A Short Personal Spectrum History and Motivating Remembrance of Being Different
Peggy Magilen
Spectrum individuals are not understood and are pressured to be different. Nearly half of my life, I was driven to be other than who I was/am.
Raised in the 1950’s, I was free to run barefoot in the summer, play street baseball with the neighborhood kids, and relish alone moments riding my bike on nearby streets, reveling in the sunshine and the sounds of birds.
Kindergarten through third grade went well, but fourth came, and I was terrified. K-3rd learning, the pedagogical time for “learning to read,” had integrated somehow into that presence I was on the bicycle: open, receptive, happy and honored by life. Fourth grade arrived, and now the time for “reading to learn” was an intense turn to the realm of information, language and mathematical facts and figures flooding my consciousness as flattened information, all of it invasive like the sights and sounds of a chaotic city.
My ability to understand and integrate overwhelmed, I began to memorize any decipherable information pieces I could grab onto, feeling my actual survival was at stake. Calmed just a bit by this method I adopted, I continued through school, never feeling free, safe, or encouraged to access my global learning abilities again. I was seen by teachers as the good, careful and cooperative student in the lower grades and likely the quiet, polite but driven student in the upper.
Fast forward…
A teacher straight out of college, I returned to teaching in 1997, after taking a break to raise family. With my return to the classroom, I found 15% of my students each year were children on the ADD-autism spectrum. Exploring some in those in-between-teaching years, I had been exposed to and was largely changed by modes of knowing and learning that were outside our primary western focus on just information.
This knowledge and different view allowed me to meet and honor each person right where they were, for who they were and how they functioned. I therefore met each of my students in this way, and in the 90’s soon realized I had a strangely familiar, intuitive and global understanding about these different kids who were showing up in greater and greater numbers.
From this background of recognition and discoveries, please read what I assert needs to be known about ‘atypical,’ Attention Differently Directed, ADD-autism spectrum individuals.
