Oprah’s Other Autism Special September 24, 2007
Posted by Daniel Dage in Autism/Asperger's, Parent Support, Parents and parenting.comments closed
My little blog was puttering and sputtering along until the other day traffic spiked up all around my post on Oprah’s previous special.
Sure enough, the queen of daytime did it again with Jenny McCarthy and Holly Robinson Peete as guests, telling their stories. You can read all about it and see pictures on Oprah’s site. Since I totally missed watching it, that’s where I had to go to get the scoop. So those of you looking for more on that show can go there. Then come back if you’re interested in my take on what I read.
First off, I’m all for more awareness about autism. The more people know, the less fear they will have. Hopefully. Those people with disabilities (especially those you can’t see) are the last ones to really benefit from the civil rights movement. And making fun of people who are different is still a favorite pastime. So getting some exposure with the likes of Oprah should be a good thing.
This was definitely a more cutting edge show than her previous special done last spring, as her guests really did push harder towards the various treatments and did not dodge the vaccinations and biomedical controversies. Jenny McCarthy was all about the diet and the mercury in vaccinations.
As a mother, I think it might be fair to characterize Ms McCarthy as intense. She has always been intense about everything she has ever done. When she posed for Playboy all those years ago, she was no young naive little girl. She was driven and deliberate, and utterly conquered using her brains as well as her body to propel her videos into the #1 spot, which I’d never heard of any Playboy video doing before or since. She then tried her hand on TV, which had a mixed degree of success. More recently I noticed her on Weight Watchers commercials, looking as fabulous as ever.
So what’s this got to do with autism? Not much, except she has parlayed her son’s autism into a book as well as her own educational business. I know she likes helping people, just like she seemed to enjoy being naked for Playboy. But I’m not having as good of a feeling about her leveraging her son’s autism into another business venture as when it was just her body for either Playboy or Weight Watchers. But maybe that’s just me.
Ms. McCarthy’s story is a good, compelling story and it does give a lot of hope to a lot of parents out there who are struggling. I do give her some credit for attempting to put her initial disclaimer of not being a doctor (nor having played one on TV), not being an interventionist but just a concerned mother out front. But I don’t think anyone really heard that part once she got into the diet.
Wait…is Weight Watchers GFCF?
I liked a lot of what she presented in terms of her own life, her struggles with doctors and her marriage.
I think the appallingly high divorce rate among parents of children with autism is an area that simply has not been dealt with at all. At least a little light was shown on it here. Perhaps I will shine more light on it later.
Holly Robinson Peete
I didn’t see her but liked what I read of her and about her. Her and her husband have a foundation dedicated towards the treatment and cure for Parkinson’s disease which claimed her father’s life just a few years ago. Their (Holly and Rod) approach was to not be extremely public about their son’s autism. But they were extremely proactive in seeking a variety of treatments that included the diet, floortime, ABA and speech and OT.
My impression just by reading the two different accounts (and the questions and answers in their own words) is that Holly is motivated and driven but at the same time is more balanced in her approach to autism. Her son has a sibling, which helps with socialization but also helps take some heat off the autistic child’s issues. Ms. McCarthy only has the one child, and this can lead down a very unbalanced road, not that there’s anything wrong with that in and of itself.
I also think Holly has more balance in that she had the Parkinson’s foundation as a cause already and didn’t fall into the black hole that the autism world (as a cause) can quickly become. It can consume every bit of energy and time and effort that you can shovel into it. And it always begs for more. There’s always a new megavitamin, a new therapy, a new chemical, a new threat, a new promise and new something or other that promises hope on one hand and inflicts guilt on the other if you decide you don’t want to do it. I’ve written about the black hole before.
I think the single best move for Oprah to make is this next spring, during Autism awareness month, to have a panel consisting of adults who actually are on the autistic spectrum. This would add some balance to where she went this fall in her focus on the parents.
I sort of lurk around the edge of the spectrum, myself. I’ve been to conferences where I sort of felt a certain kinship with a lot of the guys who claimed to be/have ASD. It wasn’t a happy realization by any stretch. That may be one reason why fathers struggle so mightily with the issue beyond other disabilities; it hits a bit closer to home perhaps.
There was a brief clip on Oprah’s site showcasing views by Rodney Peete on being a father. I also noticed that several women had asked about how to get fathers involved with their autistic sons. I may speak directly to that later. But in the meantime, welcome to all you new folks searching for info about Oprah’s autism special!
D.
RTI & POI September 7, 2007
Posted by Daniel Dage in Behavior Analysis, Curriculum, Ed Policy Discussion, Regular Ed, Special Education, Teachers.comments closed
Here’s a couple more new acronyms to add to your lexicon. These are not limited to special education. No, they are coming to regular education classrooms nationwide and especially (as far as I know) to the state of Georgia.
RTI is Response To Intervention, which is the latest buzzword burning across all levels of the educational spectrum. In fact, my blog traffic will probably jump just because I’m referencing it. Everyone is talking about it, or at least writing about it so I though I would throw in my two cents. POI is Pyramid Of Interventions, which might be Georgia’s tricky take on RTI. Here, the two seem to be used together and the state is basically mandating that the RTI/POI approach be used effective immediately. We just had a recent faculty presentation on it, and it certainly caused a lot of buzz amongst the teachers. At least for the regular teachers.
What RTI basically involves is a sort of approach that behaviorists have always used. Basically, if a student is falling behind in a subject, the teacher begins collecting data and tracks the students’ progress. There are some interventions that the teacher can try such as peer tutoring, extra practice, a graphic organizer or some other instructional strategy in order to help the student progress in the curriculum. If the student fails to respond to the intervention, then another intervention is attempted and the student is tracked some more. If the student makes progress, that’s great! If they do not, you progress up a level on the pyramid of intervention (POI). The intent is to keep students from falling behind and to keep them from having to go into special education. The goal is to have less than 5% of the school population in special education as opposed to the present rate which is about 13% in our system. This is a procedure not altogether foreign to most special educators because we tend to be more behaviorally oriented. However, the general education teachers are not from behaviorist backgrounds, so they almost instantly begin thinking in terms of learning styles, modalities, multiple intelligence and other assorted theories that may be very nice but are not really shown to be efficacious according to any sort of empirical research.
What really makes the regular ed. teachers groan (especially at the high school level) is the increased paperwork this is going to involve. Much of the load that us special educators have been carrying for years is being shifted to the regular teachers. And for a high school teacher who may teach 150 students per day, this is VERY substantial! This is why a collaborative model of instruction begins making more and more sense because well-trained special educators can help with the data collection and interpretation as well as help implement research-based interventions that might yield some results. However, this does not appear to be the way things are shaping up from what I can see in my school. Special education seems to be more and more marginalized, and the emphasis seems to be on trying to bypass and eliminate that exceptional subgroup altogether. Hey, if kids can learn better, I’m all for it! I have other areas I can (and will) teach. But regular education has been struggling with the load they already have. Increasing the non-teaching paperwork burden on those folks will not improve the special educator’s lot, nor will it improve teaching quality. It might make an already severe teaching shortage even moreso. Plus their concept of “research-based” is sort of loose compared to what I’m used to seeing in special education literature.
If you haven’t heard of RTI, you need to bone up on it. I’ll extend on the topic more (because we were guaranteed more in-service meetings on it) and provide a few resources to look at.
I also want to talk about ED in 08 at some point.
dick
Hang on to your Butts… September 4, 2007
Posted by Daniel Dage in Alternate Assessment, Behavior disorders, Day-to-day school drama, NCLB, Special Education.comments closed
Here we go again with the Georgia Alternate Assessment (GAA).
I have no problems admitting that I am sometimes a condescending prima donna when it comes to all the requirements that we are subjected to. I expect everyone else to toe the line while I sometimes play loose with the rules and have tested limits more than once. Most of the time I’m looking out for the students and sometimes my creative insubordination is in defense of other teachers who may not be able to stand the heat. And I’ve drawn a considerable amount of it during my tenure here. I’m going to try to grit my teeth and accept this bitter pill this year with the understanding that it is only temporary. I’ll be free of this burden soon enough.
We had our GAA meeting at the county office this morning, with another group attending this afternoon. Most of the folks attending this morning were people who had done it last year, which made things go fairly smoothly. Very little has changed from last year. We still have not seen any results from last year’s test and I’ll have to make an appointment with Harry to do so. I think it would be instructive to look at the scores just to get an idea where my activities are as far as meeting or exceeding the standards. I mean if something works, why change it all the way up? There are lots of resources on the Georgia DOE website with more supposed to be added all the time.
I figured out the reason why I’m so rapidly going stale this year here, is because we are too short staffed to go into the community. In the past 7 years, that really was what made the days go by so quickly and kept most of us from going stir crazy. We used to be able to spend 2 hours or so doing jobs or shopping away from the school every morning. Now, I am in the one room with all of these students pretty much all day long. I’m having flash backs of my days teaching children who had behavior disorders in a self-contained setting. The worst behaved kids stuck in one place all day long away from everyone else held no appeal for me, which is precisely why I took this position instead of the EBD position across town. But here I am! And since self-contained EBD no longer truly exists, guess which position is now the hardest of the special ed. jobs to fill and keep filled? Being isolated is a fairly substantial negative in this case. When we were out and about, having our own schedule was a positive. But now, thanks to NCLB, we are having to abide by the regular curriculum and schedule more and more which has actually made the isolation even more acute.
dick
