'CLICK'

As an educator I spend much time thinking and experimenting with how to deliver information in order to get the ‘click’- that magical moment when your students ‘get it’. The bell curve tells us that there are always the ones who get it even before you finish the lecture, and those who will struggle after you’ve explained it a second or even third time.  My discipline of being a studio professor means that much of my teaching can be down and dirty technical information on just how to accomplish a task. If they can’t get that part down, it is quite difficult to take them to the conceptual level of art making where they ultimately want to be.

Being a parent of children with autism also makes me focus on that same ‘click’. Many of those who parent, or have close relationships with children on the spectrum, wonder if our kids will ever have the neurological pathways to make certain tasks click in their brains. We struggle through therapies, change their diets, and continually try new approaches hoping for the magic moment. And when it comes, as it did for us this week, do we know any more about that magic then we did prior?

This week Xander began to talk. Not in sentences mind you, but he has definitively made the connection that a word equals an object or action that he desires. You could almost see a sparkle in his eye like that pathway had just lit up like a circuit board in his brain.  Suddenly he’ll repeat almost any single word you say when he wants something.  We went from a 3-5 word vocabulary to laughing at the end of our therapy session when he said cracker, cookie, run, outside, book, ball, bubble, come….all in a 30 minute block of time. Yes, at 3.5 years old we still have a long way to go, but today- we ‘clicked’!

The truth is, however, that I have no greater insight to that moment as I ever did.  I have no idea whether it was one therapy or another, or simply his time. My role as an educator and my role as a parent remains the same: to bend and twist and manipulate the information in any means possible to find the magical click. Because when it happens – there’s just nothing else like it in the world.