A few weeks ago I started tutoring a boy! His father contacted me through Craigslist as I had put out an ad saying that I help with one-on-one tutoring. This adolescent has been classified with autism.
Today in our session we were talking about theme within the short story he is reading and I pryed and probed a little more based on the theme he had suggested for the story. I asked him "who" - which character in the story feels this/that way based on the theme he proposed.
I asked the question maybe five times and there were a lot of pauses, perhaps breaks in his thinking and shutting down. In the end he hit his head on his table obviously resigning himself to his frustration of not being able to answer the question in that moment. He is a very capable boy and so extremely clever - I am not just saying this! He brings up topics and takes our conversations to some very interesting and unique places. I believe strongly he could answer the question and in the end he did with more prompting and encouragement from his father.
I feel led to write about this experience, however as my mind is stayed on this whole concept/idea of frustration. I understand that this boy has been labeled as having autism thus there are some types of developmental differences that perhaps make it more challenging to process information and think on his feet and thus shut down, but I am still led to explore the idea of frustration on more of a social level.
Typically we become frustrated I think due to pressures - perhaps we feel that we are not meeting a certain expectation we have placed on ourselves, somebody or something around us is not measuring up to a type of standard - we have an idea of what we think should happen and that thing is just not happening. In the case of Uriah, he perhaps wanted to express his thoughts quickly and just could not put A and B together, maybe he was having breaks in his thinking, distracted by other thoughts or perhaps and very likely so, he was thinking about the label of having Autism coupled with the ideas that have been flying around that he is not "so great" in English - all of these pressures were perhaps barriers that made him shut down in the end. He had to take a break in our session and went to talk with his father.
I am reminded in this session of what I learned in the teaching program called "growth mindset" - a type of mentality that is encouraged in children where they celebrate the process, the step by step successes rather than just the outcome. I feel that there is too little of this right now in our education system or perhaps in trying to make this transition we are still focused on the older system which is very much results driven and oriented. Even though Uriah has been classified as having autism, I still believe that there are some aspects of his behaviour which were learned or he was conditioned to believe.
For example, why is it that when he could not answer the question, he became frustrated? Where did all this pressure come from? His father was with Uriah and myself on the call for a bit after this happened and was encouraging him to pinpoint or pick out the causes for his frustration. I feel that this is a good strategy and a good step towards being the master over one's emotions. When we are able to understand the root causes for our anger/frustrations then we can actually address the underlying problem and not the symptom (the emotion) that results from the issue. I was also encouraging Uriah to be patient with himself. I think it is so important and necessary to be kind towards ourselves, slow down, take a step back, breathe, and start again. Frustraton like every other emotion, will come and go, it is how you handle the emotion that makes all the difference in the world and knowing that you can move forward, that there is a possibility to move forward and knowing the right steps of how to do so is paramount.
