Tova's friend Anna was over for a playdate. The girls had successfully managed to have a large chunk of alone time before having to finally give in to Declan's requests to play something all together. "Let's play hide and seek!" Declan requested, not noticing the subtle cues that I could detect, that the girls were not thrilled at the prospect but were willing to play along. Remarkable, I thought to myself, how much they could express without saying a word, and how I could actually read multiple movements, gestures and expressions to come up with a complete understanding of how they were feeling in that one moment. "Who will be it?" Declan enthusiastically called out, blissfully ignorant to all of these subtleties. Who is better off, I thought again, the one who is highly aware of all of what everyone around them was thinking, or the one who doesn't notice them at all and remains present and content in their own reality?
Unable to wait for a response, Declan proclaimed that he, in fact, would be it, and sent the girls off to hide. He walked straight over to where I was sitting as a matter of habit. In the past, Tova would insist that I help Declan keep his eyes shut and count at a reasonable pace to avoid unintentional cheating. Declan always had a hard time resisting the impulse to lift his head, almost as if it was too disorienting to not have his bearings for so long. As he counted, I watched as Anna and Tova hid not 20 feet from where Declan and I sat, Tova choosing to hide behind the other side of the kitchen island, and Anna, comically sitting in full view in a chair in the corner of the room with only a plant hiding her face. I held in my laughter and silently smiled at the girls as they got ready for the reveal. Admittedly, I was not sure which way it would go; would their spots be so obvious that Declan would find them in mere seconds, or would they be enough of an obstacle to keep him searching? Declan continues to have many deficits, among which are visual discrimination, auditory processing, executive functioning, and taking on the perspective of others, all of which are required to succeed in this game. Not long ago, he astonished us all by choosing to hide in the all glass walk-in shower, as if the frame of the box he walked into would be enough to keep others from seeing him.
"Ready or not, here I come!" Declan declared, and started his search with a devilish smile. His movements from the start lacked a system. Most of our frontal lobes at the age of ten would know to start in one area, and move methodically around the room so as to cover every spot. Declan, in contrast, started in one direction, then darted to another with no rhyme or reason. It reminded me of the young students that I would work with who were just learning to count. The children who chose to start with the manipulatives at one end of a line and end at the other, or who chose to slide one manipulative over to a separate area, had systems that helped them to succeed. The children who had no system tended to recount some of the objects or miss others altogether.
Several minutes into the game, Declan walked past Anna into the kitchen, and by chance, found Tova behind the counter. He walked past Anna again to continue his search. At least ten minutes went by, with almost as many drive-by's, and Declan still failed to detect Anna despite the fact that her knees were out in plain sight and her elbows poked out as they held up the plant. At a certain point it just became fascinating. What is happening for him that he cannot see her? Anna's mom Nancy, who is also a parent of a child with special needs, suggested that we try to use the example to learn. "See if you can figure out where it breaks down for him," she suggested, "it might give you a clue into what is happening for him and ideas for working with him." We all watched as Declan moved directly toward Anna again, then walked away without any clue. Mercifully, Anna directed Declan toward her with sounds and movements, and Declan happily completed his his job as seeker, unaware of the experiment in which we had all begun to conspire.
Anna and Tova continued to play the game, experimenting with different ways to hide, to see how he would respond and what would get in the way of the task for him. One time, Anna put a bag over her head and drew a similar response. We discovered a few things: if Anna's face was showing, he was more likely to see her. If she was moving, he was more likely to see her. A small aside in my sick mind: if I don't move when he is trying to track me down to help him change the batteries in the TV remote, will he, like the Tyranosaurus Rex, fail to detect me? Since these instances, I have worked with my colleagues on something called Task Analysis, a term many in special education would readily recognize. Defined, it means just what Nancy was telling me: taking a task and breaking it down into small pieces to reveal exactly what is entailed to perform it.
Let's see. To be a seeker, one would need to (among many other things):
- hide their eyes
- count
- listen for clues
- have a system for searching
- know what makes feasible hiding spaces
- be able to detect just a part of someone's body or clothing
- distinguish a person from the background
- remember who the other players were and what they were wearing
- remember previously used hiding places
- knowing when they are running out of locations to search
- have endurance...
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