Published on 12, July, 2020
My daughter was diagnosed with ASC four years ago and is now in the first year of A-levels. She is very bright and a natural independent learner.
She is studying essay subjects (RS, History and Politics) and is now really struggling with the task of essay writing. She is also absorbed, perhaps too absorbed, in the subjects she is studying. She is reading 1-2 books a week on her subjects that go well beyond the syllabus. She is following her curiosity and always wants to know more. On the face of it, this seemed like positive behaviour. Now I am not so sure.
Her challenge with the essay writing is that she struggles to make sense of the essay question. Terms are not defined with sufficient clarity and she can see many ways to address the question. When she does eventually pick a path to go down, she loses her way as the questions she has grow and grow. She finds it very hard to marshal her thoughts and often gives up.
When she does manage to write something, it is very good. She is getting top marks for the work she hands in. However, the effort and emotional drain associated with doing the work makes this all unsustainable.
She is slipping behind and is growing increasingly anxious. School refusal has now become a real issue again.
The school are now worried that she won't be ready for her year end exams and would like to talk to us about support and options. I suspect they'll want us to get some external support for her. Perhaps involving medication.
I don't really know what to do for the best.
Any advice?
My sister went through something similar with her ASD, and we found that breaking down the essay questions into smaller, manageable parts really helped her. Also, reaching out to teachers who understand her needs was crucial for her progress. I came across some helpful free essay samples on [removed by moderator] that might provide some additional support. It's worth checking out, especially if she needs some guidance with her assignments. Hang in there, and I hope you find the right solution for your daughter.
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If, or should I say when this happens with my 15YO daughter, I am planning to do the following:
1. continue with my love bombing and explain in complete detail how she will always be looked after by me
2. point out that using AI is not cheating. The winners will be those that best incorporate AI and have it up their sleeve to deploy as necessary.
My 19YO sub-clinical son who is doing very well at university is telling me he is using chat GPT to create the structure for essays and then all he has to do is fill in the details which he is more comfortable with than staring at a blank page.
I really like the approach Martin has suggested.
Finding essay writing difficult is one of the reasons why I went the science route.
Can you get her some help on how to write an essay. When I did some Open University study they had some good books on this. You might even be able to help by getting her to talk through the essay. I find hearing what I want to say can get me better focussed even when the listener doesn't comprehend the topic (this happened a lot with science topics).
After Martin's idea of brain dumping, look at the words in the question such as "describe", "show", "define", "why", "compare" etc. Decide on the type of essay best suited to the question e.g. argument-counter-argument, narrative etc. Then using the brain dump pull out a few relevant key points and a few points to support each of these (this is where I found "discussion" helpful). Add the introduction and the conclusion. Setting time limits for research, for brain dumping, for planning and for the actual writing may help. Take a break after each stage. A well structured and argued essay even if short will get good marks and no-one can write everything on a topic anyway. Practice writing essay plans without doing the essay (use old exam questions). Try finding model answers to exam questions and see where marks were awarded.
Learn to write for the exam. 3 hour paper, 3 questions. 1 hour each. 5 minutes for brain dumping, a few for planning, the rest for writing with a few for checking. It is really hard but will pay dividends and not only for A level but Uni exams as well.
It would do no harm for her teachers to take each subject group through a how to write an essay session because even NTs can find it difficult. Would you be able to suggest this to her school?
,Good luck to her
This is 100% autistic (and dyslexic). And one can never be 'too absorbed' in to subjects. Life is for learning and the often preferred environment for the ADHD/Autistic self is days of uninterrupted free-refills to the fountains of knowledge.
The issue here is rarely about confidence or competence. In fact, if we're not careful, we might not have a proper evaluation of what we're actually missing and find our selves too self-assured. Doubt is my best friend, then, in the classic sense of this word. A pathway to humility and greater understanding. Doubt, like a wee Jiminy Cricket, as the friendly skeptic on my shoulder keeping me in check and asking the right questions, recollecting that others might not mean what they're saying/asking.
When I was in High School, I was allowed to give an oral report. I think my English teacher saw my frustration and intellect and simply made accommodations. They were more pressed to ensure we were intaking knowledge.
The first problem is more often that we're dealing with Nebulous questions, vague socialising, deliberately created for a non-autistic or NeuroTypical wiring which doesn't quite appreciate direct and thoroughly analysed communication. Instead of feeling refreshed by a shower of knowledge, they can feel offended or even stifled. These are quite possibly profoundly opposed ways of experiencing and perceiving communication, to the degree that Autistics are often misunderstood. I cannot count how many times I'm trying to be as clear as possible and the response is from another planet.
The second issue is that Everything is indeed, Connected. We don't 'seek' patterns. They're RIGHT THERE. They're hard to ignore. A thing is so obvious, but it's apparently this due to how our Autistic or ADHD wiring works (have a look at Monotropism.org). So where do you draw the line? There is a whole ecology at play in everything. It took me several years to work out a proposal for a small idea. It's now 10 years later and turning all my notes into a grant proposal - I'm going on 6 months. I know myself well enough that I do have to put a thing down for days or a week and look at what I wrote again and adjust it so it makes sense. At 14 I simply couldn't write a sentence, but because I was intelligent, it was overlooked for whatever reason.
It can take all day to craft an email now. The problem is with using spoken/written language itself. It's a left brain function and I believe we default too much to the Right. Internally, I have this amazing clarity playing out in my imagination and perhaps can better describe with poetry. If you were at an art gallery and had to express in detail every picture to someone who was blind, how easy would this be?
Be prepared to hound the school and social services etc. for support but always do it in a polite way.
Get her as much support as you can, I mean in the sense of people helping her with the work, 1-to-1 support. Maybe counselling. I wouldn't go down the medication route. I've tried that and most the medications made me feel worse. Children are given way too much homework these days and the school hours are too long, that's why she's stressed out, on top of being Autistic. She might also need help with social skills, just having someone kindly explain to her how to socialise, it's possible stress relating to social problems is compounding the problem of doing the schoolwork.
Fibonacci Squid. This is really helpful. We'll suggest this to the School and to my daughter. I'll also share your experience with her. This will help her rationalise what's going on and help her understand its normal to need some help with this, at least initially!
Thank you Autonomistic . The school are trying to help, but I think they could definitely be more deliberate about briefing her, at least until she has built more confidence. It's helpful to know that this is a normal challenge, and therefore something the school should be ready to help with.
Thanks Martin. This is super useful. And its good to know that this is not an unusual experience and that she will find a way through.
I'm at uni and I also struggle with this, so I was given a study skills advisor, who's role is to help me piece together what the essay question is actually asking and what is relevant.
It sounds like a good course of action might be that right at the start, when the question is set, a member of staff takes some time to define all the terms and set limits and they can discuss a more narrow set of topics to discuss. This does getter better the more people go through it with you.
I don't think medication is likely to be the right course of action for this particular issue.
Another thing I found useful is setting myself time limits. So limit each essay to maybe 4 hours of work. Maybe more, depends on the essay, her teacher should be able to help set guidelines. Along with good exam practice, this should help reduce the exhaustion from 'rabbit holing'. It sucks at first, and the quality might initially go down, but she will likely find a balance. The extra time can be used for reading around the subject, but the essay should be handed in after those 4 hours.
But yeah in general, more parameters need to be put in place for her, because autistic brains find it really hard to do themselves.
NAS91665 said:She is very bright and a natural independent learner.
Perhaps it is time to consider if school is actually the right environment for learning for her. She may well be able to achieve much more in a home learning environment.
NAS91665 said:The school are now worried that she won't be ready for her year end exams and would like to talk to us about support and options.
It seems that the school could be doing more to support your daughter. Struggling with the interpretation of questions is a very autistic thing, partly due to the literal interpretation we tend to adopt. The school could be helping with that, ensuring the she starts off with the right focus for the essays and any questions she has are fully addressed.
NAS91665 said:I suspect they'll want us to get some external support for her. Perhaps involving medication.
The way the autistic brain works is not something to be medicated away. It is natural that your daughter will become more anxious when she does not clearly understand what is expected of her.
The basic problem is 'making decisions', which very many autistic people struggle with. When I started my Zoology degree the very first tutorial essay I was given was 'The Importance of Size in Biology'. The most open ended task imaginable. For this essay, and every other, the basic hurdle is deciding on an approach, then sticking to it. I start by having a 'free thinking session' where I write down randomly across a sheet of paper all the things I could write on the subject. I then connect the best ideas by lines and try to construct an order between them for their position in the essay. Once I have a running order I can roughly see how much to write on each topic in order to fit into the length constraints of the essay, some less important topics might be pruned at this stage. The most important parts of this process are the free thinking session and the subsequent choice the best ideas,
For my 'size essay' I decided to structure it from populations of organisms, through an individual organism, individual organ, individual cell to the molecular level, finding a single instance where relative size had a great functional effect, one for each section. Once I had a plan the writing was comparatively easy.
I worked for 34 years in universities, have written many scientific papers and book chapters, and the approach to writing I have outlined served me very well.