school attachment

yesterday was the first day i was attached to school and i met three children with autism/suspected autism.

one lil girl was dropped off by her mum at our room.. so we played with her until it's time for assembly. the girl was painfully shy.. at first i thought she has selective mutism until i asked her a question in mandarin and she replied. then i tried to read simple books with her but realised that she couldn't read, which is no surprise because of her EAL background and she's under support for language issues. but what was telling and made me suspect autism was her echolalia.. so when i read "this is strawberry" she repeated the same words (kids would normally just repeat "strawberry"), and even the exact intonation! no eye contact.. inhibition.. total imitation of play with cars.. sigh. she's a tricky case cos it's complicated by lack of exposure to english (e.g. is she so withdrawn because of self-esteem issues triggered by poor english skills, or is it really poor communication due to autism?).

then another boy.. a small cute boy already diagnosed who barged into our room a couple of times, and talked in an incessantly loud voice (autistic kids tend not to be aware of their inappropriate volume).. started ranting about how stupid his mother tongue teacher is... like how could she teach him nonsense things.. he was practically fuming, with arms crossed, seated on a chair and ranting away... total lack of awareness of authority figures (no respect for teachers and me). he also started asking the support officer whether he has found a girlfriend finally over the june holidays.. and if he has, she'd better be sexy. and he repeated sexy so many times. inappropriate topics from a p1 boy... again a trait of autism.

from these 2 cases we see two extremely different children on the spectrum.. one is the typical withdrawn kind, little verbal language and echolalia... the other is sociable, verbal, expressive, but communication lacks social quality and appropriateness. children with autism are all so different from one another.. all with different traits and manifestations, but most of them are rooted in the triad of impairments and show certain clusters of similarities, which of cos includes the social impairment part.

after having seen so many kids with autism, i find that when u meet one, u can actually "feel" it. there's just an odd quality to the way they interact and behave, although all of them are so different. they all actually give me a very similar feeling, almost like i can sense it. hmm dunno. i hope it doesn't become an occupational hazard to start looking for autistic symptoms.

going to do voluntary work at ethan's school tmr... quite excited. dunno if i'll get ethan's class. still rem seeing him there when i visited the school last time. he was struggling with a teacher and i still rem that pained me. i hope he's getting on well.