5th Grade Promotion Recognition Awards; and Other Things That Leave Neurodivergent Kids Behind
Obligatory “my opinions are my own and not intended to represent the whole of neurodivergents, parents, or fifth graders” caveat.
I watched the same maybe six to seven kids “sweep” the various awards our elementary school gave out at the 5th Grade Promotion ceremony. These kids not only had 3.5 average GPAs for all of 4th and the first 75% of 5th grades but also were recognized by the music, PE, media, and visual arts teachers for being “outstanding”. I don’t want to diminish the recognition of their efforts. I want to call attention to the survivor bias that perpetuates the public school system and its tendency to leave ND kids out of the narrative completely.
School events are sensory hell for me. Crowded, loud, overpowering perfumes or colognes, usually hot, and usually way too long. Other parents are obnoxious. Administrators had to repeatedly through this event “remind” parents to “hold their applause for the end”. One family brought cow bells they were ringing during the event. I have ear plugs on my keychain for events like this. They take the edge off, but by the end I still wanted to scream “Shut up!” at other adults in the room. Standing in walkways to take pictures, completely unaware of the hundreds of people who need to move through that exact space. I cannot leave fast enough. Absolutely everything about the way I got through this event was invisible to everyone else.
The ceremony started at 5:30pm. Initially I was happy that it wasn’t during the work day, as previous school ceremonies have been. But by the end of the day, I’m already low on spoons after using most of them at work. Today, I took PTO (of which I have precious little compared to what I need) to leave early and take a nap before the event. Perimenopause is kicking my butt, getting quality sleep is unpredictable despite how desperately I need it, GLP-1s help a lot with that weirdly. Something something science. Anyway.
My self-accomodations for the event started when I left work at 2, spent 30 minutes in my car to mentally recharge before driving home, where I took care of the dog and cats before, finally, lying down for a nap. I got maybe an hour, maybe. The ex had sent repeated texts about the event and the buzzing of my phone woke me. I rolled out of bed and drove to the school. Doors opened for parents at 5pm, event started at 5:30pm, we then sat through FORTY MINUTES of awards. Again, several of the kids won multiple awards. If alien anthropologists had been watching, they’d think the whole event was for 20 kids instead of 100 (rough estimate, it was five 5th grade classes).
Again, I’m not dismissing the hard work that these kids put in. I’m positive they sacrificed a lot and I’m glad their hard work is being recognized. My intent is to call out the fact that the hard work that’s recognized is the hard work that is overt and visible. It is damn near impossible to have the energy for after school activities or to volunteer for safety patrol if absolutely all your energy is spent on NOT having a meltdown over the fact that you’re hungry because your food aversions didn’t let you eat what was served in the cafeteria. Getting out the door on time, dressed, and remembering everything you were supposed to bring is so difficult, much less having to do it five days in a row. Then there’s the sitting still, the paying attention, the answering questions, ignoring the overhead light that’s buzzing, the kid who is flicking his pencil really hard, the sock that’s too far down in your shoe. How many more kids would fall under that “exceptional” category if their brains weren’t actively fighting the system they’re forced into? How many kids are doing an incredible amount of invisible work just to appear “average”?
Some kids are out here walking a whole mile on dry land. That’s a feat, a mile is a lot of work. Other kids are out here walking that same mile in waist-deep water against a current. All anybody else sees is how much farther behind they are than the kid on dry land. Including the kid in the water.
We stopped for dinner on the way home. I already haven’t had spoons to make dinner on work days for a long time. Usually it’s an oven or air-fryer kind of dinner. Today, well, I’m pretty sure I borrowed from tomorrow’s spoons. We got home, the kids ate, I parked myself on the couch with knitting and Supernatural. That helped me decompress some but I’m still on edge. My phone keeps buzzing–my mom is texting about plans for tomorrow–and each time it does I get slightly more irritated with it. It’s on DND now because I can’t.
All of this energy and bandwidth expended to watch other peoples’ kids get awards. I made a mental note to remind my kids that they are exceptional even when other people can’t see it.
My oldest is already an incredible artist. He wants to be a tattoo artist when he gets older. He can draw and paint in ways that make me jealous, my motor control is terrible and my brain just doesn’t process images the same way his does. I love when he comes home to show me his latest art project. He does well enough in his other classes, we don’t worry about his grades. As a fellow Oldest Child, I try not to put too much responsibility on him, I’m sure there’s an unconscious amount I do that’s unavoidable. Mostly I try to redirect his snark when I can tell it’s going to cut too deep. He’s still trying to figure out who he is, I don’t want to be too harsh because I know it’s a process.
My middle one is a deep feeler who has a level of empathy other adults would envy. He gets it from me. He adores animals and wants to be a veterinarian. School is hard for him on the social and academic levels. He’s not ADHD or autistic, we suspect something similar to dyslexia but the formal tests weren’t conclusive. He struggles with language processing, he reads at a lower grade level, but all of his teachers talk about how sweet and helpful he is. He has a few friends, but even more kids bully him.
My youngest, and recent 5th grade “graduate”, is a firecracker. She’s whip-smart and her sense of humor is so dry you could pair it with a Merlot (“I named our group ‘Insert Group Name Here’ and the teacher laughed so hard!”). She’s the one I worry about the least, because her goal in everything she does is to “win”, even if nobody else knows she’s competing. She hasn’t said what she wants to be when she gets older, I keep saying she’d make a great lawyer because her drive for justice is unparalleled compared to other kids I’ve seen. She’s my mini-me, I see so much of my young self in her. She’s not going to grow up thinking she’s broken, she’s going to grow up with the knowledge that her brain works differently. She’s going to grow up with a vocabulary I didn’t have.
I don’t know how to measure these qualities or how to shine a light on invisible labor. But I do know that if we only celebrate the visible labor, there are going to be kids who grow up wondering what’s “wrong” with them rather than understanding that they have a different operating system.