The Spark: A Mother's Story of Nurturing Genius (20 page)

I hired my aunt, a high school math teacher, to teach Jake algebra.
When he quickly surpassed what she could comfortably teach him, I realized that a little math tutoring wasn’t going to solve the bigger problem. Stephanie Westcott was right: Jake was bored. He needed something or someone to truly capture his imagination, to encourage him, to challenge him. The advanced astronomy lectures at the Holcomb Observatory had worked to bring him out of his shell before, so back we went, the whole family this time, with Wesley and baby Ethan in tow.

The change in Jake was dramatic. Those were beautiful days that the five of us spent together at the planetarium. The boys would eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on a picnic blanket on the grounds, and then we’d attend the presentation of the week. I’d bring as many car sticker books as I could fit into my bag to keep Wesley and Ethan busy, but Jake was engrossed. We’d always end up back at the giant telescope at the top of the building, with Jake looking out at the stars.

Those trips to the observatory became a new family tradition, exactly the kind of happy, ordinary childhood experience I wanted the boys to have. Ethan was a bit young, but Wesley was quickly engaged. The more he learned, the more interested he became, and it wasn’t long before he and Jake would spend the drive home talking about issues in advanced astronomy as if they were at a professional conference.
Seriously
, I’d think, catching Mike’s eye,
who
are
these people?

Wes and Ethan were happy, but Jake—well, we felt as if we’d
saved
Jake. Almost immediately after we resumed our visits, his social life picked up again. After school, he happily headed out to ride his bike or play tag with his friends. I’d learned my lesson. As long as Jake could get a good dose of serious astronomy, he could keep up with the social end of things in school. As I had seen so many times with the typical kids at the daycare and the autistic kids at Little Light, as well as over and over with Jake himself, all of his other skills would come along naturally as long as he was doing what he loved.

Then, right when we were back on track, the observatory closed for the winter. There had to be another way to kindle Jake’s interest. We couldn’t lose the gains we’d just made. Watching the PBS series
Cosmos
and hanging out on the NASA website wouldn’t be enough; Jake
needed to be completely immersed. So I searched for another planetarium.

Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) was right down the road from Butler University, where the Holcomb Observatory was located. Although IUPUI didn’t have a planetarium, it did offer astronomy courses. And so I soon found myself on the phone with Professor Edward Rhoads, who taught a freshman course on the solar system there.

I would never have been brave enough to ask a favor for myself, but because I was advocating for Jake, I was fearless. I told Professor Rhoads that I had an autistic son who loved astronomy and that we’d had a lot of success with him socially and in other areas when he was able to engage in the activities he loved. Would he consider allowing Jake to sit in on his class? I explained that this wasn’t about academics or furthering Jake’s education, just that I thought this class would make him happy, and indirectly help his social skills.

I knew how crazy my request sounded. This was a university course, after all, and Jake was eight years old. But I also knew that getting permission for him to attend this five-week class was my best chance to keep him out of the bookshelf. At one point in my conversation with Professor Rhoads, I even suggested that perhaps we could sit in the hall outside his classroom and eavesdrop on his lectures. That didn’t turn out to be necessary. In an extraordinary act of generosity, Professor Rhoads agreed to allow Jake to sit in on his freshman course on Saturn, on the strict condition that I would take him out of the classroom at the very first sign of any disruptive behavior.

It was an afternoon class, which meant that I had to pull Jake out of his last third-grade class about twenty minutes early. Fingers crossed behind my back, I told his teacher that he had a series of doctor’s appointments, hoping that she wouldn’t ask for a note. In the car, Jake said, “Well, he
is
a doctor.” It was almost a joke, a rare foray into humor for Jake, who hadn’t quite tapped into that part of himself yet. I took it as a good sign.

IUPUI is a commuter college, and many of the students are older part-timers. As Jake and I made our way into the small classroom
where the course would be held, I suspect that most of the attendees assumed that I was a student whose child care arrangements had fallen through. Although I felt sure that I was doing the right thing for Jake, I was still nervous about how the afternoon would unfold. Jake might fidget, drag his chair across the linoleum floor, or somehow otherwise make too much noise. If he did, there was nowhere to hide. So my heart was beating hard when Professor Rhoads took his place at the front of the classroom. He was slightly disheveled, introverted, and passionate about his subject—the very picture of the absentminded professor. He reminded me a little of Jake.

Thankfully, as soon as Professor Rhoads began to speak, I could feel Jake’s body relax, and when I looked over at him, I could see that he was the happiest I had seen him in months—concentrated and intent, but peaceful.

Professor Rhoads had a deck of slides, mostly Hubble Space Telescope pictures of Saturn, which were mesmerizing in their beauty. While clicking through, he asked the class to interpret what they saw.

“What is this black dot in front of Saturn?” he asked the class. Nobody answered.

Jake scribbled in the margin of his notebook and pushed it over to me: “If I know, can I say?”

“If nobody else answers,” I wrote back. “And
raise your hand
.”

Jake waited a moment, and then his hand went up. The professor turned to him and nodded. “It’s Titan’s shadow,” Jake said.

The other kids in the class exchanged glances. I was a little taken aback myself. I was surprised not that Jake knew the answer (by that point, nothing Jake knew surprised me), but by his manner. He wasn’t nervous or the slightest bit self-conscious to be participating in such a discussion in a university classroom. He seemed totally self-possessed and confident. He seemed like he belonged there.

During that first class, he answered one or two other questions, always waiting to make sure that none of the enrolled students wanted to try. I could tell that Professor Rhoads was beginning to understand that this was more than whimsy on my part and that Jake was more than a little kid who’d caught a few episodes of
Nova
.

The Jake I went home with that night was a completely different kid from the one in the bookshelf. The days we had class were the only days I didn’t have to try twenty times to wake him up in the morning. “We’ve got class tonight” worked better than any alarm clock. As we drove to class, Jake would physically lean forward in his seat as if he couldn’t wait to get there.

Toward the end of the second class, Jake scrawled a note to me in the margin of his notebook: “I have a question.”

I wrote back: “Save it until the end, and make it a good one. Don’t waste the professor’s time with something we can look up at home.”

After class was dismissed, Jake waited patiently until the rest of the kids had asked Professor Rhoads their questions. When it was finally his turn, I couldn’t help noticing that he was dancing a little, shifting his weight from foot to foot in a gesture immediately recognizable to every mom. It had been a long lecture, and he’d had a Coke in the car on the way there.

Fortunately, I wasn’t the only one who noticed, and there may even have been the faintest trace of a smile on Professor Rhoads’s lips when he said, “Science is important, Jake. But there are some things that are even more important than science. If you’d like to use the restroom, I promise that I’ll be here to answer your question when you get back.”

Jake’s question concerned the low gravity on Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons, and what that meant for the possibility of life there. I didn’t know then that Enceladus is considered one of the most likely spots in our solar system for life to exist (it has an ocean), but I could tell from the way Professor Rhoads responded to the question that Jake had done what I’d suggested and made it a good one.

By the third class, Jake’s participation had become a kind of shared joke. If nobody’s hand went up when Professor Rhoads asked a question, he’d wait a few beats and then turn to Jake with an eyebrow raised. More often than not, Jake was right, and by the time the semester was over, he was openly participating in the class. Jake has never been a particularly big kid, but he’d never looked smaller to me than he did up at the whiteboard next to those college students.

When the professor announced that the class would be breaking up into groups to come up with a final presentation, everyone was clamoring to work with Jake. He took the presentation seriously—he did all the research and put together a killer PowerPoint presentation. This was his first exposure to college students, though, and he started to get anxious when he realized that his partners weren’t putting any work into the assignment. He didn’t understand what was going on. It fell to me to explain that in the best-case scenario, they were probably leaving their own work to the very last minute.

“And in the worst?” he asked.

“Well, honey, they can see that you’ve done a good job with that PowerPoint presentation and that it’s all ready to go. They probably think that they don’t have to do much at all.”

Jake thought about that for a minute and then decided to tell his fellow students that they could have his PowerPoint slide deck, but they’d have to do the research themselves to figure out what it meant, because he wasn’t going to participate in the presentation. He wrote Professor Rhoads an email explaining why he wouldn’t be there. It was an impressive show of ethics, and I smiled a little to myself. I suspected it wouldn’t be the last time that overwhelmed, sleep-deprived college students would try to hitch a ride on Jake’s coattails. Maybe the next group would have better luck.

T
hey had strawberry Pop-Tarts in the vending machines at IUPUI. Munching a Pop-Tart while waiting for his astronomy class became the highlight of Jake’s week.

When Professor Rhoads’s class was over, Jake took another freshman survey course, this one on the solar system, taught by Dr. Jay Pehl. I liked him immediately. He had a kind, friendly face and hands covered with chalk, and he was known for carrying a handkerchief packed with candy in his pocket. Dr. Pehl’s class was much bigger than the one Jake had taken with Professor Rhoads and took place in an enormous auditorium. I emailed in advance to ask if we could attend. Dr. Pehl responded by saying that as long as we didn’t disturb anyone, he probably wouldn’t even notice that we were there.

After the first class, Jake was hooked. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get to the next couple of classes because Michael had to work. But I knew how important it was to Jake, so the following week I brought all three boys with me and took the two youngest for a walk while Jake sat in. It was weird to watch him walk away from me into the lecture hall. He was physically dwarfed by the other young people swarming around him, and I could see that his shoelace was untied. I’d never left him anywhere before, except at elementary school or a friend’s house, and this seemed very different to me. I was there ten minutes early to pick him up at the auditorium door.

Jake didn’t talk at all during those early classes with Dr. Pehl, but he was eager to sign up for the next class in the astronomy curriculum,
Stars and Galaxies, also taught by Dr. Pehl. Early on in the second class, Jake raised his hand. It’s well-known, he said, that binary stars exchange gases; the gas from one star transfers to another and causes changes in the second star. But since the second star gets bigger, Jake asked, is it possible that some of the gases could go back to the first star and cause even more changes there?

Dr. Pehl looked thoughtful. “You know, I’ve never thought about that,” he said.

The answer wasn’t in any of the textbooks either. Later, Dr. Pehl helped me to see that this tendency to take a well-understood concept and build on it is the engine behind Jake’s tremendous creativity. He is always pushing a theory or concept he’s read or learned about one step further.

Jake took all the quizzes and all the tests in those early classes with Dr. Pehl, and he aced them all. (I remember Dr. Pehl telling him whom to write to after he’d found an error in the textbook.) When Stars and Galaxies was over, Jake signed up to take the first course on the solar system again. He’d exhausted the astronomy courses offered by IUPUI.

To keep himself occupied while he was waiting to ask Dr. Pehl his inevitable questions at the end of class, Jake would move slowly through the rows of desks in the enormous auditorium, picking up discarded coffee cups and wadded-up pieces of paper. He’d put the abandoned Coke cans into the recycling bin or stick a student’s forgotten calculator into his backpack, holding it for the person until he saw him or her the next week. It was as if IUPUI had hired the world’s smallest janitor. By the time he’d made his way down to the lectern, the other students would be finished asking their questions, and he’d present Dr. Pehl with his.

After he’d been taking classes for a year or so, Jake floated an idea, an alternate theory he’d been thinking about. Did Dr. Pehl think it could work?

“I don’t have the slightest idea,” Dr. Pehl said. He sat down in the front row and tossed Jake a whiteboard marker. “Here’s a marker;
there’s the board. Go ahead. See if it works.” For the next fifteen minutes, the two of us sat and watched as Jake blazed through equation after equation.

This was the first of many after-class sessions, but it represented a turning point for me. With a real sense of shock, it occurred to me that I’d never seen Jake talk about the things he was most passionate about with someone who actually knew what he meant. Here, finally, was someone who could parry with him, question him, correct him, challenge him, and truly appreciate him. Here, finally, was a conversation.