It's All Over but the Clean-up

Well, friends and Romans, the seven-week journey of my summer job is nearing landfall. It’s all over but the clean-up. (That happens on Monday.)

We started with a full week of training, and then spent six weeks teaching theater games and making films with kids with Asperger’s Syndrome. This is an approach to teaching them social skills – the key deficit for people with Asperger’s, the one that all of them have in common to one degree or another. And an amazingly effective apporach it is, based on the gains I saw during the summer.

They know they’re there to learn social skills (and most, though not all, know that they have Asperger’s). But that’s essentially forgotten, and pretty quickly. The games are fun, and there are dozens of them, so each camper has at least two favorites. We played many of them each day. They get to be hams, to have their intelligence challenged, and to use their imagination nearly all day. In the moment, there’s no awareness going to “Hey! I just made sustained eye contact!” or, “Hey! I just conveyed real feeling with a loud tone of voice!” Or moved their bodies in coordinated ways. Or employed rapid, flexible thinking.

All these apparently small achievements are monumental for Aspies.

After they’ve played the games 20 times, it begins to sink in unconsciously that they are capable of initiating a full connection with another person (or entering a new environment, or doing all sorts of things that previously frightened them) and that good things will usually result. How wonderful is that?

There are many social pragmatics programs out there, and from their popularity, I’m inferring that they must be at least somewhat effective. But from what I’ve read (and heard from satisfied parents on the last day of camp), none of them pack that vital X-factor the theater games do: The gains in social skills come directly from the goals of the activity itself, which just happens to look like a fun game – not a “program” or a “lesson.”

Yet there are dozens of games (and more being created all the time, all over the world), and each targets a different set of social skills. So, they can be craftily combined to target specific kids, or to achieve carefully chosen group goals.

As you can tell, I’m fairly excited about the gains I saw kids make in six short weeks.

And it was both exciting and heartbreaking to see our teens – both the macho, crass, aggressive ones and the awkward, sweet, retiring ones – run up to us and give us hugs and good wishes and good-bye cards. We all milled around at the end of the day; no one wanted to say good-bye. When that last kid (who happened to be one of my favorites) got in his bus, we counselors looked around balefully, shrugged our shoulders and silently headed for the rooms to clean up.

(Of course, there was a wrap-up party last night, and it was boisterous -- a great way to blow off all that pent-up poignancy.)

It was a grueling summer session, five hours of intense contact a day with kids who often can barely stand 10 minutes of such (not to mention the hours of paperwork every day). But I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything. We made a difference in their lives – and they sure affected me pretty deeply. My favorites will be on my mind for weeks, I’m sure.

Asperger's Teens are Also Just Teens

As many of you know, I'm in the process of earning a masters degree in counseling psychology. Along these lines, my new job involves teaching social skills to young people with Asperger’s Syndrome, via theater work. Before I started, I knew a little bit about the disorder itself, and the people who deal with it. I learned a lot more during training week (and all the reading that led up to it). But nothing can prepare one for the infinite variability of real people.

My students are all teenagers, from 15 to 18. I’ve lived with them only five hours a day for a mere two days (and a bunch of talking and writing about them before and after each day, as part of the job). What has struck me more than anything is the same thing that stood out when I started my internship at a college counseling center this past school year: People are people. With disorders, without disorders, these kids are basically typical teens. They are warm, smart, funny and talented. And they are exasperating, underachieving and worrisome. Sometimes all in the same kid. Sometimes all at once.

It’s been very poignant to watch them quickly divvy up into cliques. Each kid is falling into patterned teenage behavior that serves the purpose of identifying them to the larger crew: “I’m a cool kid. You can’t touch me.” Or, “I’m hilarious and over-the-top; I’ll do anything goofy to get your attention.” Or, “I’m mature. I don’t notice the offensive things you do, so don't expect me to join in.”

The particularly difficult thing is to watch the “cool” kids. First of all, they are, of course, anything but. Moreover, though, every once in a while, a little fissure appears in their veneer, and what peeks through is an eager little kid (much littler than the age they are trying to act) who just wants to play. One of our projects in our brief time with them (the summer session lasts only six weeks) will be to see if we can help those young people to let out their inner kid, before society gets them to squash it for good.

That’s a pretty good description of how I want to approach them. I’ve already slipped into a more parental, finger-shaking mode, and I know very well that will just put us on opposite sides of a six-week war, with no winners. We don’t want to represent “society” to them. We want to help them at least take another step in learning who they are, and bringing that wealth to each interaction out in the world.

More thoughts on this anon.

Constraints and Creativity

This summer, my job will be helping to teach kids with Asperger's Syndrome social skills through the practice of theater games and projects. To prepare for this work, the director of the project assigned some very interesting reading, including Improvisation for the Theater by Viola Spolin (got to love that name). While laying out a plan for teaching improvisation skills, she also manages to ladle in some pretty interesting comments on the nature of creativity and mental health. Like this one:

Abandoned to the whims of others, we must wander daily through the wish to be loved and the fear of rejection before we can be productive.... Having to thus look to others to tell us where we are, who we are, and what is happening results in a serious (almost total) loss of personal experiencing. We lose the ability to be organically involved in a problem.... We do not know our substance, and ...insight is lost to us.

Theatrical improv exercises, as Spolin lays them out, provide one great workshop for resolving this problem:

The energy released to solve the problem [of improvising a scene], being restricted by the rules of the game and bound by group decision, creates an explosion -- or spontaneity -- and, as is the nature of explosions, everything is torn apart, re-arranged, unblocked.

I haven't tried her method yet, of course, but in theory, I agree with her and am excited by the possibilities. As a life-long creative person, and as a student of counseling psychology, I am energized by the connections between solving creative problems in my work, and "solving" the "problem" of daily life. Her books hints, not so subtly, that these two dynamics are twin siblings.

She isn’t talking about psycho-drama (experiencing emotions based on my past, on-stage). She doesn’t think that’s what helps us in this way (it might help in another, more cathartic or insight-oriented way). The exercise of setting up a creative challenge is more like life itself, and, if properly harnessed, could be a more suitable way to build day-to-day efficacy and agency.

In both life and her exercises, one has the ever-exciting task of "making something from nothing." I feel that challenge upon sitting down to write an essay or song -- and upon waking up in the morning to face an average work-day. They two are not identical, granted, but the feeling of starting each them is somewhat the same, in my experience.

In creative work, Spolin argues that we work best when we dream up certain constraints upon the "something from nothing" challenge. If set up adroitly, the tension between the rules and the creative freedom creates energy that intensifies the creative flame. And, of course, the constraints are built right into daily life, as we know all too well. But how often am I able to see them as factors that can elicit and intensify my sense of personal power and wholeness, as can the constraints in a creative game?

Food for thought as I read on and prepare for the week-long training starting a week from today.