Jeopardy Category: Potpourri

Things I've thought about this week:
John Lennon, music thereof
Paul McCartney, ibid
Emphasis on sleep, liminal states, and laziness in lyrics of John Lennon (specifically, a comparison of the lyrics to "I'm Only Sleeping" and "Watching the Wheels"). The listener as Other
"And Your Bird Can Sing" vis a vis "Sailing to Byzantium." Seriously: look at this stanza

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come

compared to

When your bird is broken
will it bring you down
You may be awoken
I'll be round, I'll be round

You tell me that you've heard every sound there is
And your bird can swing
But you can't hear me
You can't hear me

And then I got into this long mental thing (I was in the car a lot this week, driving back and forth to Storybook) about our, well my, relationship to these songs, and that it's sometimes painful to listen to them, b/c of the accumulated historical baggage of singer and listener, though of course not joint historical baggage. And that one of my weirdnesses is that I don't differentiate the Beatles: I don't care whether John or Paul wrote a particular song, and it took until my mid-twenties before I could tell who was singing on particular songs. For that matter, I don't distinguish good Beatles from bad Beatles. (I don't distinguish good Yeats from bad Yeats, either, though there are some poems I don't like.) I had a friend in grad school who only wanted to read one book by any given author, b/c he figured he'd already "gotten" the author and didn't need to read more. His fiancee and I had a really tough time explaining why we didn't agree (okay, why he was wrong).

But that's not what I was going to write about: it was actually about this book I'm reading, the one with ASPERGER in giant letters on the back cover. It's edited by Margot Prior, and the title is completely forgettable, though I'll probably amazon it in a minute. Indeed: Learning and Behavior Problems in Asperger Syndrome. I have a feeling it would have sent me further into a depressive funk if I'd read it when Primera was little, b/c it's quite clinical about the deficits and quite weak on inspirational stories. There is one account by a person w/AS/HFA/what-have-you (Wendy Lawson, very worthwhile to read) and absolutely NOTHING by a parent. Random thought: I'm not someone who loves reading accounts by people w/HFA, though I did used to read some of the alt.support.autism boards back in the day. I don't feel this overwhelming need to understand what's going through my daughter's head, b/c she's verbal enough to tell me, and we're enough alike that I can kind of extrapolate the rest (oh, yes, I have my shadow syndrome issues also, including fascination with certain visual stimuli, rhythmic repetitive motions, and obsessiveness, not to mention, God knows, pedantic speech. I think of it as superior language skills).

But back to what's in the book: it actually has a ton of good information on the kinds of tests to request in a speech evaluation that gets at pragmatics and some of those other hard-to-quantify deficits (double meanings, ambiguous situations). We had a very fine speech eval done at Yale back in the day, but nothing comparable since, and the school speech pathologist is an intelligent but under-informed woman who thinks I'm malingering at CSE's, trying to get things that Primera doesn't need. At any rate, this book has a rad article by Janine Manjiviona entitled "Assessment of Specific Learning Difficulties" that describes some of the assessment tools, in particular those for speech and language assessment. Manjiviona notes

Because many children with AS score extremely well (or within the average, at least on [the CELF and the TOLD], other measures...are required to tap into the child's sometimes very subtle deficits in social communication language skills (commonly referred to as "pragmatic skills"...)

She describes the TOPS (Test of Problem Solving--Revised), which "is designed to assess language-based critical thinking skills; questions focus on a wide range of skills, such as clarifying, analyzing, and generating solutions and affective thinking. THe TOPS-R provides an approximate age-equivalence level of a child's social reasoning skills." Yep, that sounds about right. There's also the TLC, "a normed test that assesses a variety of abstract language skills, including the ability to make logical inferences from verbal information and comprehend the subtleties of language (e.e., understanding ambiguous words and sentences)" (62-63). Anyway, the book's worth reading for that one chapter alone, though there's also a good article by Helen Tager-Flusberg on language and communication deficits (haven't finished reading the whole book--the essays are variable in quality/usefulness). On the off-chance that someone happens by b/c they're googling these issues, hope this is helpful.