After yesterday's lesson I wanted to scaffold the content a bit. I provided Ben with a graphic of all the Nth roots from 1-15. It showed Ben how 1^2=1, 2^2=4, 3^2=9 and so on. We discussed how it goes from squaring to square rooting and how these operations are inverses of each other. As we were working, he began to get distracted and bring up random topics. In a teasing way I said to Ben, "The function of your behavior is escape, Come back to meeee!" He asked me WTH I was talking about. I explained to him that we as humans have 4 behavior functions: escape, access to tangibles, attention, and sensory/automatic. It opened up a dialogue of his behavior, his diagnoses, and learning about how his mind works. He said he wondered if he was a bad attention seeking kid or if his brain just worked differently. I told him that he absolutely isn't bad, but he learns, processes, and experiences the world differently than others. He explained to me how he has a cylinder of emotions and when communicating with someone with a lot of emotions it pulls from his cylinder more and more until it has no emotion left and it takes time for it to refill. He explained it to me as one of the ways his autism affects him. I could completely relate.