One of the things many parents wonder about–and worry about–is whether their kid with disabilities will be able to go to college.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s pretty easy, sometimes, to come up with a firm “No, sorry, this child will simply never be able to attend college” and at that point concern can shift to other ways to prepare the child for adult life.\u00a0 And sometimes it’s pretty easy to see that a given child will be able to–colleges now accommodate students in wheelchairs, for instance, much better than they did fifty years ago, when simply being unable to walk unaided barred wheel-chair bound students who could not reach classrooms or labs or rooms in the dorms.<\/p>\n
It’s the borderline ones–the “maybe” cases–that cause parents the most angst.\u00a0 I know, because I have one of those.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And yet…in time, with enough hard work from everyone involved…sometimes “maybe” turns to “yes.”\u00a0\u00a0 Yesterday we had a taste of “yes.”Tuesday was actually the first day of classes and went as reported in my comment on the previous post.\u00a0 Our son survived the day with no meltdowns, no freeze-ups, and though he came home looking worried, he was also happy, he said, to be starting.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 He’s 26, looks younger, and is the product of 3 years of private preschool, 12 years of homeschooling, 4 years of spec-ed public high school, 1 year in a group home (did not work out at all for him)\u00a0 and several years of part-time work (too few hours, no chance of advancement.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 He tests borderline for IQ, has speech & language problems, and is autistic; he’s on disability.\u00a0\u00a0 (He’s also friendly, hardworking, gentle, thoughtful…)<\/p>\n
Wednesday was spent getting him hooked into the college’s online learning center and class connections–they require a broadband connection (which he doesn’t have at his house, but we do),\u00a0 and his first sight of real college homework (which, albeit these are remedial classes, is a lot heftier than anything he had in spec ed in high school.)\u00a0\u00a0 We alternately hauled him through the first chapters in all three textbooks, and poured on the parental support\/encouragement\/advice until it was coming out his pores and he fled for his place and bed.\u00a0\u00a0 Both his transition to college text and I emphasized the need to ask for help when having problems (I myself flunked out by not asking for help, trying to get through entirely on my own–incompetently, as it turned out.\u00a0 I now have two college degrees, but that first awful year could’ve been better if I hadn’t been convinced no help existed.)<\/p>\n
Thursday was the bigger test–real classes, not day of introduction.\u00a0\u00a0 He and my husband got off on time, caught the right buses, and arrived at campus to find that the first class, the transition to college one, had been canceled.\u00a0 Those of you with autistic offspring know what chances in schedule can do.\u00a0 But–no meltdown.\u00a0 His father pointed out that this gave him time to work on the other classes, and to ask the math prof some procedural questions the two them hadn’t solved with the online process.\u00a0\u00a0 And coached him in how to ask those questions, and then sent him to the math prof’s office (and yes, hovered outside the door.)<\/p>\n
Our son was able to ask the questions coherently enough, and get answers he understood.\u00a0\u00a0 (He still has difficulty with speech production.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In the math class itself (second class of the day)\u00a0 he took relevant notes and understood the lecture.\u00a0 In the third class (remedial reading, where he’s more advanced in some aspects of reading than other students, but not in others) he was able to answer questions and discuss something from the text.<\/p>\n
Best of all,\u00a0 when I talked to him in the evening, he was clearly much more confident than he had been Tuesday evening.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 When I asked what the best and worst parts of the day had been, he said the best was taking notes in math class and the worst was the first class being canceled.\u00a0 I asked if going to talk to the math prof had been scary or not (my husband and I had gone to supper while our son went ice-skating right after classes, so I knew about that) and he said it was scary, but it would have been scarier not to ask.\u00a0\u00a0 (And I will have major glow about that for a week at least!\u00a0\u00a0 YES!!)<\/p>\n
He has also gained a lot of confidence from the pre-college rides on the buses in and out of the city, and is looking forward to riding them alone–not at all his attitude when we started, when he was clearly afraid that he might take the wrong one and would be totally lost somewhere in the city with no way home.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 (We live 50 miles out, and the nearest connection to the city transit system is a little over 20 miles away.<\/p>\n
He’s on my husband’s computer now, doing his homework.\u00a0 Arrived over here at 9 am sharp, with all his books and notes, ready to start.<\/p>\n
I expect there will be bumps and problems and possibly even “failure” ahead,\u00a0 and he may or may not make it to a degree, but for a kid we were told would almost certainly need to be institutionalized, who didn’t have much chance of achieving any independence…I’m doing the happy dance now, and hope it gives hope to other parents.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One of the things many parents wonder about–and worry about–is whether their kid with disabilities will be able to go to college.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s pretty easy, sometimes, to come up with a firm “No, sorry, this child will simply never be able to attend college” and at that point concern can shift to other ways to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,39,12,26,10],"tags":[3,40,13,50,22],"class_list":["post-102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-communication","category-education","category-life-on-the-spectrum","category-parenting","category-socialization","tag-autism","tag-college","tag-communication","tag-parenting","tag-progress"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=102"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":103,"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102\/revisions\/103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.speedofdark-thebook.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}