Living a Dream

I saw a saying the other day from Dr. Temple Grandin.  The gist of it is that we spend too much time focusing on student’s weaknesses and not enough time on their strengths.  As a teacher of students with Asperger’s Syndrome, and adult with AS as well, I firmly accept that statement as sadly accurate.  Even some schools that are supposedly designed to help students with special needs design their curricula around trying to make the students “fit in” with society by “improving” on their weaknesses, rather than helping them learn to use their strengths to get by in the world.  Unfortunately, education has often been too focused on what kids cannot do rather than what they can do.  This former way of teaching is where the national standards (known as Common Core) are heading since the standardized testing that students are forced to undergo every spring are based on just this idea - what can they NOT do?  The latter way of teaching is the way that many PRIVATE schools teach, a very individualized, student-centered approach.  Unfortunately for many kids, private school is out of the reach of their families financially, and they are forced to hear, day in and day out, what they cannot do...

Recently, I had an opportunity to have a book of mine published.  This book, For the Blood of the Lamb, Part 1, is about a Stone Age vampire who meets Moses, King Saul and King Solomon in Biblical Israel.  I spent quite a bit of time researching the Bible, biblical history, and vampire history, not just in order to write the novel, but because I was interested in them.  However, this was not something I was able to do in school since I attended a public school.  I had to wait until I was in college and beyond to start REALLY researching these topics, and there was no one to tell me that I couldn’t research them.  Also standing in my way, were a number of teachers in Middle School, High School and College, both as an Undergraduate and Graduate student, who at some point or another, regularly berated my writing style, choice of topics or interpretations of what I was writing.  For example, while taking a Creative Writing class as an undergraduate at the University of Connecticut, I consistently received Cs and Ds on my writing assignments because, in the words of my professor, “Your surprise endings are not appropriate for stories - no one likes to be surprised.”  She almost convinced me to stop writing.  In fact, I DID stop writing fiction for a few years after that, partly because of the fact that I was doing a Masters Degree in Paleontology, but ALSO because I got such negative reviews from this single professor.

You see, negative comments can hurt, even to the point where they can end someone’s dream.  I let that college professor’s comments get inside my head and injure my self-esteem.  At the time, I did not know that I had a neurological disorder (Asperger’s is on the Higher Functioning end of the Autism Spectrum), since it only became an official psychological diagnosis in 1994, the year I was taking the creative writing class.  Had I known, I might have even let the criticism (which were not constructive in the least) affect me more than it did.  I might have stopped writing all together, thinking that my defect made it impossible for me to become an author.

However, that never happened.  I began writing again this past year, and, in December, I published my first novel.  It is now available on Amazon.com in paperback and Kindle versions.  Not only that, I put it up for free on Monday on a 5-day promotion.  Apparently, it caught the eye of a blogger, who then posted it on their free picks for the day blog as a Wild Card Pick in Fantasy/SciFi/Horror.  Within 12 hours, it was on the Amazon.com Kindle Top 100 Free Sellers List for Alternative History.  Not bad for someone who was told, by a college professor that he would never be a writer, huh?

So, when you talk to your kids teachers, and they talk about what your child is doing wrong, be sure to ask them about their strengths.  Make sure that their teachers are helping them learn their strengths and how to be the person they can be.  Who knows - maybe one day your child will show a creative streak that rivals that of Steven Spielberg, or becomes the next Albert Einstein.  Einstein flunked out of school since his teachers thought he would never amount to anything, but we know where HE ended up!