They Might Be Curly Giants!

This weekend marks the start of a new phase of Ajab’s education as I have started him off on how to use the pc. On Saturday, I sat him down in front of our pc, fired up MS Word and asked him to type out the alphabets from A to M, which is what he and his classmates had been taught in school. Little did I realise that he could recognize all twenty-six letters already.

I’m starting him off early on using the pc, even though it’s not in his ’syllabus’ in school, because I was concerned about the slow pace at which his speech is developing. As yet, the only word he readily utters is ‘car’. Occasionally he’d say other mono or duo-syllable words like ‘duck’ or ‘water’, but he would seldom say it when we ask him to. Not having a speech therapist in school for the past few months isn’t helping either - the school is having difficulty in recruiting a new speech therapist still.

In any case I’m thinking that in today’s highly connected IT environment, what better way for him to communicate than via the pc. As show in the case of Amanda Baggs, a very articulate autistic woman, but not in the vocal sense. She has severe functional autism and has never spoken, but read her blog (yes, she types out her posts herself) and you’ll know how intelligent this woman is.

I’m not giving up hope that Ajab will one day learn to get out of his bubble and talk like a normal toddler, but I’m equipping him with the tools he’ll need to survive in today’s world.

Even if it means typing with one finger, one letter at a time, although I hope he’ll learn to type properly in future.

But for now, it’s simply typing out the alphabets at his own pace. I guess he’s good at it because he has very good matching skills and memory. Initially I had to show him where each alphabet was on the QWERTY keyboard. Once he recognized each alphabet and their location, he could do it on his own without much help, although he insisted that I say out loud each alphabet as he pressed the keys.

What impressed Trin and I was the fact that he could sit there in front of the pc and really concentrate on the task, which is something that rarely happens in class. The fact that Ayeed was asleep and Maya was not in the room to distract him helped, of course, but it’s still a rare occurrence to see Ajab sit still for more than five minutes when he’s not watching TV.

Accompanying him in his hand wasn’t the usual string (he still has a string fetish to this day!) but some cotton filling from a cushion he dug out. He kept it between his thumb and forefinger, rolling it, occasionally rubbing it against his nose as he sat typing the alphabets.

It took him a while before he managed to complete typing A to Z. What took so long wasn’t the difficulty in finding the alphabets on the keyboard - he kept repeating his task when just a single letter was out of sequence, even though he’d already reached as far as U or V (he seems to get V and Z mixed up a lot). Whenever he makes a mistake, he’d press the backspace all the way to the start and re-did the whole alphabet all over again, even though I told him he only needed to remove the letters that are out of sequence and not the whole thing.

Well, he did this over and over and over again. I think he must have given it 8 or 9 tries before finally getting it right in typing all twenty-six letters from A to Z in sequence. I’m amazed he didn’t scream and give up in frustration. He simply gave a sigh, dropped his shoulders, backspaced and started all over without much fuss.

I’ll be continuing this ‘training’ until he’s proficient enough with the alphabets before starting him off on spelling, probably next month. All this is of course not taught in school, so I’m hoping he’ll get the hang of it and be happy with his progress.