Using special interests in school

Post Reply New Topic

Recently I was talking to a mum of an 8 year old with aspergers who currently attends a special needs school. She has always believed that the best way to educate him is to use his special interest (whatever it is at the time - currently wizards) and adapt the lesson around this. This will increase his motivation and help his understanding of whatever concept or idea is being taught.
School disagree, saying that he should not be indulged in his interests/obsessions and we should try to manage these. They use his interests as rewards but not in the actual teaching. Does this sound like the right approach or is Mum right?

Just interested in your thoughts. It's a special needs school so each child in the class would have a fairly individualised timetable anyway.

Thanks

The mother is right. Nothing you can say or do will actually make someone branch out without a lot of pain. You can cause upset, and maybe loss of his greatest love, but you can't make it an NT-level interest. (You can, kind of sort of, with exactly the right touch, but not healthfully for the boy.)

Just teach him everything about wizards. If a wizard has seven apples, and he magically creates six more sets of seven such that he has a total of seven sets of seven, how many apples does he have? (Answer: as many as he wants, if he can conjure. Worse answer: wizards can't do that. But that's the risk you take.)

You don't "manage" a special interest any more than you would "manage" an NT's love of a particular person.

Speaking from my experience and a friend's, special schools suck. Regular private schools might be better. Public schools might be better, but only because special schools such that bad.

But from a practical standpoint, they can't afford to turn the lesson into something related to the special interest of every kid in the class. That's one reason why big classes suck.

And this will never stop, although if he has the right sort of personality, he might come to like the various subjects in their own right, if they're taught correctly. The way it is for me now is that I definitely draw my special interests into things, but not intrusively anymore, and I'm capable of enjoying something unrelated as long as it's already interesting. So, for instance, I got extra credit in biology for doing a pedigree tree going back eight generations or so of a fictional family tracing the presence of a magical allele, almost entirely from guesswork, without even knowing if it was dominant or recessive. (I finally went with recessive, because it seemed to skip generations.) In some cases, I had to essentially make up the family tree however it would be most useful. But on the other hand, the class itself was interesting, so often enough I just learned the material. Both ways worked, but I'm insanely proud of that family tree.

Wow I have to completely agree with the mom on that. When I went to school I had an IEP in grade school and they were very harsh with not involving my interests and because of that by the time I was in high school I was still unable to read. When I entered high school it was for special needs and I was able to bend the rules because of that I ended up learning how to read from comic books I was interested in and by the end of high school I was attending a regular high school and getting creative writing awards for novels I wrote in my English classes that were inspired by my special interests. I felt happier too. I find that when I can't involve my special interests some how in my daily life I get clinically depressed. I think that Aspie special interests need to be nourished and tastefully incorporated into our lives especially where schooling is involved it can be the difference between pass or fail, and for me it's the difference between happiness and clinical depression.

His mom is absolutely right. Looking at 8 year old NT boys I know I can tell you that even they don't seem to have much of a concept of motivating themselves with a future reward yet; it seems more that they work with intrinsic motivation (for what they find interesting/are good at), intrinsic motivation by making the task more fun (by imagining stories around it or making a contest out of it), or with fear. And fear isn't a good teacher.
You don't even have much routine to work with in kids of that age, at least not in NTs. (Talking about routine operations they themselves can follow independently, not outside routine they're used to.)

Of course I do not know the boy in question, but I know from my own problems with executive function that reward-oriented motivation just doesn't work. I can force myself through ten, fifteen minutes of not really intensive work, and then I suddenly find that I've been gawping or daydreaming for the last hour. And the capacity doesn't increase just from other people telling me I have to.
The whole idea of 'motivation by a goal or reward' is competely overrated anyways, most of our daily tasks are done using routine, social influence or intrinsic motivation. And the older a child is, the more diffuse the social influence becomes. So, routine and intrinsic motivation are the tools of choice, and routine has to be built up.

Last edited by zombiecide on 21 Jul 2010, 3:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.

That's the only way my mum was able to teach me and one of the reasons I couldn't learn in public school. Even if it was as simple as replacing the names of the characters in word problems with those of characters from Lion King or the names of my pets, my mum always believed in using my special intrests to modivate me to learn things.

They should use his special interest to get him more interested in learning key concepts and reward him with his special interest. This is the best way to go for someone with a special interest. You can motivate them to do spectacular things. Why waste time building bitterness and resentment when you can inspire them to greatness?

It's a great idea to teach the boy, using his special interest. That way, we would be inspired to learn. I was taught the old fashioned way, without my special interests, and I got in trouble for writing about The United States, in my journal, in Grade 4, a special interest that I had at the time, by my own mother. It was like that for me, throughout my entire childhood. I was diagnosed with Clinical Depression, as a result, 13 years later, at the age of 23. My mum realized that she couldn't play that trick on me, anymore that day that I was released from the hospital. I told the doctor, that I'm proud to be a Kinks Fan, that Mick Avory and I, are a lot alike and we've both had similar childhoods, and that if I want to dress the way that The Kinks did, in the 60s, that nothing's going to stop me. I also said that I feel more English, than Canadian. My mum and the staff decided that I'd be better off, at my apartment.

I'm pretty shocked that this school doesn't know that using special interests to teach is a great tool.

This is my favorite book on ways to implement the concept:

http://www.amazon.com/Just-Give-Him-Wha ... =8-1-fkmr2

Your friend should get this book and switch schools if that is an option.