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?
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.
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.