies of the DVD to sell at the completion ceremony, and I had to take orders instead.

Furthermore, music composition became a frenzied process at the end, and the music did not quite match the visuals. There is one particularly apparent moment of awkward silence where I ran out of music. Fortunately, I was able to correct this for the DVDs that parents will be receiving.

The moral of the story? I need to set a date I want everything compiled by so I can enter into the duplication process with less time pressure. The final step is always where things go wrong. As a result, this is where I need to allow myself the most time. Anything that falls after that date will just not be included in the DVD.

The Conclusion of the Matter

Overall, the DVD went well. There was one major snag, but it was easily resolved. Time is my biggest enemy every year, and I just need to realize that I do have control over that variable. I was my own worst obstacle when it came to time, so that's something I can learn to work around.

Product Links

Apple iLife – includes iPhoto, iMovie HD, iDVD, GarageBand, and iWeb.

Apple iWork – includes Keynote 3 and Pages 2.

Sibelius – great composition software. It's now up to version 4.

Audio Hijack Pro – nice little recording app.

Tags: work, macintosh

April is Autism Awareness Month, so I thought it was about time I had a coming out of the closet (no – not that closet!) party for myself. Simply put, I have Asperger Syndrome, a pervasive developmental disorder closely associated with autism. To some of my peers and colleagues, this may come as a surprise. Others may have seen it from a mile away (as one told me when we were talking about this a couple of weeks ago). For most of my adult life, I have tried to hide behind a facade of being neurotypical, but I have finally come to terms with this enough to openly talk about it.

My History As An Aspie

The term "Asperger Syndrome" was not coined until 1981 (despite initial research being conducted nearly 40 years prior), and the diagnosis was added to the DSM IV in 1994. As a result, I was a freshman in high school before there was a category for my behaviors and social difficulties. During elementary school (in the 80s), you really fell into one of three categories: hyperactive, retarded, or "get over it." Autism at the time was considered a form of mental retardation, and you had to be pretty low-functioning to be labeled as autistic.

Since then, more study has been conducted on the broad spectrum of autism and related conditions – referred to as pervasive developmental disorders (PDDs). Unfortunately, this work was of no benefit to me as I struggled emotionally with the difficulties of my condition; I was the weird kid, a target for bullies, and a loner. I found more solace in my collections than in other humans. Mind you, this is not meant to create a heart-wrenching drama. I'm just putting things in perspective.

I became what seemed to be a very self-absorbed adolescent, which is a common perception of many individuals with AS. Friendships were rocky and short-lived. I absolutely could not handle rejection of any form, and I was slumping into deeper and deeper depression as I entered high school. I was a complete and total mess. I would even make up elaborate lies about my health or some other aspect of my life in order to create some kind of connection (even if it was a fraudulent one) with my peers.

Then something happened. My sophomore year in high school, I began emulating behaviors of individuals I felt were socially successful. Over time, individuals like Ben L. & Kevin S. at church became social role models (though they were unaware of their status), and I learned my facade – a facade I still implement to this day when I am in social situations. Internally, I was still a wreck, but I could talk a good talk, and that made school easier. My last three years at high school were great, and I even met my wife during this time period!

Interestingly enough, it was Crystal who, while majoring in psychology in college, first brought up autism as a possible explanation for my bizarre private behaviors – rocking ceaselessly, finger biting, repeating phrases, seemingly unpredictable outbursts, aversion to spontaneity. However, I had not experienced a language delay (one of autism's defining characteristics), nor did I seem to experience the physical seizures that sometimes accompany the condition. In contrast, my linguistic abilities as a child were quite pronounced, and I often read books far above my grade level.

I had been teaching for a year when I met a child who could have been my clone. Physically, emotionally, and socially, this child was me all over. He was a fifth grader, and his teacher (the talented and lovely Ms. Hill) was convinced he was autistic. His fourth grade teacher (the equally talented but not-quite-as-lovely Mr. Hall) shared the same suspicions. However, his parents were extremely reluctant to concede to testing. Ms. Hill did not want this child to enter middle school without the proper services in place, so she was persistent.

At the time, I was mentoring this child, and I was making as many discoveries about myself as I was helping this child with. If he was autistic, surely I had to be. We had a very good bond, and his parents were quite fond of my involvement with their son. Consequently, in mid-Spring, I sat down with his mom and dad and spelled out the fact that there was a good chance that I'm autistic. Their son was a carbon clone of my former self, and they would be doing him a disservice by not having him tested. They agreed.

When the test results came back, autism was not the label. Asperger Syndrome was, and, at last, I had my diagnosis. AS fit me like a glove, but I remained very private about it, confiding only in a handful of associates. I even kept my direct supervisor out of the loop until March of this year (and I've been employed in the same place for five years now). You see, I was grateful to finally have a clear picture of myself, but I've been terrified of how others would react.

Behaviors & Workarounds

Many behaviors associated with Asperger Syndrome permeate my life, and, at home, these behaviors can be very pronounced. However, in public, I can usually temper them enough to avoid looking too strange.

Talking to Myself. Let me set the record straight: I'm not actually talking to myself. I'm holding a hypothetical conversation with someone who's not there. For example, if I'm thinking through a problem regarding helping a child read, I may pretend I'm talking to one of our literacy coaches, and I try to verbalize how I think she would answer my questions or constructively criticize my ideas. Most of the time, I can avoid doing this when people are around.

Self Stimulation. "Stimming," Stereotyped behaviors, what ever you want to call them – I can avoid most in public except for the rocking. I usually just pretend I'm cold – which I often am anyway, but it has nothing to do with the rocking.

Echolalia. This has always been sporadic. I'm much more likely to repeat myself than I am to repeat you. If I do repeat you, I've learned to turn the voice inflection to sound inquisitive. It's like the old joke about psychiatry: turn the last word of your patient's last sentence into a question, and you sound interested.

Eye Contact. I'm looking at the bridge of your nose or your eyebrows. Most people can't tell the difference.

Literalness. I still have struggles with this. I answer rhetorical questions. I take sarcasm seriously (though I understand how to use it thanks to Peanuts). I'm pretty good at noticing idioms and figures of speech when they are used, but that doesn't mean I necessarily know what they mean. My wife finds endless amusement in this fact, and my reaction to the first time I heard the phrase "Quit Cold Turkey" is a running joke around our house.

Emotional Vacancy. I can emulate the proper voice inflections and facial expressions for most emotions. Empathy is still a major challenge to demonstrate. It does get on my nerves when the term "emotionless" (or something similar) is used to describe AS. We experience the very same emotions you do. We just express them differently, and we have as hard of a time reading your emotions as you do ours. It's not a lack of emotion; it's a lack of nonverbal communication interpretation.

Meltdowns. I prefer the term "social seizure" because that is exactly what these feel like. I can usually defer these when others are around. In other words, I can put it off until later. Usually, I become very quiet when a social seizure is about to hit, and I may seem completely non-responsive for a moment. Then, I'll pop back to being engaged. I haven't avoided the meltdown. It's merely waiting in the sidelines until I'm alone. Noise is a huge trigger for me, and I've been accused by colleagues of going too easy on my classes when they become rowdy. The truth is that I am trying so hard not to inappropriately overreact that my behavior swings to the polar opposite. This is actually a huge area of challenge for me working in an elementary school, and it is the sole reason I seldom accomplish much during my prep periods.

I could really go on ad nauseam here. Really, an individual with Asperger Syndrome may have deficient coping skills, but his self-help skills are in tact. Once I figure out that a certain behavior of mine may seem odd to peers, I can usually find a way to mask it. Please understand, though, that this does not mean I have eliminated the behavior – I can only keep my act up for so long. Sometimes I do social seizure in public. Sometimes I do stare at the floor while talking to others. Sometimes I do pick at my face or chew my fingers in public. My seemingly outgoing and personable facade is just that: a cover. It is an act that takes concentration and energy to maintain. Some days are easier than others.

The Trade Off

Do I view my condition as a disability? Yes and no. Socially, Asperger Syndrome has leveled a heavy price in my life. I have few close friends. Many of my peers view me as eccentric or strange, and I do not fit in well during social events. I have a hard time engaging others in conversation, and I am much more likely to eat at a table by myself than I am to approach others or be invited by others. I come of as a trifle self-centered because I will try to steer conversation to topics I am interested in – topics many others find dull or tedious. No matter how many people I am around, I am still very much alone.

On the other hand, I am very smart. However, I do have a hard time broadly applying acquired skills and knowledge. I was reading Beverly Cleary & Judy Blume at six and Tom Clancy & J.R.R. Tolkien by the time I was twelve. In middle school, high school, and college, I would test very high in math, even when being tested on material for which I had never received formal instruction. I just "get" computers. One could say I like computers more than most people (by which I mean, I like most computers more than I like most people). I hold my own when watching Jeopardy, and I'm better at Double Jeopardy than the first round; Old Testament names give me very few problems; I am a Scrabble freak.

In other words, Asperger Syndrome is really a trade off. My IQ hovers around 130-140. On the other hand, my unaltered EQ is probably <80. (I say "unaltered" because I am quite capable of acting like an individual with a much higher EQ for a few hours at a time.) What I've lost in one area of my development I've made up for in the other.

The End

So there you have it. I'm outed, as the saying goes. Hopefully this entry helps you understand me a little better, and I will continually try to find ways to improve my methods of handling my condition. I have no desire for a cure (if such a thing is even possible – a discussion for another post), and medication of any kind is very aversive to me. AS is part of who I am and part of my individuality – something I do not want stolen from me. Asperger is my buddy, and, now that we're all acquainted, I hope we can get along.

Tags: asd, memoirs

Here we are with our new family member Cymry (Kim-ree)! He's a Corgi mix, and we adopted him from a rescue shelter. He's about 1.5 years old and weighs in at 26 pounds. He has adjusted well to our household, and he's definitely helping us get some exercise through walking. Additionally, he has taken to our couches and bed very readily. He likes to sleep in weekend mornings, so he's a dog right after my heart!

Hopefully, he'll be part of our family for many years to come!

Tags: family

So I got this weird phone call a couple of night's ago. I was cleaning at the time – more accurately, I was fixating on some unusual spots on our kitchen floor – so the call caught me off guard. Slightly shaken, I picked up the phone with the usual, "Hello?"

"Hi, David. It's [some name I don't remember]. Blah, blah, blah..."

"Um, I think you have a wrong number. I'm not David, and I don't recognize your name."

Now, at this point, I expected the usual apology for a wrong number, and I was getting ready to hear a hasty "good-bye." Only, it didn't happen. The lady kept talking. I don't even know what she was saying – nor did I at the time – I was so knocked out of kilter by the fact that her voice was still going.

"Can I speak to your lovely wife?" My wrong-number-who-wouldn't-shut-up asked.

"Wife? She's out of town." At this point I should mention that I have a high-functioning ASD and was having a hard time making heads or tails of the situation. I didn't know why this person was still talking, clearly ignoring the fact tat I was not – nor am I now – David. I didn't know if I had perhaps misheard her name. After all, I had been fixating just prior to the call, so my brain might not have caught up with the auditory information I was receiving. All I could do was answer her question.

Presently, the woman went on to explain that my (David's?) wife had been invited to some party, and she had not RSVP'd. Things were still not adding up, so I ask for the woman's name again. She tells me, and I answer, "I don't know that name." By now, frustration was beginning to creep into my voice.

"Okay, whatever," my masked caller responded. "I'll talk to you later."

I hung up the phone, mildly confused, and wondering what the kitchen floor thought of the whole ordeal. I crouched back down with my Lysol and 409, getting back to my obsessive scrubbing when it suddenly dawned on me that the lady on the phone had thought I was lying to her. It made perfect sense – the way she kept going on after my first attempt to disengage, the "whatever" and the "I'll talk to you later." She must have thought I was just trying to avoid her! I couldn't clean for the rest of the night ... well, except for some dusting and vacuuming ...

Now I'm sure there is some moral to this story, but I haven't figured it out yet. It was so strange, though, that I had to tell someone about it!

Tags: silly, asd

Crystal's mother has been in the ER all night due to severe abdominal pains. She has been there nearly twelve hours, but we still don't have a firm answer on the reason.

Please keep her in your thoughts and prayers.

Update 2/9:

It turns out that there was a mass on her ovaries. Fortunately, the growth was benign, and no further treatment will be needed. Crystal has been with her mom nearly non-stop for the past 48+ hours.

While it's distressful to have any family member undergo such a procedure, we do feel blessed that the surgery turned out as it did, and Crystal's mom should be home very soon.

Thanks to those who have been so supportive during this ordeal.

Tags: family

On an initial side note, I was planning on sticking something like this on my site (being a good Mac citizen and all), but the great site MacInTouch has beaten me to the punch. MacInTouch is a great first resource if you are experiencing technical difficulties with your Mac.

Speaking of technical difficulties, you know that presentation coming up this Friday? Well, early on in development, I realized my G3 PowerBook was not up to the task of running a Keynote presentation and demoing the iLife software in a manner that looked anything less than excruciating. Enter Dad's iBook – not an ideal machine for this job but better than the alternative.

The first order of business was putting in more RAM. It had 256MB, which, as any Mac OS X user will tell you, is less than you want to have. The first idea was to get another 256 MB module to bump up to 512 MB. The only problem was that no one around here seems to stock 256 MB RAM modules anymore, so we had to go with a 512 MB module, giving my father a grand total of 768 MB. Dandy.

With that out of the way, I was using his iBook at church to take notes when the screen began to freak out on me. Sometimes it would just die; other times, colored gibberish would streak around until it died. However, if we played around with the hinge, the picture might come back. Did I mention that this problem cropped up on Sunday – six days before the presentation?

Fast forward to Monday. It's apparent that this is a serious problem, so my wonderful wife trucks the iBook over to our local Apple Store (who treated her like an idiot, but that is another post for another day). The iBook has to be sent away to be worked on and won't be back for AT LEAST five days. Fortunately, my wife asked a question that would have never dawned on me: "Can we rent out a laptop?"

Thanks to her quick thinking, I have a G4 PowerBook to deliver the presentation with. Still, the Apple Store failed to throw in an ADC to VGA display adapter, but I fortunately have one because my G5 tower came with one. Let's just pray nothing else goes wrong between now and Friday.

Saturday, I'll write up a postmortem on how the presentation as a whole went.

Tags: work, technology

From the Obituary:

MULBERRY -- Mrs. Norma Virginia Dunn of Mulberry died of heart failure Monday (Dec. 19, 2005) at home. She was 89.

Born in Detroit on Sept. 9, 1916, she came to Mulberry from Michigan. She was a homemaker and a Girl Scout troop leader. She was a member of the Methodist Women's Club in Michigan. She attended Covenant Presbyterian Church in Lakeland.

Mrs. Dunn is survived by her husband, Marcel W. Dunn; daughter, Mary Ellen McElwain, Mulberry; stepdaughter, Marlene Smelser, Indianapolis; five stepgrandchildren; 10 stepgreat-grandchildren; one stepgreat-great-grandchild.

Memorials may be made to Good Shepherd Hospice, 105 Arneson Ave., Auburndale, FL 33823, or the Alzheimer's Support Network, 660 Tamiami Trail N., Suite 21, Naples, FL 34102-8133.

By Any Other Name ...

Grandma Virginia – as she was known in the family – was my grandfather Dunn's second wife. If I remember family history well enough, his first wife passed away in 1982, very shortly after my family moved to the small town of Three Rivers, Michigan.

At the time, Virginia was our neighbor, and she quickly became known as "Aunt Virginia" to my older siblings. She was very attentive to our family, and she cared for us as if we were her own.

Eventually, Grandpa became friends with Virginia, and they were married just a couple of years after. At this point "Aunt Virginia" became Grandma Virgina to all but one of us. You see, my siblings were in their teens to early twenties when all of this happened. As for me ... I was three.

To me, Grandma Virginia was just plain "Grandma."

Tags: family

From the Obituary:

Herbert Leo Smelser, Sr., age 94 of Elizabethtown, Kentucky and formerly of Searcy, died Thursday in Elizabethtown, Kentucky. He was a native of Manson, Arkansas and was a member of the College View Church of Christ in Elizabethtown. He retired from General Motors in Willow Run, Michigan. He is survived by three sons, Burris Dale Smelser of Bowie ,Maryland, Herbert Leo Smelser, Jr. of Indianapolis, Indiana, James Marion Smelser of Elizabethtown, Kentucky; two brothers, Marion Smelser of Westland, Michigan, Lehman Smelser of Jonesboro, Arkansas, two sisters, Evelyn Bush of Walnut Ridge, Arkansas, Frances Dance of Wayne, Michigan; 10 grandchildren; 25 great-grandchildren; and 3 great-great-grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his wife, Ethel Jane Smelser; and his parents, Jasper Marion and Pearl Novella (Melton) Smelser.

Modes of Transportation

Due to my being far younger than my siblings and cousins (14 years younger than my youngest brother), I have fewer memories of my grandfather during his active years. He was already 69 years old when I was born, and in his mid-seventies by the time I can form coherent memories of him and grandma.

One memory I do have of grandpa before he entered assisted living: His license was revoked in Arkansas because of his eyesight. Now Grandpa Smelser carried the Smelser gene to its fullest extent, and the Smelser gene is a very stubborn, sometimes obstinate, gene. The Smelser gene does not take "no" for an answer. The Smelser gene says, "It's my way or the highway." How many Smelsers does it take to change a light-bulb? Only one, but if two are in the room, it may never get done!

Well Grandpa Smelser was very independent along with being stubborn. The state told him he could no longer drive his car, but he wasn't about to let anyone else do his Wal-Mart runs for him. Fortunately, Wal-Mart was quite close to his house. Wal-Mart was less than a mile away, quite literally across the street. (The fact that this street is a highway bears absolutely no bearing to this story ... None at all.) This was not a distance Grandpa Smelser could have walked, but other solutions can be found for one possessing the Smelser gene.

He drove his riding mower.

Yes, you read that correctly. Grandpa Smelser drove his riding mower from his house on Smelser Lane (I am not making this up), across the highway, up the road about a quarter of a mile more, and into Wal-Mart's parking lot, where I assumed he parked in his usual handicapped parking space. It was best to never ask him why he did this. It was also best never to suggest he not do this. One never questions the Smelser gene once it guides you in its path.

This went on fine for several months until one day his dog Tango was chasing him rather vigilantly. Now Tango always chased the riding mower, but this time, he seemed a little more distraught over something. Thinking little of it, Grandpa Smelser continued his holy pilgrimage to Wal-Mart aboard his trusty lawnmower, in his own world, being annoyed by the heat at the seat of his pants and the fact that the lawnmower was not driving as well as usual.

Yes, the lawnmower's engine had caught on fire. Fortunately, Grandpa Smelser was not hurt. Of course, many members of the family used this event to illustrate just how unsafe it was to ride that lawnmower around and how he needed to allow others to assist him more.

Grandpa Smelser's response to the whole sordid affair? "I thought Tango was barking louder than usual."

The Indoor Bonfires

Speaking of fires, I think everyone in the family will always remember the fireplace in the house on Smelser Lane. (Seriously, I am not making the street name up!) It seemed like that fireplace was always roaring, no matter the temperature outside. "Ethel," Grandpa would say, "it's gettin' kinda breezy. I think it's time to throw some logs on the fire."
And so he would.

Mind you, "some" logs on the fire consisted of a pile that nearly filled the entire fireplace. From a child's point of view, it sure looked cool to have those logs burning, flames going so high into the chimney, you couldn't tell where they stopped. Man, was it hot though. I am a firm believer that Arkansas (despite weather reports to the contrary) never gets below 100º Fahrenheit during the summer, thereby singing my grandparents' skin to the point that 85º felt positively nippy. Hence, the eternal flame within the Smelser living room.

One visit, we noticed the air was getting rather hazy while the indoor bonfire was raging. Dad convinced Grandpa Smelser, with no little arguing, to put the fire out; but the haze persisted. Once the fireplace had cooled below the boiling point for human flesh, Dad inspected the fireplace to find the shell had cracked – actually, it had melted entirely away in one spot. As a result, smoke was pouring through the ventilation system that was intended to only transport the heat from the fireplace.

Before he was placed in an assisted living center, I don't know how many fireplace shells Grandpa Smelser would go through, but I do know this: The bonfires never stopped, nor did they shrink in size. It wasn't Grandpa's faulty the fire was too hot. The fireplace shell manufacturers (bless their hearts) needed to make them there shells stronger!

Conclusion

You have been a powerful force in our family for many years, Grandpa Smelser. You will be missed, but I hope to see you one day in our eternal home. Hopefully, fireplaces are made out of stronger stuff there than they are here on Earth!

Tags: family

On a personal note, we had a very nice trip to Florida last week. We stayed with my brother and his wife as well as their two sons. We had a great time with them, and I always regret leaving them because I know it will be a while before we see each other again,

The only touristy thing we did was seeing Bok Tower and Sanctuary. It was very nice but a little sad at the same time. While the sanctuary is beautiful, the evidences of last year's hurricanes still linger, and the damage will probably take many years to recover from.

On a slightly sad note, my grandmother (who is also in Florida) is in the advanced stages of Alzheimer's Disease, which many of you know is not a fun thing to witness. Right now, grandma's daughter and son-in-law are living with her. I don't know how her daughter does it, but she has the most positive attitude. Also, grandpa is very supportive of grandma, but it must be tough on him too.

It was nice to see everyone. Personally, I'd like to get back down to Florida one more time in 2005, but it's going to be tough with school starting back up in a couple of weeks (both teaching classes and taking classes). Still, it will be worth the effort to see them.

I think that's all I'm going to post on this topic. It's really good to be back home, and I hope some of my readers will keep my Florida relatives in their prayers.

Tags: family

After 14 intensive hours of work, the DVD for the 5th grade completion ceremony is finished. As has been my practice for the las three years, no Microsoft products were harmed (read: used at all) for this product.

The Process

1. All photos of the children are organized in iPhoto and touched up or modified in Photoshop Elements 2.
2. The actual "slideshow" is put together in Keynote 2 and gets exported as a QuickTime movie.
3. Music was composed, orchestrated, and recorded in Sibelius 3 (with a little help from Audio Hijack).
4. Children's voiceovers are recorded in Audio Hijack. Both these voices and the music get imported and organized in to iTunes.
5. All media gets dumped into iMovie. Audio recordings are sorted through and added from within iMovie.
6. The whole package is exported to iDVD. A bonus slideshow is added from within iDVD. We burn, and DVD labels are created in Pages.

The Good

iPhoto is awesome. I organize everything image related in iPhoto – digital photographs, desktop pictures, stock photos. I love that program. Also, Keynote 2 is a great tool. I've discovered so many neat things about it during this last project. Apple's media browsers built into their iWork and iLife applications is also great. Since all of my audio was organized in iTunes, and all of the images were organized in iPhoto, all of my resources were no more than a click or two away – even if the application it was stored in was closed!

Getting away from Apple's products, Sibelius is really growing on me now that I am learning some more about it, but I have a long way to go. Now if only I could justify upgrading the instruments to Kontakt Player Gold! Also, Audio Hijack was great for recording the kids' voices. It also saved my tail once, and I'll talk about that further down in this post.

Also, Christine H. gets mentioned in the awesome category. She composed the beautiful music that went into this year's project. I merely acted as orchestrator and arranger.

The So-So

iMovie and iDVD were acting flakey this time around. For the first time, I began experiencing some slowdowns and unexpected terminations in iMovie, and iDVD got screwed up burning the first DVD and produced a coaster. I opened up my Process Viewer in OS X, and my CPU usage never maxed out, nor was I in any danger of running out of memory while iMovie was running. (Update: As far as iDVD goes, that coaster turned out to be my fault, so iDVD worked as well as expected.) I guess my main iDVD complaint is that I feel like I'm growing out of it.

The Bad

Things got rushed at the end, so there are still some details I am left unhappy with. That's my own fault. I did not pace myself as well this year as I have in previous years.

Keynote's "drop" slide transition did not translate well into video, and I wish I had made some time to compose some additional music for the extra slideshow. Another weird Keynote flaw was the "fly" transition: when I used it on an object (technically it's a text transition), it would leave artifacts only if the object was coming from the left side of the screen.

Finally, Sibelius was not behaving at all when I was trying to export the score as an audio track. It would always come out as an unreadable file. Fortunately, I was able to use Audio Hijack to record the music while it was playing, and that saved the day!

The End

Overall, the project went well. Now all that's left is duplicating a bunch of copies as parents order them. (I really need to invest in one of those disc duplicators before I fry my computer's optical drive!) The glitches seemed pretty random and isolated, and, overall, my "Made on a Mac" DVD was another relatively pain-free experience.

Product Links

• Apple iLife - includes iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, iTunes, and GarageBand.
• Apple iWork - includes Keynote and Pages.
• Sibelius Software - makers of Sibelius 3 and distributors of Kontakt Player Silver and Gold.
• Rogue Amoeba - makers of Audio Hijack Pro.
• Adobe Photoshop Elements - less daunting and less expensive photo editing from the makers of Photoshop.

Tags: work, software

My nephew Aaron got married to his fiancée Sarah this last weekend. They make a cute couple, and the ceremony was very nice. I don't know how I feel about Aaron growing up, though. I remember when he was born. Of course, I also have one other nephew and one niece graduating high school this May. Congratulations to them in advance!

Anyway, I hope Aaron and Sarah have many happy years together, and I wish them the best of luck as they begin their new life together. Here's to both of you!

Tags: family