Around Wednesday of last week, Curtis started telling me I had to bring him to school early on Friday so he could hang up the numbers. I didn't know what this meant and he had a hard time explaining it. He reminded me about 10 more times before Friday morning and got antsy when the day came that we wouldn't get to school early enough. He explained as we walked to school that each Friday, three sets of numbers were hung up and he wanted to be the one to do it. I believe he thought someone might beat him to it if we weren't at least 10 minutes early. When we got to the classroom, he showed me where the rest of the number lines were and how eventually they would wrap around the entire classroom. He then surrounded himself with the numbers before telling me there was 200 numbers total and he thought there should be more. He was especially excited about the negative numbers that started the border.
Curtis finds great comfort in numbers as do many on the autism spectrum. Before he began drawing roads, he used to regularly write strings of numbers with his sidewalk chalk. He does Sunshine Math in his free time or to calm down when he's feeling stressed, including multiplication. Since kindergarten he has been able to remember the birthdays of all his classmates and has long since had his family members birthdays committed to memory. He loves license plates and keeps an old one on his desk that he says he wants to put on his car when he is 16. He memorizes plate numbers as well. Curtis remembers a variety of phone numbers and can recite them even when he hasn't seen or dialed them in some time. He remembers street addresses with ease and seems destined for a fascination with social security numbers, bar codes, and any number of other numeral strings.
Curtis has shown similar aptitude with letters. He knew the alphabet and was reading by the time he showed up for kindergarten and aces his spelling tests now in second grade. But his relationship with numbers seems more intense than with the alphabet. He gets energized by numbers and as a parent who sucks at math, it's exciting to see where that interest could take him. Tomorrow is Wednesday so I'm sure the chatter will begin that there's two days until the next sets of numbers go up and how we'll have to be sure to be the first ones from his class to show up at school and hang them.


Greg, Dad