A Quick Intro to My Ineffective Parents Substack
I hope this isn't confusing...
I get confused easily, and I’m making the assumption that maybe 50% of you do too - that’s a fair split, right?
So I have a page over on Facebook for talk about ADHD, ASD, and PDA. There are a few comics, because as most of you know, illustration is my outlet as well as my job, and there are a few posts in general about those conditions.
I have a background in education as well as experience of working with children to get their emotions/thoughts/general silliness down on paper. That combined with lived experience of ADHD, and a teenage son with ASD and PDA, means that I spend a lot of time thinking up and reflecting on organisation and education strategies that can be successful for anyone grappling with general demand avoidance right through to PDA. It’s not easy.
One of the hardest things to navigate with PDA is traditional education. Unfortunately, it's difficult to find alternatives that will allow the same outcomes (such as GCSEs).
We have some methods that seem to work, one of which is to provide a choice of tasks/multi-tasks that can be picked up and put down in a non-linear way until a task is complete. This happens over weeks, not hours.
I tried this because this method works for me (ADHD) and supports the boredom factor. I've never naturally worked in a linear way. A page order or list doesn't translate to a working order in my head.
The place where you run into problems is when you have to build on knowledge. Maths is the obvious example - you can't do long division without first having an understanding of what division is.
That's why creative subjects tend to be a good place for non-linear learners. Experimentation yields results. Having a wide range of thought processes and alternate approaches is what makes you stand out. However, you still have to annotate, document, and repeat to refine your work in preparation for final pieces. That's the hard part. Repetition.
If you don't understand why this would be difficult for a demand avoidant person, the only analogy I can make is that of writing the same word over and over again. Eventually you get bored. For me, that is accompanied with a grinding feeling in my stomach and the urge to move away from the task after about 10 iterations. For a PDAer, they most likely wouldn't be able to even start.
So what does that mean for teaching and learning with a PDA student?
It means you need to forget everything you think you know about how learning works. If you're neurotypical, you might find this really difficult to understand (in the same way neurodivergent people find traditional teaching methods nonsensical).
I wanted a space to share information and talk about these things, and here seems like a good place. The Facebook page is here