I’m not a parent of a child with Autism, but fate led me to become the mentor of one. Having been through the growing journey of helping an autistic child navigate a seemingly disconnected world, I want to share the story of how Autism doesn’t define or impede someone autistic from achieving a full life and their dreams.
Not all Autistic people have the same conditions. As many of you who are reading this may already know, Autism is a wide spectrum. Symptoms can be as minuscule as someone who is too shy to communicate in a social environment to symptoms such as hyperactivity, self-injury, or having a quick temper of what seems to be minor changes to their routine.
Where the Journey Begins
I came to know Caleb when he enrolled in a class of mine. I’m a Primary school teacher at a school in the Northern suburbs of Melbourne. When Caleb joined my class, he was new to town and first came off as a shy kid. After a month or two of having him in class, I started to notice little signs of his daily struggle.
He was unable to make friends quickly, even though the other children had been welcoming to him. He was constantly staring out of the window in class and seemingly not paying attention. I would constantly ask him if everything was alright, but he wouldn’t respond directly. He’d always look away while giving his response. This led me to try and understand him further.
I organized a time where I could give him personal attention so that we could discuss him falling behind on his classwork. At first, I thought he did not like to discuss classwork, so I tried to bring up different topics to discuss. I noticed he only likes to discuss certain topics like superheroes. After further discussion, I decided to reach out to his parents.
I found out from them that Caleb was diagnosed with Autism and that they didn’t want him to grow up in a special needs school. However, the school I worked for was not equipped to teach kids with Autism as they may require more attention to help bring up their full potential. At the same time, I did not want to give up on Caleb seeing as he was such a sweet kid like others, just a little misunderstood. I started researching how to educate Autistic children when I came across Posity.
The Collaboration with an Occupational Therapist
Posity is an NDIS provider located just nearby, and they were occupational therapists that were trained to help people with disabilities live up to their potential. I found out that they helped with applications for NDIS funding which eased the burden of Caleb’s parents. I recommended Caleb’s parents inquire about their services. After a couple of weeks, they managed to apply for the NDIS program and Caleb began going for sessions.
After my working hours, I would request if I could tag along to understand how I could better help manage Caleb’s autism when in school. That’s when I met one of the occupational therapists at Posity, Jordan. He was a great help in providing education and resources about how children normally develop motor skills and how to better promote this development in the classroom.
The most interesting part is the process of recognizing the symptoms of a child who may have a motor skills problem. This has allowed me to better plan daily routines for children with special needs to learn in a way that resonates with them.
A Great Adventure
It was a learning journey with Jordan. He taught me how to be a better teacher by having more patience and dedication throughout the process. Apart from that, Jordan would visit Caleb over a period in different places to make an assessment of his progress. Fortunately, there’s always a slight improvement in his assessment and we started to see positive impacts in Caleb’s classwork.
His results started improving as he started to adapt to the social environments at school. He started showing interest in sports as well which has been tremendous growth for him. As a teacher, I feel pride when I see a student achieve their full potential but, the case of Caleb truly gave me something to be proud of. Being able to help him through his journey to adapt to his environment despite his condition and even excelling in his interest with the dream to become an athlete, not only changed my perspective of being a teacher, it changed me as a person to understand autism.
