My whole life I have been around kids with learning disorders. From preschool to second grade, I was in speech therapy at my school, and a lot of the time I was grouped with kids who had ADHD, Autism, and other learning complications. Then, when I was 11 eleven years old, I started to volunteer at a local church and they had me work with a girl who had Asperger’s syndrome. This Autism Spectrum Disorder gained my fascination very quickly, and I started to research in depth. Since then, I have always been consumed about Autism and everything that goes with it (therapy, treatment ideas, causes, etc.) Then one day, I was really fed up with my job at Lifetime Fitness, and was planning on putting in my two weeks notice, but I didn’t want to do this …show more content…
Due to this, I was not able to receive my training this day, and I was completely thrown into the chaos. Now when I say chaos, I don’t mean people panicking and screaming- it’s much worse than that. I helped everyone get prepared for the kids coming in by unstacking chairs, organizing toys, and greeting people. Before I knew it, there were suddenly at least 90 children, along with my 40 coworkers, all running around in our “play room”. Toys were being thrown, bicycles were being raced, and kids were either pulling someone’s hair, screaming, crying, or all of the above. Now, I had worked with Autistic children before, but never in a capacity that was anything close to how Aspire Autism was. I ended up playing trains with one of the kids who I knew was in my group because quite frankly, I really had no idea how to control behavior, or how to control a child for that matter. Fast forward one week later, and I still hadn’t received the training I was promised. However, I was starting to learn how to apply ABA therapy and how to track the data for each one of my clients. It wasn’t easy, especially being a 17 year old