Vacancy caducado!
I am looking for people who value sincerity, honesty and integrity to work with my Autistic Spectrum son in a number of areas. The job entails teaching Benjamin various life skills, such as how to interact appropriately with other people, how to keep his apartment and himself neat and clean and how to travel safely and independently in the community.
My son, who has a degree in Biochemistry from City College, is gifted and intelligent. He has always had an enormous thirst for learning, and an impressive ability to acquire and assimilate knowledge. The mentor’s role is to helpand figure out ways to motivate him to stay focused, communicate with other people appropriately and develop his sense of self and his place in the world, while also supporting him in his various intellectual and artistic pursuits (and vice versa). One of our overarching goals is to work with him and his other mentors on figuring out an appropriate career path for him. But in order for that to be possible, Benjamin must learn how to control himself and how to behave appropriately.
Since the best way to reach my son is through learning, it would be great (but not necessary) to find a mentor with a knowledge of music, science, computers, yoga, art, phonology and/or foreign languages.
My son has been studying violin for several years and has been developing a classical repertoire. He recently started studying guitar, drumming, and piano. He excels in the visual arts. Musicians and artists have been successful teaching giving him lessons in Art, Chinese and Italian and refreshing his knowledge of Spanish. A new mentor has been having social conversations with him in Spanish an she reports that this has been effective.
I want to emphasize that this is a long-term job, with the potential for more responsibility and more hours, depending on the mentor’s interest in and ability and commitment to working with my son. I also want to be careful not to mislead applicants by putting too much emphasis on my son's academic and artistic gifts: his deficits in the area of attention and communication and his ability to control his impulses are significant and just as great as, if not greater than, his gifts. The mentor's role is use his or her own creativity to teach Benjamin to navigate those deficits in order to function as independently as possible in a dangerous world.
I am not trying to make my son into a Renaissance man. The teaching is merely a means to that end. Working on his deficits is primary goal of all our work with him. The Pandemic has come bearing its own hefty share of challenges. Helping him deal with the significant and relentless trauma is an important focus of everyone's work with him.
This is very much a collaborative effort; it can be inspiring and rewarding, depending on what you value as a human being. It can also be very frustrating, if this is not your thing.
After years of winging this, we have a long last found competent professionals in the fields of behaviorism, Occupational Therapy and Speech to guide us in creating a structure program.
What I have been trying to do is build a community of like-minded, deep-feeling people who will work in collaboration with each other as a team and to help my son develop the skills necessary for him to make use of his considerable intelligence and gifts, the ultimate goal being to give him a chance to live a happy life and one that is as independent and productive as possible. That is why I have been placing this ad on Craigslist very month!
Right now, given how challenging working with Benjamin can sometimes be, we are starting people out on a provisional basis: that way, the mentors and I can feel free to decide whether or not this is work they enjoy doing, they are commited to doing, and work they have a knack for doing.
This is a job that is very much based on mutual trust.
It is essential that working with my son be as rewarding for his mentors, as it is for him.
The hours are flexible, as is the start date.
If you have answered this ad before, please do so again. I will always make room for someone who seems to have the talent, skills and strength of character to work with my son.
Finally, I should point out that while I am in charge of the program, I do not write the checks. The social service agency The Center for Family Support does thatand the hiring process can be laborious, unfortunately.
My son lives in Washington Heights, right next to the A train.
Please send your resume to Maxine at:
Vacancy caducado!