Early on in my son's school experience, the other children started teasing him. He didn't seem to know how to deal with this and couldn't figure out why he was being teased, after all, he didn't tease anyone else, so why were they teasing him? He started resisting going to school and when I tried to get to the bottom of the problem, he got very upset and couldn't explain what was happening, resulting in my having to question the teacher in Grade 1 and sort out the problem that way.
Sorting out a teasing issue with a teacher is very difficult when your child has Asperger's Syndrome. First of all, some teachers cannot understand why it's such a problem for the child and why the child gets so upset about it. Second of all, sometimes the teasing is a direct result of what the teacher has done and the teacher has unknowingly created the problem. For example, my son is extremely uncoordinated at gym activities and this one particular teacher was trying to get him to dribble a basketball which is impossible for him to do. He got frustrated, the teacher got frustrated and the next thing we knew, another child in the class started calling my son a gimp. If the teacher had not insisted that my son dribble that darn basketball, none of the resulting anguish would have happened. When discussing your child with the teacher, it's best to bring up the teasing issue before it starts so the teacher is aware of the situations that set the child up for these problems.
The school system response to the teasing and bullying issue is to maintain that their WITS program solves the problem and that there are supervisors in the playground for children to turn to.
Neither of these solutions work for my son. He does not want to be labelled a "tattle tale" and in his experience, all that happens when he tells a supervisor is that he gets into trouble.
For a few years we involked the help of our younger son who is in the same school, one grade lower. During a particularly bad session of bullying, he waited for the offender to come into the boy's washroom, shook his fist under the child's nose and said, "If you hit my brother one more time, I am going to flatten you". This worked like a charm and the bullying stopped.
