Well, I got the telephone call from the school psychologist today -- they've finished the evaluation and are ready to have The Meeting At Which It Is Decided What Services Will Be Provided To My Child. I called Robyn's therapist and told him I'd like him to be there if possible. I hope it's possible.

The school psychologist said that Robyn is an extraordinarily interesting case. They did discover that she's more than just a little bright. They also found she's more than a little lonely. I'm not at all sure they got a sense of what's causing Robyn difficulty in class, but we'll find out at The Meeting on the 12th of December.

Last night when I was on real-time tutorial duty at Smarthinking, a student came onto the whiteboard looking for a paper topic. The prompt asked her to describe a classmate that might be someone they could really learn from.

The idea, I realized, was to get these naive students to think about diversity by talking about what they might learn from someone different from the heterogenous populations of their high schools. But that wasn't working for this particular student, because she had been raised in a highly diverse set of environments.

Our technique is to ask students probing questions that move them towards a topic they might like. So I started asking questions, trying to find some sort of diversity she hadn't had experience with yet. I asked questions that started with "Have you ever had a friend who . . . " and filled in the blank with all sorts of descriptions -- religion, ethnicity, multilingualism, more religion, life experience, age, interests, disabilities. I was about to run out of ideas when it suddenly occurred to me that I had left out the type of diversity I am myself most acquainted with.

"Have you ever had a friend who . . . was autistic but high-functioning?"

No, she hadn't. She wanted to know more. I told her about autism and about how many people there are out there with mild forms of it. I explained that these people rarely have a lot of friends becuase of the communication challenges and social awkwardness. I made her aware of the fact that many high-functioning autistics have special abilities, and that a large number of the great advancements in science and technology may very well have originated in minds affected by autism -- Einstein? Newton? Bill Gates? We'll probably never know. But sure seems likely. Could we learn something from these people who think so differently from the rest of us? No doubt we could.

She was fascinated -- she was inspired. She said, "I can do this!" She was happy. And I was happy.

I made someone think of autism as a form of diversity.