The Real Learning Disability - The Fussy - Fuzzy Fractal

Have you ever struggled to understand what a teacher was saying? Have you ever asked them if they could say it in a different way? This week, in our ongoing series on education and learning, we're going to explore yet another aspect of how children learn. As well as another fractal. The one which most affects childrens' ability to learn language. Including how they voice what they learn. Sound intriguing? "It certainly is, Ollie."

Fussy and Fuzzy Ran a Race. Fussy Fell Down and . . .
When I was a boy, girls jumping rope sang things like, "Skinny and fatty ran a race. Skinny fell down and broke his face." And, "Step on a crack. Break your mother's back." Now most of you know I have Asperger's. So can you guess how I interpreted these words?

Of course, me being me, I took these words literally. Can you imagine? Laughing little eight year old girls singing, "break your mother's back!" Whoa! Was I confused. And try as I might, I could not, for the life of me, understand what would make them say such things. No less laugh while they said them.

Fast forward to August 2004. I start working with a little eight year old boy. A boy who, like me, has Asperger's. And as I watched his struggles, especially with his dad, I realized why I had struggled so to understood those childhood sayings. You see, he, too, understood only the literal meanings of peoples' words. And none of the social content.

Fortunately for this boy, his dad was the most patient father I have ever seen. Which explained why week after week, he patiently battled what I eventually came to call, his son's "fussy word disease."

What the heck is "fussy word disease?" Start with that it's not exactly a disease. I call it this merely to bring to peoples' attention that having this condition is painful. Both for the parents and for the child.

What is it though? It's when a child takes every thing you say as if you chose your words perfectly. Straight from a dictionary. With no non verbal meaning. Which then means, if you want to say something to one of these kids, you had better say it exactly as you mean it. Otherwise, you're going to hear about it.

This in fact is how this boy responded to most of his father's words. Thus if his dad said something like that they were leaving in ten minutes, at precisely ten minutes, they had better be leaving. No if's and's or but's. If not, the boy would blurt things out like, "you never do what you say!" "You promised!" Or "You lied!"

Worst case he might even call him, "stupid!" Can you imagine?

Being his dad was such a patient man, whenever this happened, he would calmly try to explain how he hadn't meant exactly ten minutes, that what he said was simply a figure of speech.

Of course, the boy would totally blow off these efforts, then rudely argue, "You're wrong! That's not what you meant!" Which would usually result in his father reluctantly getting firm with him.

At times, watching this happen made me well up with tears. This dad so obviously loved his son. And the boy so obviously loved his father. Despite this love though, week after week, they could not find a way to understand each other. Nor to stop their ever present arguing.

Finally, one day it hit me that the problem had nothing to do with this boy's social skills. Not directly, anyway. Nor was it rooted in his poor impulse control and outbursts of disrespect. What was happening was simply that when the boy said to his father, "you're wrong," he was simply trying to make him speak in a way in which he, the boy, could understand. In the boy's own language. And when this didn't happen, his frustration overwhelmed him and he blurted out insults.

Shortly after that, I began to call the boy's language, "fussy." And his father's language, "fuzzy." At which point, I explained this idea, the idea of "two languages," to the family. Then whenever this father spoke "fuzzy," I would gently remind him that "fuzzy" language confused his son. And whenever the boy felt compelled to make his speak "fussy," I reminded the boy that "fuzzy" was his and my language, not his father's.

These reminders also helped me as well. They reminded me that in no way did the boy intend to hurt his father. In fact, whenever I managed to get him to see he had hurt his father, he'd burst into tears. Partly from this realization. And partly from the sheer frustration of having to work so hard to be understood.

Here then was the opening I had been looking for. The boy's problem was that he had no sense of the personal meaning of his father's words. A meaning I was calling, the "fuzzy" meaning as in, the "warm fuzzy" meaning. And the father, while he could logically grasp the words his son was saying, had no idea his son could not interpret words in other than dictionary meanings.

Today, when I think about how most of today's therapists refer to Asperger's as a social impairment, I feel sad. They're missing the point. Moreover, treating these kids as if the main problem is a social problem only makes them worse.

The social difficulties in Asperger's are not the main problem. I say this knowing full well how disruptive kids with Asperger's can be. Even so, beneath this behavior is a far more basic problem. The thing which actually provokes their antisocial behavior. Their inability to navigate the range of specificity within normal folks' language. The degree to which we do, and do not, include the meaning in our words.

What I'm saying is, Asperger's is first and foremost a language problem, not a socialization problem. And whether these kids' brains are wired differently or not simply does not matter. Whatever the case, they, and I, simply speak a different language. Fussy. And because the majority of the world speaks fuzzy, we get told we have a disability.

Why all this talk about Asperger's? Because discovering fussy and fussy as the root problem in Asperger's lead me to an equally important realization. That ADD is better seen as, "fuzzy word disease." If I am right then and I believe I am, then this is why we are seeing so many kids with ADD. Why? Because fuzzy is the majority language. The way at least fifty percent of kids naturally speak. Unfortunately, teachers, when they teach, must lean toward fussy as the way in which to get what they are teaching across. This then creates in classroom a major mismatch. A mismatch similar to the one I've been telling you about between the boy and his father.

ADD and Asperger's. According to many, they are the two current scourges of education. Sadly, by failing to recognize the lingual specificity problems inherent in these conditions, we treat these kids as defective learners or social misfits rather than "strangers is a strange land."

So what about medication? Doesn't it help? At times, yes, and at times, it's even necessary. Especially when the the problem has gone on for years. However, as a permanent solution, I would ask we look for more. Why? Because the single most common complaint in these children is that no one understands them. Moreover, no medication in the world is going to remedy this situation.

"The Continuum of Lingual Specificity" offers us a non medical alternative. With this knowledge, we can design pragmatic tools with which to matching kids to teachers who speak their language.

This, then, is what we'll be exploring this week. What I see as probably the most important change we could make to our kids educations. What change? Putting them in classrooms where teachers speak their language. By column's end, I hope you'll see the wonderful possibilities this could lead us to. Possibilities which are easily within our reach. Today, not tomorrow. Don't our kids deserve this?

Now let's take a more fussy look at the fractal to which I've been referring. Including how I could be calling this circle, a "fractal."

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