My cousin’s boy has Downs Syndrome and maybe some form of autism and if you’re not accustomed to him he’s hard to understand. “What?” I kept saying. “He’s telling you about Buffy,” they told me. He’s an expert in a few areas, including some computer games and Buffy. They take him to a horse therapy place and say he’s easier to understand when he’s on a horse. He’s going grey early like the rest of us.
When I was in high school and university, I made money in the summers and weekends working with kids and adults with, I suppose one says these days, special needs.
My experience was that the gene that causes Down’s Syndrome also confers a certain personality type: stubborn, funny, a sense of the dramatic and a bit obsessive-compulsive.
Working with kids and adults with special needs is exhausting, physically and emotionally, but the work is incredibly satisfying and constantly laugh-inducing.
A friend teaches a class of 5 mentally retarded children (it’s actually okay to still say that in a school). One of her kids is so severely disabled that’s he’s practically incapable of completing the simplest tasks. If you ask him about music, however, he knows about a billion songs and can tell you the artist and the recite lyrics. It just goes to show that everyone is good at something.
Crap. I split an infinitive in the above comment. I shouldn’t be teaching.
My nephew, about 4, has a friend who although very bright has a thing about air vents and ventilation systems. They think he has Asperger’s. “Whatever you do, don’t ask him about air vents,” my sister warned me.
“don’t ask him about air vents”? Huh. What else is there to talk about?