@whatanerd If I may illustrate the vibes with some mental images, we had a bunch of these huge rope spools donated by someone's parent who had... some kind of job that gave them access to wholesale or scrap rope spools, I guess. They were among the various things we used as playground equipment. Once, my youngest brother wrapped some of this rope around my other brother's neck, and my mum commended the latter brother for years for his inherent horse-sense based on having seen his instinct to immediately cling on for dear life and scream for help when he found himself in a high place (sat on top of the spool) with rope around his neck.
The same sensible brother had a period of nearly a year (at the age of 3 or 4 at most, so that is a long phase) where every morning, he would go to the costume closet, put on a pair of huge pink high heels, go out into the yard, go to the little pedal powered digging machine in the sandpit, then sit pedaling it in the shoes and digging the whole sandpit over, for hours and hours and hours, day after day. Apparently no attempt was made to dissuade him from this, everyone thought it was a lark and they just left him to it, he did other things when he felt like it. He is now an actuary who does triathlons and yet somehow in the high upper percentiles of the straight men I've met (even more impressive given we are both definitely autistic) for general self-intuition and wisdom in his social functioning, somehow I feel like these pictures are connected.
I still remember a smattering of Maori vocabulary from the songs we learned there. I must have had some internal motivation towards it, because participation in song learning, story listening etc was on a purely voluntary basis, like if you would rather be digging mud or something you could just go do it whenever. I have no memory of feeling in conflict with the rules and expectations of those around me, since if I was asking to be taught a thing due to wanting the stimulation of getting to do it how I've seen it done... well, I asked how to do it, didn't I?
I did not adjust well to mainstream school once we moved to Australia, and was assessed for an intellectual disability pretty much immediately because my response to entering a classroom was to look around, notice there was a bookshelf, pick one off at random and have a look, and to just ignore that the room also included some adults organising a worksheets session. The teachers concluded that since kids that young can't read at that level, and since I showed social skill deficiencies, I was trying to hide from other children behind the book, and didn't even realise it wasn't a plausible choice. (An IQ test saved me from special education, eventually the thing they did with me was say "if you go up a year, and work hard on the more stimulating material, then you get to read books out loud to your former year 1 classmates every Monday".)
I am frustrated all the time when working in Finnish kindergartens because we spend so much time telling the kids not to eat play-doh, when at Playcenter they just made brightly dyed salt dough, the general vibe was towards freeing up adult attention budget for more important things (and it was fun to participate in making the salt dough sometimes). The first time I worked in one here, I got halfway to making a kid a sandwich before my coworker stopped me like "wait what on earth are you doing, it is not meal time". I genuinely didn't realise we would be expected to make them all sleep at the same time, rather than designating an area of quiet space to do that in whenever. Wish I could give them what I had.
nerd teacher 🦇
Idzie
compost_funeral