Show notes
A new school year means new students, new relationships, and a Script Garden filling with meaning. But how does any of it become usable language? I’m starting with the question between Stage 0 and Stage 1.It is the beginning of another school year, which means I am back in the Script Garden. New students on my caseload. New students in the Maths classes I support. New teachers, new classroom dynamics, new relationships, and an enormous amount of information arriving all at once. I am paying attention to all of it. Rather spectacularly so. But thinking about something and having usable language for it are not the same event for me.At Stage 0, there is already a great deal there: scripts, patterns, memories, sensations, observations, language, relationships, notices, wonders, and things other people have said. It isn’t empty. There is something almost superpositional about it—multiple possibilities remaining simultaneously alive whilst new information keeps arriving. A student may understand. They may not. They may understand the mathematics but not its language. They may understand both and not yet trust me enough to show me. I don’t necessarily want to collapse those possibilities too early, because sometimes that is precisely how I get a student wrong. Meaning is forming. There just may not be a sentence yet.But eventually I need one. I am an RSP teacher. I have students to support, teachers to collaborate with, IEPs, meetings, documentation, and decisions to make. At some point I have to step out of the Script Garden carrying a word. And that has left me with a wonderfully inconvenient question: How do I actually get from Stage 0 to Stage 1? What has to happen for meaning to become language? Sometimes I know the whole before I can find its parts. Sometimes I know that a sentence is wrong before I have any idea what the right sentence would be. What, exactly, is happening in between?This is very deliberately N = 1. I am not speaking for all autistic people, all gestalt language processors, all RSP teachers, my colleagues, or my employer. I am following my own problem of practice. My ASD Level 2 diagnosis matters here because much of the support I need has to be constructed by me: externalising information, collecting it, parking it somewhere safe, returning to it, moving it around, letting patterns emerge, and eventually developing words and scripts stable enough to use when I need them. That is accommodation, but it is also simply part of how I make my work possible.So this video is a prologue, not an answer. I don’t know where the question is going yet. I’m going to do what I tend to do on Substack: collect things, park them, play with them, and see what grows. Somewhere inside that rather overgrown Script Garden, I am hoping to understand a little more about what has to happen before all that meaning becomes something I can actually say—and, with any luck, come out the other side with enough usable words and scripts to remain employed for another year.The AutSide is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit autside.substack.com/subscribe