978-1572305441

Frankie 173
with ASD, their prodigious memory, their fascination with the visible,
their love of facts and details, but also their difficulty with inferring
something from what is not seen and the difficulty in generalization, abstraction,
and conceptual thought. It is important to understand this
learning style, this way of seeing the world so as to teach children with
ASD at school. Both Frankie’s teacher and Janice, Heather’s mother, had
an intuitive understanding of this and were able to capitalize on their
knowledge to enter the world of the child they were working with and
challenge that child to reach up to another developmental level. The
key was not to expect Frankie and Heather to follow the standard curriculum
or the usual parenting guidelines, but for adults to first adapt to
the child’s way of thinking and then move the child along his or her own
developmental pathway.
What must it be like to remember all the flags of the world, all the
flags around town? Frankie solemnly tells me that each flag is different.
I suppose that is true, but my memory is not good enough to visualize
these differences in any detail. I hear Frankie’s voice asking me, in a
gently mocking tone, if I am the same person who sat here last week in
this apple orchard or a different one. As I get up to walk home, I resolve
not to make any superfluous gestures. It is very difficult, but once I
master it, even for a moment, the atmosphere becomes very still. I imagine
that Frankie and Heather already know such stillness when they
look at and discern the patterns that are invisible to us. They already
know the rule about superfluous gestures. No school had to teach them
that.