OK folks, a different perspective here, based on experience.
School counsellors are generally not experts in anything. We'd like them to be qualified psychologists as well as capable teachers but the facts are - generally they're not either. What we DO want from them, however, is for them to be someone who can access resources on behalf of our kids, someone who will listen to the actual practical problems we're dealing with (or the school is dealing with) and help us all work to a solution. We ant them to be facilitators and trouble-shooters.
Yes, it would help a lot if they had a good understanding, but they just can't know everything. And even if they are experts on what our child's disorder is - every child is different. difficult child 3's 1st Grade teacher was experienced with autism, we were told, because one of her own sons was high-functioning autistic. I got the chance to talk to her before the first day of school and warned her, "No matter what you already kow, difficult child 3 is very different."
She replied, "We'll be fine, I know what to do from my experience with my own son."
But at the end of day 1 she said to me, "You were right - he IS different, isn't he?"
She was a very kind (if somewhat volatile) lady but later in the year when she was succumbing to the frustration of trying to cope with difficult child 3, she said to me, "I'm convinced he has ODD."
I looked up ODD and then wrote her a long analysis of her statement. The gist of what I wrote was this - "ODD implies the child is choosing to be difficult. This is not the case with difficult child 3, he does not choose this. However, he does choose routine and sameness where possible and will fight change, because to him change means he needs to adapt yet again and this is difficult for him. I can understand why you suspect ODD but the resemblance is purely superficial."
I was furious with her because I felt it was a distraction for me to have to go digging and then plan a considered reply. But really, it was a good thnig for me to do. She also needed to feel free to say to me what she felt - I needed the teachers to communicate freely with me, even if I violently disagreed with what they said.
I've learned that I must look past my anger at them for their stupidity, their blindness and their ignorance, and focus on the need to communicate and also on my responsibility to educate the educators.
Of course you have the right to ask for this person to be removed from your son's case. But what will this achieve? She will be replaced, but what knowledge will her replacement have? Chances are it won't be any better. It could be worse. At least you know her level of ignorance, you can work on teaching her (and at the same time, everyone else). Every time someone makes an idiot statement, they have just handed to you on a platter, the right to correct the misconceptions and to get on the sopbox. These opportunities are gold, because the ignorance is rife but you can't always assume that stupid decisions being made around you are made from ignorance (even if that is true). You have to accept (until you know for certain otherwise) that the decisions are being made by people who know what they are doing, who are experts (because they often have a piece of paper saying they know what they are doing).
So don't ask to have her removed. Don't shout at her or let your anger show. Instead, politely and kindly teach her the correct terminology as well as WHY it is now the correct terminology. Also teach her that Rain Man gets it so very wrong...
The character of Rain Man was based on Kim Peek, who is a very unsual case. The film wasalso made long enough ago, for ideas presented in the film to now be badly out of date. Hard to believe but it's true. We keep more up to date than most educators, because it's OUR child. We have a vested interest in being thoroughly up to date. Educators and school counsellors only have to be as up to date as their job requires. it's their career. But we do it because for us, it's our lives. Far more important to us, we can't expect it to be as important to other people.
I can hear people screaming at me, "But that is just not right! It shouldn't be like this! Why should we accept this unprofessionalism?"
Of course it's not right. But we have to work WITH these people, their education starts with US. So we have to be the hero here, we have to step up to the plate and teach them. At least when someone says something that shows their ignorance, we know where to target our efforts. Such a person is doing us a big favour by revealing their ignorance to us so we CAN do something about it.
I remember being totally shocked by difficult child 3's school counsellor. We'd had the same school counsellor all his schooling. He was in Grade 4 at this point, we had just come out of an IEP meeting and were standing on the office steps, looking over the playground from a distance. All the kids were wearing the same school uniform so they all blended in to a sea of blue shirts and grey flannel trousers, with blue legionnaire's caps (to ward off the Aussie sun - no kid is allowed outside during school hours without a hat). We could barely make out difficult child 3, walking around the edge of the basketball court (painted on the asphalt) with his feet walking along the yellow painted lines. Totally oblivious to kids around him, not part of their world at all. But still hard to work out which was him.
The school counsellor looked across the playground and said to me, "It's wonderful to see difficult child 3 doing so well. You must be so proud of him, now that he is no longer autistic."
It was a statement using the same logic as "when did you stop beating your wife?"
She didn't say, "Is he still considered autistic," no. She made the statement that HE WAS NOT AUTISTIC ANY MORE and expressed in a way that made me seem like the worst pessimist and malingerer if I challenged this. Since I had already had someone else in the village try to accuse me (via one of the local doctors) of being Muchhausen's by proxy (the doctor shouted at me, "Stop trying to find things wrong with your children!" in response to my statement that difficult child 3 had been diagnosed with autism; the doctor's best friend had written to a charity I had been president of, making the claim that I was mentally ill because I was trying to label my children as autistic) I was particularly sensitive on the topic. However, I chose to challenge her (politely).
I said to the school counsellor, "Why do you say he is no longer autistic? It is a diagnosis for life."
The school counsellor replied, "Well, he had bad language delay and now he can talk really well, his last speech assessment showed his language function has now slipped into the normal range. So he's lost the diagnosis."
I gently corrected her (which is what I suggest you do). I said to her, "The diagnosis of autism requires a HISTORY of language delay. I agree, it is wonderful that difficult child 3 now passes a speech pathology assessment. But he DID have language delay and we can't go back and change history. It happened. difficult child 3 isn't cured, instead he has adapted. He himself described it as 'pretending to be normal' which means he still can feel the difference. All his life he will have to work harder than most people, to continue to blend in. To describe this as a cure devalues this constant effort the child puts in."
I was also reacting (despite my concern about aggravating my own poor reputation on the Munchhausen's front) because any claim by Dept of Ed staff that difficult child 3 was no longer autistic, could lose us his support funding.
Autism is a diagnosis for life. However, the person with autism can (and often does, especially if they are very intelligent and high-functioning) adapt to such an extent that they can pass for "normal" and slide by without supports.
Another reason I chose to handle this with educating the educator, was because I don't want to annoy the people whose support I need. Of course I require a level of professionalism from them but if I have to, I will teach them how to be more professional. If I react with anger and frustration and respond by getting aggressive, then I am behaving exactly as my autistic child responds to his frustrations. I am trying to teach my son how to handle frustration more gently and more positively, so what sort of example am I setting? Also, the educators whose assistance I require, could look at me and quietly think, "Oh yes, the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. So that's where the child's bad behaviour came from. I did hear that this sort of problem is hereditary." So you see - all it does, if you react with anger, is make the situation worse.
We want our children to learn from discipline. we want them to be better people, to grow up to fit in to society. So why not extend this to educators and other people around us? Practice our child-rearing techniques on them.
I am on record as saying that I believe that the Department of Education (and many other official departments) are themselves autistic.
Think about it - they are intensely obsessive about following rules (and laying down rules for other people to follow).
They have their own definitions for things that don't always match what other people define things as.
They have serious problems with communication.
They are socially inept, as an organisation.
They often say the same thing over and over, without effectively communicating - echolalia on an organised administrative scale.
They require things to be done according to pre-set patterns that often don't make sense and just get in the way, but yet tey insist and we have to go along with it.
If you make them angry they get petulant and can take it out on you and make your life a misery.
So I use "Explosive Child" methods not only on my own kids, but also when dealing with bureaucracy. I find it really, really helps. It also relieves my frustrations.
Now, to the "idiot savant" label. This is an interesting one. It was a legitimate description of several sub-groups of autism, legitimate as recently as 15 years ago. Probably less.
When difficult child 3 was 3 years old and recently diagnosed, I made contact with Dr Trevor Clarke (Aussie researcher into autism) who was studying techniques that were considered revolutionary at the time - Trevor claimed that autistic savants (the new acceptable term) were not, as was popularly believed, merely memorising vast chunks of stuff and parrotting it but were actively thinking about the topic(s) that fascinated them and that they were obsessed by; moreover, Trevor believed that it should be possible to use the high skill areas to stimulate these children and involve them in learning areas that otherwise they showed no interest in.
The main premise of this research was that these children were not the "retards" or "idiots" (medically speaking) that they had previously been considered; that there was something in there worth trying to save and that the method of saving it was through these special interest areas.
There was a research study going on at the time developing teaching techniques to make use of the high skills of autistic savants. We (our family) were just a little too late to plug into this, but I was told they would keep me posted on the outcomes. difficult child 3 definitely would have qualified, we were told.
Yes, the term used to be "idiot savant" because when these people were given IQ tests, they generally scored sufficiently below normal to qualify in the "idiot" category. The word "idiot" had specific medical meaning in those days. The belief back then was that idiot savants were like tape recorders or curiosities, but nothing of any intellectual significance was really going on. We even were told with about difficult child 3 with regard to his remarkable ability to memorise as well as his ability to read numbers, letters and music. The reason - when difficult child 3 was given an IQ test, he flunked it. By then the words "retarded" or "idiot" were not being used - due to common usage (as insults) these previously medical words had been dropped in favour of something more palatable (and often less clear). "He's borderline," we were told. (borderline WHAT? they never said). But whatever it's called, the meaning was the same.
Now, the trouble with all this - IQ tests were not developed for this. They should never have been used to diagnose with any accuracy, anybody who is far away from the middle-of-the-road. This means IQ testing is increasingly inaccurate the further away from the midline of the population that you go. Either highly intelligent, or not. Also, anybody being tested who would not have been included in the original groups whoich were tested when developing the basis for comparison - the tests are useless here too.
Historically, IQ testing was designed to be able to rank people according to intelligence, from the normal spectrum. But kids with autism would not have been included in the original testing - they would have been tucked into an institution somewhere.
It was after the tests had been developed that someone had the bright idea of taking these tests into the institutions. But the tests were designed to be done by people who were predominantly white, American, attending mainstream schooling and in good health. Even then, these tests are only ever a rough guide, the error in them is still quite high. You cannot say with any accuracy that your child has an IQ of, say, 143.6 because such a score comes with a wide error range usually of plus or minus 10 points. The error range will vary depending on the sub-score range and the inherent errors in those. The wider the discrepancy between the sub-scores, the less accurte will be any final averaged-out IQ score.
This didn't stop the early testers who enthusiastically applied this new and wonderful tool to every child they could. Of course if you try to apply the test to a child who is non-verbal (or who simply doesn't care about answering the questions) then the eventual score will be highly inaccurate. I remember watching an episode of "Quincy ME" where Quincy fought hard to allow an autistic child to be tested again, but with time limits removed. Solving the medical case required Quincy to prove that this particular child had superior problem-solving skills but when given standard IQ tests this kid scored very very low. But when Quincy observed the child he saw that the child simply wasn't interested in doing what the tester asked. The autistic child was not motivated (as a normal child would have been) to do what was asked, when he was asked. However, the child did comply, he sat and looked at it for a long time and then once he began to actually move puzzle pieces around he solved the problem rapidly.
It takes a long time for old ideas to be changed. "Idiot savant" gave way to "autistic savant" and I think even the "savant" term is being lost. The whole point of the original term was the contradiction in it, the oxymoron. The semblance of high capability coupled with "the light's on but nobody's home."
The trouble (for neurological medicine) now is, we know that somebody IS home and is very much on the job.
I'm not certain what the current acceptable term is, but we still use the term "autistic savant" to describe difficult child 3. Maybe this is what you can teach the school counsellor to use, if she must use any such term.
I'm including a link to Trevor Clarke's work - you will see that he got his PhD on the topic of using splinter skills to help autistic kids to diversify and do better in school.
http://sites.google.com/site/autismresearchaustralasia/new-south-wales/trevor-clark
Maybe show this to the school counsellor and re-educate her.
For every person you successfully re-educate, you have one more ally and one less idiot.
Marg