Children
with Autism have peculiar behaviors but that does not mean they are wrong.
Their behaviors can be unexpected. After understanding the characteristics of
Autistic children, I feel that it is really not easy for a mainstream school’s
teacher to handle them, because the teacher has other children to focus on and
they are not trained. They do not know how to react to Autistic children’s
actions and behavior. For example, mainstream school teacher may not know that
an Autistic child actually has difficulty listening to instructions so they
might just lose focus and roam around because they do not know what to do. They
need visual instructions and have difficulty in communication.
There is
this new four year old boy in my attachment center and I highly suspect that he
has Autism Spectrum Disorder after understanding these characteristics in this
project. He does not have eye contact with anyone and does not talk to anyone. In
the middle of a lesson, he would just roam around to other classroom. The teachers
in the center did not know what to do, they would just make sure there is
somebody holding on him. Sadly, his parents refused to say anything when I
asked the teacher. I haven’t heard him talk for the past 2 week; he would only
mumble some alien language to himself. He does not sleep and he likes to go
under the mattress cover. None of the children wants to talk to him. A boy from
the Kindergarten 1 class even told me, ‘he always naughty I don’t like him’. It
is kind of heart breaking to hear that. The teachers do not know the right
methods and the boy is left like that. I think his Autism is quite severe and
something has to be done.