The Nut Wars

Sometimes it is impossible to tell whether I'm a really good parent or a really terrible one. Since I'm usually so busy with the day-to-day chaos of parenting while working full-time, I don't spend a ton of time thinking about this question, but occasionally something happens that makes me reassess everything I do as a mom. One of those times happened with Stow a month or so ago (BEFORE the concussion incident), and it came in the form of a writing assignment.

Stow doesn't love English class, and he does not love writing, so when he excitedly asked me to look at what he'd written for homework, I was taken aback. He told me they were supposed to write a story about feelings without using the word for the feeling. His feeling, he explained, was anger. When he showed me his computer, I was thrilled to see that he had written more than one or two sentences AND that he had done so without nagging from me or Ren.

Then I read what he wrote:

Nut War 2

Once there was a small fat round squirrel that lost his nuts. He dropped his nuts while he was running away from the neighbors fat lazy dog. He left the nuts but he will always remember them, then he Became maniacal from the loss of his nice juicy round nuts, he gathered his squirrel friends all 10,230,381 of them and planned an attack with his smartest squirrels with nuts as brains but not just any nuts, big brain nuts, He got nut bombers and planned them to bomb doggy harbor, and his nut tanks were sent in a wave of them, the navel nuts sent in last clearing all the remains of the dog army, and well… the nut army well they just ate nuts. He would do what it takes to destroy that pesky dog. Then the day came, the Nut Bombers Came in at a “High” altitude Bombing from 10ft in the air. The dog attacked the bombers and Sir Squirrel got even more Maniacal, he sent all his troops including himself and fired the nutty nuts, the dog just licked their shiny nuts, sir squirrel threw his exploding nuts, there were too many dogs. Sir Squirrel the 3rd retreated in defeat and anger but was oddly surprised at how smart the dumb dog was to win the attack. Sir squirrel the 3rd is in grief and regret that he did not push the attack, Sir Squirrel the 3rd lives in the street with his fat wife, he lives in the street because he spent all his nut coins on the attack. 3 months later, Sir Squirrel the 4th was born and Sir squirrel the 4th heard of this story and wanted to avenge Sir squirrel the 3rd and his big large round shiny nuts so he Started “Nut War 2”. Nut war 2 was the bloodiest war in nut history.

Sir squirrel the 3rd
death 2012 august 3rd
from a falling nut
His last words were
“Those darn falling nuts”

Buy the 2nd novel for the rest of this nutty tale for only $10.99 Limited time, just don't get too nutty about it.

*****
Now, what would YOU do? Your kid who hates to write has created an extended pun, using multiple sentences and decent spelling and grammar. Telling him to rewrite it would 1) meet instant resistance, and 2) risk the possibility of crushing his spirit. But you also know that his teacher will likely not find the humor in this exposition. Plus, you aren't sure what the assignment was but feel pretty certain this wasn't it.


What would have been the right response?






And, how would you have discussed it with your kid?

Seriously, think about it...








and once you determine.....








how you would have responded.....








scroll on down to hear the rest of the story.

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Here's what I did. I'm not sure it was the right thing to do, but it was the only thing I could think of to do.

I told Stow I thought it was a brilliantly creative and funny story. I asked him to explain the assignment again and questioned whether he was sure he'd understood it. (He was). Then I pointed out that although I thought it was funny, I wasn't sure his teacher would. I reminded him that there is a time and place for certain humor and that it was up to him to determine whether he thought submitting it was appropriate. He responded by asking me, "Mom, it's just about a squirrel and his nuts. Why would the teacher get mad?"

He had a point, but also, the story was clearly not about THAT kind of nuts.

After reiterating that I was pretty sure this wasn't what the teacher was looking for and asking him to consider how she might feel reading it, I gave up because clearly his mind was set. 

Plus, I was happy he'd done the assignment and didn't want to crush his creativity.

I forgot about the assignment for a few days. And then this arrived in my inbox:

Good morning,

I wanted you to be aware of the writing assignment Stow turned in. The assignment was to write about an emotion. The task was to "Show, Don't Tell" what the emotion would look like, sound like, feel like. Students also needed to include strong verbs. We worked on this for several days in class, going over examples, having class discussions, modeling both good and bad examples, and doing in-class practices. 

[Copies and pastes "Nut War 2" in full]

We are going to have Stow redo this assignment, as how it currently is, will not receive many points. He wrote a creative story, rather than explaining the sensory details of the emotion he chose - mad.

Mrs. G. and I are also concerned about its appropriateness. The largest focus seems to be on "nuts." While he wrote it to be about squirrels, the way he describes everything is not appropriate.

Sincerely,

Miss N

*****

One of my close friends is convinced that Stow is on a secret mission to force teachers to write emails to me that include words that teachers don't normally say. I've gotten emails about things like "Merry Poopmas" (kindergarten) and appropriate and inappropriate uses of the word "bottom" (2nd grade). So when I told her about this, she just added it to the ongoing list of things Stow has forced adults to have awkward conversations about. 

My first instinct was to feign ignorance when responding to the teacher's email. Maybe if I pretended I'd never seen the story before she would never know. Then I realized that the FIRST thing Stow would say to his teacher about this is, "My mom thought it was funny." 

My next instinct was to panic--Was I wrong to let him submit that essay? Should I have lied and told him I didn't think it was funny? Am I inadvertently encouraging delinquent behavior in my child? 

After considerable inner turmoil, I decided to tell his teacher the truth. Yes, I did know about the essay. Yes, I had read it. And, yes, I had talked to him about it. I explained why I didn't dissuade him from submitting the assignment. 

She responded kindly and explained what he needed to do to get credit for the assignment. The class had been working on how to express emotions through writing--so, for example, instead of saying "she was sad," they were learning to write things like, "her eyes filled with tears." Since identifying and describing emotions is something autistic kids can struggle with, it didn't surprise me that Stow found this assignment difficult. But since he was pretty adept at giving examples in class, his teacher didn't realize how much he didn't get what she wanted them to do. Being able to give verbal examples and understanding how to do a writing assignment are two completely different skills. Stow did the assignment as he understood it. His choice to be funny was likely an attempt to cover his uncertainty about the task at hand.

The teacher made him redo the assignment because his original submission was "inappropriate." But I think she if she was going to have him redo it, it should have been because he really didn't understand it. When he sat with his therapist to rework the assignment, she helped him understand how to write phrases that showed how someone is feeling. He ended up changing his emotion to "sad" and describing how he felt when he lost his Nintendo Switch. 

It was not nearly as amazing as his nut story, but I guess we both learned something from the experience. Stow learned about the importance of knowing the appropriate time and place for some kinds of humor. He also learned how to describe emotions. I learned that my kid can write a kick-butt essay full of puns, but the teacher probably won't like it.

Ordered this shirt online and now I want to know what a "goobye" is 

I'm not sure how to end this post, so here is a picture of a shirt that I ordered online. Somehow it feels like a metaphor for most of my parenting decisions: close but not quite.

Now What?

Ever since the concussion, I've been thinking about this 2019 incident a lot, and ironically, at the IEP meeting on Tuesday the person on his team who has known Stow the longest referenced the year this happened, noting that he had a "really difficult time." After the incident on the bus, we never did get things back on track for Stow, and then COVID-19 happened, making it difficult to know if we would have gotten there eventually. The trials he experienced then were a major motivator for getting him a service dog. Without going into details, suffice it to say that I got weekly, if not daily, phone calls from school until they transitioned to online learning in March; he went from being in a low-support environment to a high-support one at school. Maybe it wasn't the bus aide telling Stow to shut up that triggered the spiral, but the changes in behavior pattern strongly indicated that it was.

Dog pic by Stow. We had fun celebrating Shiro's third birthday.

The third-grade year came up at the IEP meeting this week because the woman who mentioned it wanted to highlight how much progress Stow has made since then. "He's a completely different kid!" she said. While Ren and I agree that Stow has grown and matured a lot, we also know that he is, in fact, not a different kid. He is still Stow and things can still throw him. And THAT makes the candy bag assault so much more infuriating. Stow seemed to be coming into his own socially and academically before this happened. He'd taken on leadership roles at school and was working hard to build positive relationships with his peers. The concussion stopped him in his tracks.

Most days now, he doesn't want to go to school and when he is there he doesn't want to do school work. At some point on any given day, his headache returns, and all he wants to do is come home. He's asleep by 7:30 most nights, worn out from trying to get through the day.

He's more wary of his peers, too. The behavior of the two girls who hit him is inexplicable which makes things harder for him. Many autistic people learn a lot about social interactions from studying the behavior of other people. They look for patterns and try to understand the various implicit rules involved in how we engage with one another. If the candy bag girls didn't abide by any of those rules, who's to say that other kids aren't equally unpredictable and dangerous? Right now, he is going through his school day like a kid with open wounds, highly sensitive, pained by any glare or mean word. It doesn't help that he sees one of the two girls in many of his classes. It's important for him that she understands how much she hurt him, but she doesn't or can't.

Another dog pic to brighten this blog post! Here she is playing with her birthday present.

Since the incident, I get almost daily phone calls from school again. Our hope is that things will get easier for Stow as he feels better and better physically. He IS more mature than he was in third grade, and he HAS been doing so much work to manage some of his more impulsive tendencies. But nothing changes the fact that the girls who hit him didn't play by any of the social rules he has worked so hard to understand, and his sense of justice makes it very difficult for him to square the fact that both girls are still in school. 

I suppose these are good lessons to learn. People aren't predictable and the world isn't always fair. I just wish he didn't have to learn these lessons like this.  

Now what?