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One may ask, “What is the purpose of even doing such an activity in the first place?” My answer is that this process mimics education at its’ very core. A teacher, parent, therapist assigns a student work to be done. The student completes the work and hands it back in. Over time, the work becomes more and more complex and subtle as the student’s skills progress. ShoeboxTasks® are at the very beginning level of this educational process and these Tasks are helping to establish this educational relationship that exists between adult and child. The following example is not related to ShoeboxTasks® but it does say much about autism and how it may frequently manifest in social settings. I consulted to a fifth-grade classroom where a student, diagnosed with autism, was refusing to learn how to divide numbers because it made no sense to him and he saw no reason to learn it. To his teacher’s credit, she did not write him off as being willful but knew this refusal had something to do with autism. As a consultant, I knew that unless the process of division made logical sense to him, he was not going to just accept learning it. I was aware that the boy lived on a nearby farm and that his family raised chickens. He loved caring for the chickens. I made a division problem out of eggs and chickens (there were 20 eggs and 10 chickens, if each chicken laid the same number of eggs, how many eggs did each chicken lay?) Once he realized the application for division, he became open to learning it. The high interest in the task opened the door for this to happen! No one gets it right with these children the first time, every time! The process we all practice is Present the activity, Observe and Assess how the student does, Re-structure the activity (if necessary), Present the “newly structured” activity, observe/assess, repeating the steps ad infinitum. This is a valuable method of teaching and very exciting when we get it right.
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