White Knuckle Parenting: The Geo Bowl & the Inclusion Problem

A little more than a week ago, I got an email from a parent at my son Jack's school. It started out with this happy greeting: "Great news! Your child was a top performer in the Geo Bowl quiz and has thus been selected to be on the 4th grade Geography Bowl team."

Naturally, I panicked immediately.

I am, of course, beyond proud of my son for qualifying to be on a Geo Bowl team. I will show up on Geo Bowl day and cheer on his team as they compete against the other fourth grade teams in this quiz show-style competition. No matter how it goes down, I will be so proud of him.

That said, I can't imagine a situation more fraught with landmines. I am terrified of how this could go down. See, Jack is my son with autism. He is incredibly smart and has a great memory, and it doesn't surprise me in the least that he did well on his geography quiz.

Unfortunately, a live quiz show format is almost specifically designed to flummox my son. Kids with autism tend to need extra time to process information and form answers, making quick responses difficult. Verbal communication on demand, which is needed to answer quiz show questions, is not easy for my son either. Add in some extra sensory overload from an audience and an unfamiliar situation, and Jack is likely to not just neglect to answer questions, but have a hard time remaining at the table. The only thing that could make it worse would be to add the pressure of the possibility of letting down your team. Oh, right.

My panic intensified the day Jack came home with a 35-page study booklet and an assignment to learn all of the material, but to be entirely responsible for the information on three of the pages as well as the capitals and state abbreviations for Texas through Wyoming. After working with Jack a little and determining that our only hope was to concentrate only on his specific information, we checked out his assignment—pages 32 through 34. 

Dagnabbit. Jack got the U.S. territories.

I'm not entirely sure that before last week Jack even knew there were U.S. territories and now he has to learn all about them. (Do you know that there are U.S. territories? There are five. Go ahead and name them. I'll wait.*)

I've already told you that Jack is smart. In addition to his regular homework (which is hard enough to convince him to do), we have been working hard every night studying flash cards that we made for the Geo Bowl. Even though Jack is not all that into the idea of the competition, he understands that he is on a team and that he has a responsibility to do his best.

Here's the thing: I trust in Jack and I trust in his intelligence, but I worry that he is going to have a tough time because of his disability. Now, as long as Jack does his best, I don't much care if he answers a single question right. 

The problem is that the other kids on his team are likely to care if he is able to answer questions right.

I worry that the other kids and their parents aren't going to understand why the Geo Bowl is such a hard situation for Jack. They likely won't know about processing time and sensory overload. They will just know that the team was asked a question from page 33 and that page was assigned to Jack.  

The fallout could be epic.

The goal for special education students is to include them as much as possible in general education. This Geo Bowl is a wonderful example of inclusion—my son isn't the only special education child to participate and this is a great opportunity to show the typical students that kids like Jack are smart and fun and great additions to the team.

Yet this Geo Bowl also shows the failure of inclusion when not done right. The students like Jack are being asked to meet the typical kids entirely on their ground. Jack's brain isn't wired the same way as the other kids and yet he is being asked to compete as if it were. Ideally, the typical kids would meet Jack and his classmates at least halfway. I have plans to talk to the teachers and other parents, but I'm concerned that Jack is going to be on his own. I just hope that the other students on his team know enough about autism to know how hard Jack is working even if it doesn't look like he is. I'm worried, however, that this won't be the case.

For me, if Jack can handle sitting through the entire Geo Bowl competition, much less answer any questions, I will consider it a huge accomplishment. I just wish I could know that the other people in the room will see it the same way.

* The five U.S. territories are Puerto Rico, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Guam.

Jean, a.k.a. Stimey, writes a personal blog at Stimeyland. You can find her on Twitter as @Stimey and on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/Stimeyland.