On the Art of Rolling Eyes

"I wouldn't have taught him that if I were you," a teacher at my son's elementary school said to me recently.
She was responding to my story about my son's attempts to roll his eyes in an act of boredom that morning.
It all came about from a social skill I was trying to teach him the night before. His two tasks were to recognize rolling eyes, a common body language to indicate boredom, which he might see on someone's face when he is talking to them at school and what he can do about it.
This lesson became important to us because of two reasons - one, with the exception of anger, sad, shock and surprise, my son is not able to recognize and understand the meaning of expressions on someone's face. Two, he tends to burst out on a topic, for example, trains, cars and his latest, Iron Man movie. It doesn't seem to occur to him that he has already talked to the same person about it maybe once or twice already and that his friend might not want to talk about the same things any more. They might roll their eyes at him when he starts to talk about trains, I told him. When he sees that expression, he needs to understand that it's a clue for him to stop talking about trains and maybe talk about something else.
As I began the lesson, I realized that before he could 1.recognize this facial expression and 2. remember to follow through with the next step - stop talking altogether or change the topic, I had to step back and show him what rolling eyes look like. It was quite entertaining to watch his version of it the next day. Let me tell you it looked like anything but.
Point of this note is, social interactions come naturally to typically developing children. Somehow they just seem to pick up on such invisible social demands all by themselves. Not so my son, who is on the mild end of the spectrum. Hence, we are currently working on this shocking art of rolling eyes as a body language.
In retrospect, I suppose the above-mentioned teacher thought I was out of my mind to teach my son something she thought to be disrespectful and one she's had enough of from other typically developing students. I guess I'll just have to replace it with another skill should my son decide to use the brand new skill his mom taught him on his teachers at school. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.