A story fit for a King
In working to help neurodivergent students succeed, Andrew King found a perfect job or rather, it found him
King’s students have found that he will go to any heights to help them succeed, whether that be taking this running leap to help a student with a shutter speed photo challenge or creating original teaching tools to help students be more successful in their daily school work.
May 17, 2023
When Andrew King went to the AISD job fair, he was not planning on being a teacher’s assistant but rather a substitute teacher. Principal Nicole Griffith approached King and asked him if he wanted to be a TA. She told him it was for SCORES, and that he’d be working with students with autism. He had no idea there was a department specifically for neurodivergent students but was excited about the opportunity, especially because he himself is on the spectrum.
For more than a year, he has been working on ideas and products to help kids and adults with neurodivergence, including fidget toys, cards, games, books and teaching tools. The thing is, he has gotten many ideas to the prototype stage but can never get to the next step of creating the final products.
Luckily, as a SCORES TA he’s been getting on-the-job training in how to be productive and stay on task while working with his students on their projects and assignments.
But it’s not always easy to stay on task. His first day on the job, he met a student who was supposed to be heads down on a math assignment. Instead, they ended up laughing about the (horrifying) process of prepping Subway tuna. They didn’t realize how distracted they’d become until the teacher gave Mr. King “the look.”
He says it’s the most challenging job he’s ever had … but he feels lucky that he gets to help students fight distractions and procrastination, skills he hopes to apply in his own projects this summer.
Back at the job fair, when Mr. King showed Ms. Griffith a binder full of his prototypes, she was impressed. “Andrew, you could sell these!”
“That’s my goal!” he replied. But for now, he has other projects to help finish.
Editor’s note:The digital media students wrote 300-word stories that emulated the feature profiles written by Brady Dennis for the St. Petersburg Times in the mid-2000s. Shield co-editor in chief Alice Scott prepared a master class on Dennis’ stories for the newspaper staff, and adviser Dave Winter was so impressed with the lesson that he changed his feature profile assignment based on what Scott taught the staff about Dennis’ stories. As a result, we have a collection of wonderful short profiles—including this profile of SCORES teaching assistant Andrew King—that are well-crafted, powerful and straight from the heart.
