<p>Wolfpiper, </p>
<p>if you were my kid ( which you are not but in some ways I sure wish my boys were like you), I’d be pushing you to get a law degree and work in the field of disability rights. It would give you a public voice and it would give you the power to really change things, both for the individuals you would be involved with and on a more cosmic level.</p>
<p>You would make a very successful lawyer–you have the intelligence, drive, tenacity, and voice–</p>
<p>My eldest’s college (Amherst) has an administrative spot on staff reserved one of their own new graduates who is physically disabled. It supplies someone with their first professional job. They’re not allowed to keep it indefinitely; I think perhaps just for a year or so, and then it passes on to another. This gives the student a launching pad to other employment, a chance to prove hm/herself outside of the classroom. They can go “from strength to strength.” </p>
<p>Perhaps it’s being done at other colleges, but if not I think it’s something for people to write to their alma mater or where their child attends. </p>
<p>The content of the job is not disability work. It can be, for example, tending to some policy of the college (recycling program, for example) and making sure it’s happening right. It can relate to student life issues, housing, anything, but it has professional status that any other school would recognize as dignified and educated employment.</p>
<p>Because it’s on campus, the student has already mastered all the physical challenges there, so can concentrate on the work at hand. I’m not sure, but I think the option for continued dorm housing is provided, taken out of salary of course and no longer from the parents’ pockets!</p>
<p>Job Accommodations for People with Learning Disabilities</p>
<p>"The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires that reasonable accommodations be made by employers who have 15 or more employees. Accommodations should be based on the specific needs of the individual with learning disabilities. Employers can claim that a given accommodation is an undue hardship, and can propose a different one. The process of negotiating for reasonable accommodations is one of give and take.</p>
<p>You can request accommodations even if your employer has fewer than 15 workers on the job. It is to your supervisor’s advantage to help you be productive. Even people with learning disabilities who work for themselves need to think about how to incorporate accommodations into their work routines. They must identify their areas of strength and figure out how to get around areas of weakness." </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.ldonline.org/article/9942[/url]”>http://www.ldonline.org/article/9942</a></p>
<p>This information may not help the OP, but may be of interest to some following this thread:</p>
<p>Key Differences Between Section 504 and IDEA </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.wrightslaw.com/howey/504.idea.htm[/url]”>http://www.wrightslaw.com/howey/504.idea.htm</a></p>
<p>nyc,
Is your firm large enough to find a place for him in the law library? We know someone who was disenchanted with practicing law and went to the library side. Has a nicely balanced life, and uses his JD.</p>
<p>I know someone who who is on the autism spectrum – he is in his early 30s and works doing software maintenance and power point presentations for a gov’t agency. Started out as a file clerk. He is very meticulous, it doesn’t involve lots of people skills, and he is full-time and self-supporting. His co-workers are understanding and let him take on new responsibiliites as he feels ready to handle them. This is a HUGE relief to his mom, who has worried for years about he’d function in the real world.</p>
<p>Great thread with wonderful ideas.</p>
<p>We had a partner at my law firm who I’m positive was an Aspie…fit the profile 100% but was over 55, so I’m sure he was not diagnosed. He was a usury expert…he could talk for hours on his spreasheets of interest calculations.</p>
<p>The sad part is that we fired him. It happened right around the time my son was diagnosed, so I knew precious little about Asperger’s at the time. Even if I had been able to advocate for him, I doubt that it would have helped because he ticked off so many people in the firm. He’d get in these email wars with other lawyers…he never got that he was making people really really really mad at him. I think he saw it as sport. Anyway, we fired him about 7 years ago and he hasn’t practiced since.</p>
<p>So many of these stories are sad…</p>
<p>Here’s a fascinating Asperger’s narrative:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/20/070820fa_fact_page[/url]”>Parallel Play | The New Yorker;
<p>SV2, the New Yorker article is really touching.</p>
<p>I do have a couple of suggestions for your nephew, boxsy3. In addition to job induced stress, there is a significant variation in the stress level caused by the environment in which people live and work. I live in an affluent suburb of Boston and lived in Cambridge and NY. One of my colleagues landed at Logan Airport, took the cab back to Boston and said, “I’ve returned to Cambridge Standard Time: Two weeks behind.” I would advise someone like boysx3’s nephew to try to craft a life in a place that operates on a slower time scale and probably with greater tolerance of workplace inefficiency. Similarly, I’d tend to focus on places with lower costs of living – my perception is that in general wages for certain types of jobs (e.g., school teachers) do not vary nearly as much as the cost of living. And finally, I’d suggest doing what you’ve described: looking for jobs that benefit from his strengths and place lower emphasis on his area of deficits. [There are, for example, contractors who produce software or website code. You can contract for some of these online and never have to meet the people. Such a contractor could do one job at a time (not the best business model, but adaptive in this case).]</p>
<p>Let me offer an example. My brother was born into a family of high-achieving academics. Both parents were professors. My father was a brilliant theoretic physicist who was so engulfed in discovering mysteries of the universes that he a) didn’t pick up social cues; and b) was a warm, loving, but relatively distant parent. [Could have been a bit of Asperger’s, but given my limited state of ignorance about Asperger’s, I suspect not]. My older sister, who doesn’t always get social cues, became a clinical neuropsychologists, but as one of the earlier posters suggested, focuses on clinical diagnosis and not treatment (though interestingly, she worked with austistic kids during some college summers). My younger sister, who is superb socially, got a law degree from a strong school. I was probably the golden boy who met all my parents expectations – went as an undergrad to one of the HYPS and graduated magna, went to two of them for grad school, and spent about 10 years as a professor at one of them before going into business. My brother is a sweet kid who never really got the big picture when he’d do reading assignments, was the kid who always got into trouble when his friends instigated something and figured out how not to get caught, and as an adult, never really gets the politics inside the school where he works. He’s always held rigid and simplistic ideas about fairness that get him into trouble. Probably some kind of LD but nothing has ever been diagnosed. Following my older sister and me was a tall order in an academically-oriented family. He decided to go into music as that was an area in which he had some talent and he wouldn’t be competing with his siblings. But, to make a career as a musician, you have to have both talent and a lot of hustle. His talent level was sufficient that with a lot of hustle, he could have made it. But, he doesn’t have any understanding of how to hustle and just assumed that if he was nice to others, they would somehow include him in the gigs. Didn’t happen. In a less competitive arena than the NY area, he might have been able to make a living doing something that he really loved (albeit not a great one). In the NY area, he couldn’t.</p>
<p>My father applied for my brother to every school in the state they lived in for a position as an apprentice teacher – the state had created a path for people with experience to be an apprentice teacher for a year and then to become eligible to be hired as a teacher. My brother got a teaching job and has retained it since then. He is a superb teacher. Kids love him and parents credit him with changing their kids’ lives. However, he has had angered the department head and does not know why. As I said, he is clueless about organizational politics. He’s gotten worse assignments than he should have and didn’t get a promotion he should have received, but he is only a few years away from being able to retire with a full pension. That said, he’s living in a high cost state. The same salary in a lower cost of living state would enable him to have a more comfortable life style and a less stressful life. There might be (might) greater appreciation for having such a gifted teacher come to the district. I advised my brother to move from the NY area years ago to NM or CO (when it was cheap) and where the pace of life was slower. I think both would have improved his life. [The counter to this is that he has always been near his parents and my mother in her 80s in some ways still looks after him in a way that she doesn’t for her other kids]. We’re all concerned about what would happen if he were to lose his job and what will happen when she passes away. </p>
<p>On whether accommodations fail to prepare kids for the cruelties of a capitalist society, I think it is mixed. </p>
<p>On the plus side, I looked at my highly gifted and severely dyslexic son. Since getting some remediation, his reading improved dramatically and his writing is doing so – although he still gets exhausted and then sick from too much reading/writing and still reads and writes very slowly. He’s among the most active participants in all of his classes. But, he now gets 100% extra time on all tests (and typically more if he asks). He’s received only one A- in high school and the rests are evenly divided between A’s and A+'s while taking pretty much all of the honors/AP classes offered. He would not have the same grades without extra time because he reads and writes SO SLOWLY. He attended a private middle school and took their standardized tests (the ERB’s) with accommodation and scored in the 40th percentile. He hasn’t gotten less than an 800 or 5 so far on his SATs/APs but hasn’t yet taken the SAT Reasoning test. This is due in part to improvement in reading and writing that has taken place and in part due to the accommodations. For someone like him, the accommodations enable him to a) be intellectually challenged in school (though he finds almost all of his classes to slow intellectually and we’ve gone to partial homeschooling to get him the challenge); b) be able to demonstrate his capability. Without the accommodations, I suspect that he would have become discouraged and depressed and society might have lost the benefit of a kid who, in my opinion as a tough-grading former Ivy prof, consultant and former hedge fund founder), has real potential to add value at a high level in society.</p>
<p>He’ll have to go to a college (and likely grad school) that enables him to craft a curriculum that doesn’t place so heavy an emphasis on large quantities of reading and writing. And, he’ll have to pick a job where quality of insight and intellect and ability to work with people (he seems to be a confident, quiet leader) will be rewarded and ability to read/write quickly or in large quantities will be reduced. In his case, the ratio of concepts to words has to be high for him to maximally exploit his talents. [For example, I would imagine careers like quantitative hedge fund manager/trader; private equity or VC; psychologist or psychiatrist; economist; physicist; high tech manager/entrepreneur could be crafted to reduce reliance on large volumes of quick reading/writing]. In his case, I think the accommodations have been of great value and he will be able to transition to positions that match his gifts and place lesser emphasis on his deficits. They have enabled a kid to build the skills he’s going to need to be successful. In 4th grade, it took him over an hour to copy (not write, just copy) one paragraph and he was so exhausted that he couldn’t do any other work that day. Without the accommodations, I think he would have said, “I just can’t read or write. Reading and writing hurt me physically. Why bother trying to learn?” But, with the accommodations, he did make progress: Last spring, he almost won his high school’s Moot Court competition (albeit with me reading cases to him and having him dictate some of the briefs – and he was sick for 3 1/2 weeks as a result of all of the reading/writing). [He lost to a kid who was admitted to Harvard but chose to go to Tufts.] He never could have gotten to that point without the accommodations.</p>
<p>On the minus side, if the accommodations don’t really help the kid to build the skills (academic or social) that he/she will need in the cruel world out there, they could well be doing a disservice to the kid as well as to society. I suspect that choosing how to help each kid would require a much clearer ability to a) diagnose; and b) be able to accurately predict that effectiveness of various accommodations and remediation techniques. If we can’t help them, we as a society ought to be preparing them for what will await them. but, I think we could taper into that – why do we have to push them into slots that make them miserable any sooner than we have to? Over time, I think our ability to help with some diagnoses is improving and our ability to diagnose is also getting better (functional MRIs will probably start to transform our ability to figure out what is going on in non-neurotypical brains and later on how to help them).</p>
<p>I don’t think it is ever going to be easy. We’re still worried about my 51 year old brother. Your nephew may not be able to get or hold jobs for which he would be intellectually qualified – but moving to a place where his intellect and skill level may be rarer could help there. I wish you, your sister and her son luck.</p>
<p>CountingDown,</p>
<p>My office hires only MLSs (not JDs) for positions in the library. Also, my intern’s social issues would be problematic even in the library, b/c much of the reference work requires discussion w/ the attorneys and law students. The only position in our office for a person w/ his limitations would be paralegal or clerk - - and he has aspirations beyond those lower level positions.</p>
<p>More troubling than the absence of a suitable professional positon in my office is the fact that I don’t feel I can serve as a reference - - so he may have to eliminate this position from his resume.</p>