A little Mentat

Now that I know what to look for, I can recognize when Ezra is reacting to a situation in a purely Aspergian way. While his father Jason has finally mastered (at twenty-nine) the social necessity of small talk (I still find this hard to believe), Ezra is still struggling to understand why his friends and sister are frustrated, angry, or hurt with his treatment of them. 

Yitzhak is the son of an Israeli woman, Navah, who lives in our apartment building. She and I have been acquaintances for a few years and our little families have become fast friends. Isis plays with Yitzhak's two-year-old sister Levona, and Ezra and Yitzhak terrorize the playground together. Yitzhak is a very mature, active, and generous boy; his competitiveness feeds Ezra's instinct to always be right, always win, with the result that Yitzhak is almost always frustrated. I like the fact that Ezra has a boy to go ride bikes with, run around and get sweaty with, but I can see already the difficulty that Ezra is going to have with friends he tries to control. 

Most of Ezra's peers can't appreciate his instinct for debate and reasoning, which he's honed to an admirable skill. Ten times out of ten, Ezra will want to discuss with you how what you did was logically incorrect, and therefore why he was not in the wrong.  Couple this with the dozens of tiny things that annoy Ezra physically on any given day (the way his socks are bunching in his shoes, how bright the light is, the whine of machinery, the itch of his bike helmet, the scratch of his t-shirt tag) and you have a little rationalist attorney, highly sensitive, on the verge of a meltdown if just one more thing goes wrong. 

In no uncertain terms, the administration and teachers at his Montessori school have made it clear that for Ezra to attend for first grade there, he will need a shadow tutor with him. He is easily distracted during times that he needs to work by himself, but thrives brilliantly with one-on-one attention. Rather than spend the money for private school tuition and a tutor (and preschool for Isis) I am still determined to find an alternative solution. My hope is for some lively, creative (vegetarian) person who can work thirty hours a week as a nanny/tutor for both of them, but so far this dream individual has yet to appear. More than likely Isis will have to endure a few more months of preschool, and Ezra will piggyback with another homeschooling family from August to December (when I finish my own degree). 

Homeschooling does seem, at this point, the only conceivable opportunity for Ezra to learn to his abilities but not be disturbed and distracted by a "school" environment. I feel like this first year has basically been a scratch---- it's true that he's learned things he was "supposed" to learn, like letters and numbers. It's how he learned them that really concerns me. Ezra has no reverence for meaninglessness, and I struggle to find what was meaningful for him in kindergarten. Art class, he tells me. And chess.