Stories of Bridgeway House: Chris Holter and Kevin Miller

Presenter: To celebrate Autistic Pride Day, we’re visiting with the extended family of students, teachers, parents, grandparents, and volunteers at Bridgeway House. There’s more demand than ever, and this wonderful school, which serves Lane County and beyond, needs your help. Donate at their website, BridgewayHouse.org, or call (541) 345-0805. We’re visiting with teacher Chris Holter.

Chris Holter: I’m Chris Holter, a classroom teacher at Bridgeway. I love my job, passionately and deeply, because it’s the most rewarding thing I have done, period, in my life. I’ve had different careers, but this one is just something else.

[00:00:44] This is a talented group of young people. I just speak for my class. They’re 10 to 15 (years old). These are really gifted thinkers. Really. It’s not always obvious to everyone. It just doesn’t show up in the same way that the world at large is used to looking at it, but really bright, and they have social skills issues, which is they just don’t understand all of the unwritten rules that there are about what you’re supposed to, how you’re supposed to act in this situation, that situation, those kinds of things.

[00:01:21] And we just need to go through those and teach them so they can access whatever it is they want to access, you know. They’re capable of doing whatever is they decide to do. They’re very curious, very interested in learning. It’s not always what I want to teach sometimes, well, quite often.

[00:01:41] They’re really good at learning the things that they love. So if they’re particularly interested in space, that’s a particular interest and they can run circles around me. For instance, when it comes to teaching math, yes, I can teach math, but then I’ve got one student that is just whizzing right ahead of me, you know.

[00:02:03] And I love putting together curriculum for them, is pretty exhausting. And just because of the amount of time and effort it takes to do that search for something that’s going to grab them.

[00:02:20] Bringing a professional writer was a big deal because yes, I like writing, I can teach writing. But they need something extra. They need that oomph.

[00:02:32] And they all need something a little different, but it’s incredibly fulfilling and it is a two-way street. I learn too, so, yeah, I learn to look at the world in a slightly different way than I have before, and that’s something that can happen multiple times during a week.

[00:02:54] Kevin Miller: I’m Kevin Miller. I’m Chris’s husband. My wife asked me once if I would come in and I think it was to talk to them about adverbs, and it wasn’t that big a deal. She said they were having a little bit of trouble. This was a couple years ago, and, she wanted to have somebody that they would pay attention to.

[00:03:15] And I guess they tend to like, if you have credentials in their mind, isn’t that kind of—?

[00:03:22] Chris Holter: Yeah, he’s got street cred, he’s an editor.

[00:03:25] Kevin Miller: And I had clippings I could show them. So I came in and it went really well. I mean, you have to be careful, I think, generalizing about autism, because it’s a really wide, wide disbursement of characteristics.

[00:03:41] But one of the things is that, in general, is that there’s not a lot of artifice to them. They will tell you what’s on their mind.

[00:03:50] And so, you know, she introduced me and said all this nice stuff about me, and they didn’t know I was her husband, ’cause we didn’t want ’em to get sidetracked onto that as a topic. And also I wanted ’em to know that I was there ’cause I wanted to help them.

[00:04:04] And she told them some stuff about my credentials and I shared a little bit. I read ’em part of a story I wrote that happened when I worked in Missoula, Montana and the ash blanket came from Mount St. Helens. It was a fairly dramatic story about the ash arriving and nobody knowing what it was, etc.

[00:04:25] I showed them some other clippings and then Chris asked them, before I started, she asked if they had any questions and this hand shot up in the back. And it was: ‘Yeah, but are you a real writer?’ Just like that.

[00:04:38] And I said, you know, ‘That’s how I’ve been paid.’ I said, ‘People might have differences about how good a writer I am, but I’ve been paid to write and edit stuff for a long, long time now.’

[00:04:51] And then she said, ‘Well, okay, but my uncle says he’s a writer and he never writes anything.’ And so that was sort of amazingly direct, and I spent the 40 minutes talking and they asked really good questions and I find them to be, like, steel-trap learners. It stays. That’s a fun thing about them too.

[00:05:16] She sometime later said: Would you be interested in just kind of coming in and volunteering to teach them creative writing? ‘Cause they really liked that.

[00:05:26] I said, ‘Well, sure,’ but, and I started looking at all these scientific papers that teaching experts had said, ‘How do you teach creative writing to children with autism?’ And about half of them basically said, ‘Well, you can’t.’ It just seemed audaciously wrong to me, and I just said, ‘Okay, well, never mind. I’m just going to go try to do this,’ you know, and it’s been an amazing thing.

[00:05:56] They like it to be performative. We workshop. We write things in class and then we immediately workshop them in a group.

[00:06:07] And so they get used to giving each other honest feedback, and without people’s feelings getting hurt. And it’s been an amazing thing ’cause they’re now very open to that. I’ve taught in college classes where kids would storm out of the room.

[00:06:25] I spent most of my working career in newsrooms as a reporter, as a city editor, as a senior editor, and that’s an environment where you’re trying to get stuff done quick. And it’s just accepted that people are going to come look over your shoulder and make suggestions.

[00:06:42] Your boss is going to come and look and say, ‘No, I need you to write a different lede.’ But that’s just part of the process, and it ties in with the social skills teaching.

[00:06:53] And so, we just wrote on deadlines from the beginning. And my thing was, ‘Here’s what writers do: They write. They don’t stare at the wall. They write, and I don’t care what you write.’ And then I would say, ‘Okay, here’s a prompt.’ And we’d give ’em a prompt and I’d say, ‘Okay, write for 12 minutes.’

[00:07:13] And now if you said, ‘What do writers do?’ They would probably chant in unison: ‘They write.’ And they have fun with it. It’s impressive. It’s amazing to me.

[00:07:25] I’ve taught ’em that all your words should be doing some work, so let’s get all the extra words. We don’t want lazy words in our stories that aren’t working.

[00:07:33] They’ll say, ‘Well, that’s a run-on sentence.’ Sometimes the student, as we’ve got it on the screen, it’s in their Google Docs, and the student is literally accepting and implementing that correction as the other student—who may or may not be a close friend of theirs—is giving them some suggestions.

[00:07:52] That’s impressive. And obviously that has broad applications beyond writing, being able to take suggestions and not personalize any feedback you get.

[00:08:03] And it’s amazing to watch them navigate through, like, I’ll make ’em, we’ll do formal writing. They don’t like doing formal writing. They want to write in their vernacular.

[00:08:15] And I say, ‘Well, one of the reasons we try to teach you this is you’re going to be in environments where, and you’re probably not going to be writing things out actually, but we’re training your brain so that it can switch gears. So if your boss asks you if you have any good ideas, you won’t speak to him in slang and stuff. You will explain it.’

And they get that, and then they get into it, and then they do it. And that’s arming them for the world out there, you know?

[00:08:44] And then the other thing I’ll say: They want to tell their stories. These children are living particularly interesting lives. Some of ’em get pretty strange reactions from the world outside, and they’re learning how to navigate that, and Chris and her crew are trying to teach ’em social skills, but they’re full of stories and they want to tell their stories.

[00:09:07] They’re also, they’re appreciative of the help that they get. And they’re incredibly appreciative of this school and the environment it provides for them.

[00:09:20] They talk about that, they write about it, and trying to make this a safe place for them to learn. And some of them are getting older now, that they’re smart enough to say, ‘There’s a world coming at me that’s not the, you know, safe Bridgeway.’

[00:09:37] But they get that they’re learning this stuff. They’re not just learning, you know, percentages in math because it’s something they want to hurt their brains with. They’re learning because they’re going to be out shopping and all that stuff. And they get it. They get it and then it becomes, I don’t want to overstate it, but you know, almost like a sacred thing to try to help ’em, because they deserve the help and they will respond and they just consistently do.

[00:10:08] And these teachers, they know what they’re getting them ready for, you know?

[00:10:13] And I love, now, I can recognize (sometimes) children with autism out in the community. And I can look at the parent and give ’em a smile and a nod, because that’s the other group that you get all this respect for.

[00:10:26] I’ve lived here a long time. I was a journalist here for a long time. I feel like I have a feel for this place and I feel like if more people in this town understood what was going on here, there would be more philanthropic support and other support of the place, because it’s amazing.

[00:10:45] And not to be too dramatic, but it’s an important kind of opportunity for these kids to get ready and then to go out, and then they’ll be in the world and they’ll be functional and they’ll be able to have jobs and lives and all that stuff.

[00:10:59] And it’s not going to happen without some kind of positive intervention in their lives. This place, you know, I’ve gotten to sit there and watch my wife and other teachers here—there’s wizardry at work here. You listen to the kids and they’re getting ready for what’s next.

[00:11:20] It’s the best kind of prep school. And the other thing is, in our culture, there’s not a lot of alternatives. Eugene is very lucky, this area, these kids are coming from all over around the area. This is a special place. And I promise you, it runs on a shoestring, and it needs as much help as it can get.

[00:11:43] Presenter: We’re sharing stories about an amazing community institution, Bridgeway House. It started as a group of parents meeting in a living room and providing mutual aid. Now two sites serve 90 students from 17 school districts.

[00:11:57] With more wanting to attend, KEPW is celebrating the many success stories and asking you to donate through the website, BridgewayHouse.org, or call (541) 345-0805.