With all the hubbub related to coaching the Lego League team towards completion of their challenge and preparation for competition, I forgot to mention one rather important wrinkle that’s affected the team's work.

 

I strongly believe that one of the team has Asperger’s Syndrome.

 

I’ve talked with his teacher (who’s also my daughter’s teacher) to see if she observed anything unusual about this child’s social interaction and skills.  She also noticed a number of the same unusual issues, but was treating them as if this was a person who simply wasn’t acting their age.  There was no other additional help being provided – my guess is that the parents aren’t aware this child is different from other children his age.

 

This child needs additional help, some sort of counseling and attention, so that he can perform better in school and develop normal relationships with other children. 

 

The parents may not recognize this need as they may also be Asperger’s or may have family members with Asperger’s.  By comparison against family, their child may seem completely normal.  If the parents are prone to Asperger’s, they may also not recognize the issues their child faces – period.

 

I’ve had to referee several heated interactions resulting from the different behavior manifested by this child.  Kicking him off the team was not in his best interest nor in the best interest of the rest of the team; these kids all need to learn to work together, regardless of their diverse abilities.

 

What the heck to do?  Point this out to the principal?  Leave my sentiments with his teacher?

 

  10:36:03 AM    comment []

 

“Lego Mom” is the sad and shaken woman nursing a stiff cocktail at home after four grueling hours cooped up with ten boys between the ages of 9 and 11.

 

She chants to herself, sotto voce: One more week…one more week…

 

Before I had kids, I refused to subscribe to gender-based behavior.  I admit it; I was wrong.  It’s a whole ‘nother world to be a boy.

 

I spent most of the afternoon refereeing arguments breaking out between personalities; rather than try to find a middle ground or alternate path to solve a disagreement, they continually pushed back at each other, trying to make it clear who was “top dog”.  I don’t ever recall seeing this kind of thing when I spend time with my daughter and her girlfriends en masse; there’s more concern about who’s being fair and equitable, not who’s right.  I’d seen this same phenomenon recently among adult women and completely forgot the application and corollary when it came to the boys on the team.

 

Lucky me, the kids had no school yesterday; it meant they had an opportunity to spend extra time together on the Lego challenge.  They needed it badly since the competition is this coming Saturday and they’ve only completed a tenth of the programming required to run the entire competition.

 

We reserved the computer lab, committed to spending noon to 4:00 p.m. working on the remaining objectives.  They were to spend the first three and a half hours on engineering, programming and research, with the last half hour meeting about remaining objectives, planning and clean-up. I brought a gallon of Kool-Aid and a tub of popcorn, apples and Chex-mix to keep them running; I made them take a break outdoors for ten minutes every hour on the hour. 

 

The snacks and the breaks helped a lot – yet by 3:00 p.m., they’d had enough of each other.  They were at each others’ throats constantly for that last hour.  The tension was taking its toll; our brightest team member asked me if there were any repercussions to dropping out of the competition.  The rest of the crew gave that momentary consideration and then went back to duking it out, scrapping over every little Lego and each command in the program.

 

At 3:45 p.m., I snapped.

 

They were supposed to be meeting about the last objectives and the order in which all of the activities must be sequenced at the competition.  They weren’t making any progress, hung up on their continuing pissing matches about who was the big dog.

 

I barked at them.  I am the big dog.

 

I didn’t say “bee-yatch”, but yeah, that’s what it took.

 

They got the 2-minute riot act at that point.  I explained that I could pull the plug on the whole thing, right now, after all the work they’d done to that point, simply because they weren’t being respectful to me and to each other.  They needed the reminder that 25% of the competition score was awarded for teamwork, and that they weren’t acting like a team nor were they treating me like a team facilitator.  They also needed the reminder that they’d just spent 30+ man hours – more than they would have the rest of the week, attending meetings every afternoon – and they needed to knuckle down and stay focused for 15 more minutes if they were going to get anything constructive out of that time, or make the rest of the week more successful.

 

Maybe I should have done that at 2:00 p.m.

 

I suspect I still would have had to do that at 4:00 p.m. again, though.

 

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My daughter said to me this morning as she sipped her cocoa: Lego League this afternoon…

 

She trailed off, as if fatigued.  I could see it in her face, the resignation and frustration.  It was like looking into a mirror.

 

Yeah, babe, I told her, every afternoon this week.  And then we’re done; no Lego League next week or after.

 

She shut her eyes, as if to savor the idea.

 

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Out of the clear blue, I got a call late last evening; it was last year’s Lego League coach.  I don’t know how he got my unlisted number; must have been through the principal.  He asked how things were going for the team.  I told him the kids were making progress, that the largest obstacles were trying to get them to act cohesively as a team, that two of the kids were members of his team last year.  He validated my observation – that getting them to work together was the biggest challenge, that last year’s all-boy team had no initiative when it came to research, and shared observations about the two boys from last year’s team that were spot-on.  So it wasn’t just me, I said; I’d wondered if it was something I wasn’t doing that caused the boys to continually one-up each other, or if it was the dynamic of a female coach/predominantly male team that was an issue.  Nope, it wasn’t.

 

He then told me another elementary school across town is looking for someone to do the same thing for them, start a Lego League team for competition.

 

Ah, that was the agenda, the real reason he called.  I made the suggestion that the school start now with an after-school enrichment program where the kids simply spend time together on Lego projects.  It would have been much easier to make a team of kids who’d already developed relationships than to try and make a cohesive team inside a six- to eight-week window under the pressure of competition.

 

And I didn’t volunteer.

 

I suspect I’ll be spending a lot of time talking with my daughter about doing the same at her own school, to see if this would help next year’s team.

 

  9:29:30 AM    comment []