1.30 pm
I was scheduled to visit Charlie at his class at precisely that time, 1.30pm on Tuesday. I signed in the school office, put on my sticker name tag, and ended up wandering back and forth in the first floor corridor (Charlie’s school is made up of an old stone building and a much newer, very large, addition). I finally found the room and caught a glimpse of Charlie at his desk, the speech therapist sitting across from him with a stack of laminated cards. When I walked in, he eyed me for a fast moment, said an equally fast “hi Mom,” and went back to work.
“Did you tell him you’d be coming?” Charlie’s teacher asked me. I said yes. “And did you tell him the time?” his teacher continued. I was semi-sure I had. “Well, five minutes before you came in, Charlie kept looking at the door and saying ‘Mom, Mom,’ like he knew it was time.” I wondered if maybe Charlie remembered the time of my last visit—-at the same 1.30pm time—and could tell I’d be showing up, from his reading of it being a certain amount of time after lunch, and from other clues in room: The speech therapist appearing. The other kids involved in certain activities. The light from the windows.
Charlie is learning to tell time, using a digital clock. Reading off the numbered times is not so easy: 5:00 is sometimes “fifty-zero clock” and 12:30 “twelve-o’clock-thirty.” I know he is used to having to explain himself in non-verbal ways, to speak without language and try to get his mother to figure out what he means. I so often sense that Charlie knows, that Charlie understands but something makes it so much harder and slower: Something in how the parts of his brain interact or do not, or do differently—and it has recently been reported (in a study involving 13 preadolescent boys with Asperger Syndrome) that autistic children have more gray matter in their brains; something about whatever it is that enables many of us to link thoughts to words, does not happen automatically for Charlie.
So he’s learned to rely on other sights and sounds and senses to understand what is going on. The hard part is that we have to figure out what, with fleeting collections of words and pieces of words—”bye Sean! bye! Arielah,” as he starts running up and down the room, making noises in his throat.
Always so much to learn to keep up and in time with Charlie.
Related Stories
POSTED IN: Education, Neuroscience, Time
10 opinions for 1.30 pm
Moi ;)
Nov 29, 2007 at 9:32 am
That’s really great, Kristina!
Time is one of the hardest concepts….I think Bug was maybe in 6th grade by the time he Really understood it. I had to laugh - “12 o’clock thirty” - that sounds like Bug, too. I think once they start 3rd-4th grade level (more abstract?) math, it starts to click….
Marcie
Nov 29, 2007 at 10:03 am
Thanks for posting the study. I’m glad to see at least someone is speculating that it’s the connections in the brain, not the “mirror neurons” per se, that are are significant.
gretchen
Nov 29, 2007 at 12:26 pm
Kristina- I had a dream last night that I met you and Charlie in real life (and many of my other blogging friends too). But one part I remember so clearly- that Charlie let me give him a hug! What is it about Charlie? He has charmed me from so far away! :-)
Kev2
Nov 29, 2007 at 2:12 pm
I think there’s a point in some (all?) autistic brains where things aren’t lining up right. I have been wondering lately if most/all people on the spectrum have a bit of what is traditionally called mental retardation.
I dig that article about gray matter, especially the line, “mirror neurons allow us to learn without knowing we are learning.” That seems to be the crux of a lot of AS (and probably autism), at least from my experience. It’s very ‘meta’. It’s basically hard to learn things because eventually you start realizing that you’re learning something. It makes you very cynical, often at an early age.
M
Nov 29, 2007 at 2:44 pm
“That seems to be the crux of a lot of AS”
Wow. Massive generalization, very impressive. I generalized like that once and strained a frontol lobe.
“It’s basically hard to learn things because eventually you start realizing that you’re learning something.”
Wait. Doesn’t the quote you provide say that mirror neurons allow us to “learn without knowing we are learning”? How can one “start realizing that you’re learning something” (to quote you) if there’s a lack of knowing about the source of the knowing (to pseudo-quote the quote that you quote)?
Don’t worry, it sounded cool. Inverted tautologies are wonderful rhetorical devices.
Well…”meta”…how is it meta? The mirror neurons allow “learning without knowing we are learning”. If they don’t know, how can it be in any way “meta”, i.e. referential? I would call you cynical but that might imply you have AS and we all know what you equate that with (hint: it rhymes with “rental bee libation”).
Ralph Savarese
Nov 29, 2007 at 5:57 pm
I would bet you that Charlie has already fully mastered time. I reread Tito’s book THE MIND TREE last night, and it brought home again the big gapy in many people with autism between what they know and expressing/using what they know. How dangerous it is to assume that because there appears to be little understanding or “slow” thinking, that the person can indeed be described this way. Again and again, people like Tito, and Sue Rubin and Jamie Burke and Sharisa Kochmeister, and my son report that autism is more a profound motor disorder that masquerades as “retardation.” Your two narratives of Charlie’s uncanny sense of time are proof that he fully understands the concept. What else does he already know and how can you imaginatively help him to express–outside of language, spoken or otherwise, if you must.
Ralph Savarese
Kristina Chew, PhD
Nov 29, 2007 at 6:05 pm
“Imaginatively” is the key word—- also reminds me, I need to draw on my imagination to understand what he is communicating to me.
Daisy
Nov 29, 2007 at 6:33 pm
Fascinating article. My 15 year old (with Aspergers) often needed to be explicitly taught basic skills. We chalked it up to his blindness at first, but the mirror neurons might be a strong part of it.
Moi ;)
Nov 29, 2007 at 9:55 pm
I’ve always related it to a “short” of sorts, the inability to connect. Whether or not they are connecting the concrete and abstract concepts of time, or connecting the idea of and ability of verbal communication, there is something that is shorting out the connection.
As my son gets older, I see it more and more every day. Of course, he mentioned driving a car just this evening…..there is a connection thing with reality there, too…..
Big Time Clocks
Jun 23, 2008 at 9:37 pm
[…] he seems to have a strong internal sense of what time it is, it’s been more difficult for Charlie to learn to tell time looking at a clock (the […]
Have an opinion? Leave a comment: