on growth

I love to watch things grow. It's a fundamental part of who I am. It's why I love to be outside, why I love the springtime. It's probably why I am well-suited for motherhood, though I didn't realize that until a few days ago. And it's why I love to teach.

I have been teaching J for nearly two years. Normally, in early intervention as in classroom teaching, you spend months with a child, not years. This has been a new - and very rewarding - experience. I've had to learn a lot in order to keep up with what he needed at the time. And I've also had to learn to adjust when he was ready for something new. In December, J was definitely ready to move forward. He had gotten very good at rote memorization, but because of his diagnosis, was not able to apply what he knew. The gap between therapy and real life was significant. So I asked his mom to let me try something new. This was intimidating mostly because I was moving completely away from the protocol I'd been hired to follow (ABA therapy), and I knew his other therapists would not agree with me. But J needed to spend some time in the real world. He needed to learn conversations, not just vocabulary, and he needed to learn to notice what was happening around him.

So we started going to the grocery store, fast food restaurants, malls, and people watching. "What do you see?" I would ask him. Silence. So I would answer, "I see a man in a blue shirt. What does he have?" Silence. Me again: "He's buying milk." This is how I spent six hours every week. For months, it was mostly silence. What am I doing? I would think as I drove home. I am wasting their money and my time. But I wasn't ready to give up yet.

Two weeks ago, we were at the park. "What do you see?" I asked J. Silence. "I see a little boy. He's sad. It's time for him to go home." A minute later, J said, "She's crying too. She needs to go home." Then, from him, "She's a girl. J's a boy. I'm a boy." The light came on. There's still work to do (always work to do), but J can have a conversation with his mom. He can answer a question and will sometimes even ask one. He can comment on what he sees, and what he sees is other children. Golf courses, red lights, swing sets - he sees a world now, or a little more of it, anyway.

And I couldn't be more proud of him. I love to watch things grow.