Refusing to be defined

Temple Grandin encourages ‘normal’ life with austism

GO & DO ‘Read This’ Lecture With Temple Grandin When: 5:30 p.m. Monday Where: Stubblefield Center on the University of Arkansas campus in Fort Smith Cost: Free but tickets are required and available at the UAFS Box Office in the Smith-Pendergraft Campus Center Information: 788-7000FAST FACTS Teaching Ideas From Grandin◊Teach your child words. When you give him a snack, name the food when you give it to him. For example, say “apple” when you give your child an apple.

◊Play lots of games that involve turn taking. If the child is spinning a penny, turn it into a game of taking turns. Children’s board games, such as Candyland, are good for teaching turn taking. When a child gets older, use board games that are suitable for an older child.

◊Limit TV and video game playing to one hour per day.

◊Sing nursery rhymes and play other interactive children’s games. Always try to encourage social interaction and eye contact.

◊Use lots of positive reinforcement, smiling and praise. Encourage the child to give you a smile.

◊Use each mealtime to teach social interaction and manners. Structured meals where a child learns social skills are part of a 20-hour week program.

◊Make sure your child gets plenty of exercise. Exercise has a calming effect. Cut excess sugar out of their diet. Make sure he/she has a good breakfast that contains lots of protein such as meat, eggs, dairy or peanut butter. Sugar loaded foods are bad. Eating protein, especially at breakfast, really helps one to be calmer, focused, and less likely to get headaches.

Source: www.templegrandin.comTemple Grandin describes herself as a professor of animal science, a researcher on cattle behavior and a designer of animal handling facilities.

Most of the world knows who she is because Grandin hasautism.

She wouldn’t change the autism, but she is adamant that it shouldn’t define her - or anyone else on the autism spectrum.

“The thing that worriesme is seeing too many youngsters that put their autism first,” Grandin said by phone from Fort Collins, Colo., where she teaches at Colorado State University. “I see kids much less severe than me playing video games on Social Security! Too many of these kids are too sheltered. They’re not learning the basic stuff, like howto walk into McDonald’s and order a hamburger.”

That’s not to say that Grandin always appreciated socialization.

When she was in school, she said, she wanted to stay in her room because interacting with other people mystified and frightened her. Neither her mother nor the educators at the Dedham (Mass.) Country Day School would allow it - and neither, she said, shouldparents now, even when school becomes challenging.

“High school was the worst part of my life,” Grandin said after Dedham. The respite from being teased and tormented for being different came in classes where she shared interests with other students. “The kids interested in those activities weren’t the ones doing the teasing.”

“My best interactions still happen around shared interests,” she said. “It’s so important for teenage kids (on the autism spectrum) to get involved in shared interests - the school play, the newspaper, art, music, electronics, all kinds of different things. But you can’t let them be reclusive.”

Grandin is also a vocal advocate of putting young people to work. She was working with a seamstress by the time she was13 and taking care of nine horses at 15. But the summers spent on her aunt’s ranch when she was a teenager changed her life.

“You have to expose kids to interesting things to get them interested in things,” she said.

READ THIS!

Grandin is visiting Fort Smith on Monday as part of Read This!,the community read sponsored by the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith. The book selected for 2013 was Mark Haddon’s 2003 novel “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time,” which became something of an international treatise on being autistic.

Haddon never used the word “autistic” in his novel, according to Keith Fudge of Van Buren, associate professor in the department of English, Rhetoric and Writing at UAFS. But “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time” was chosen to bring attention to autism.

“It used to be that one in 250 children were born with some sort of nonspecified personality development disorder,” said Joe Hardin, dean of the UAFS College of Languages and Communication. “Now it’s more like one in 88. In other words, everybody you know is related to or knows somebody with some sort of autism spectrum condition. We thought these statistics make this is an ideal book for a community read.”

“The whole idea of the community read originally was to unite first-year students, but we want to see it go beyond that,” Fudge said. “This book has thepotential to bring in healthcare professionals, educators, people from different walks of life across the campus - and from there it just blossoms to book clubs, support groups...”

Beyond bringing attention to autism, Fudge said, he hopes the book encourages the same consideration of “tolerance, acceptance and those sorts of issues” as did last year’s “The Sunflower” by Simon Wiesenthal and the accompanying visit by Holocaust survivor Eva Kor.

“We read about (the book’s protagonist, 15-yearold Christopher John Francis Boone) and think about how he relates to the world, but we never turn it around and think about how the world functions in relation to him,” Fudge said. “We put the stress on the differences between us and him. This is a book about saying it’s OK to be different.”

“The book’s jacket copy identifies him as an autistic savant, but Christopher tells us all we need to know about his condition without reference to medical terminology,” The New York Times wrote in 2003.

“Christopher compares his own brain to a computer that is easily overloaded by multitasking. He has a photographic memory and is capable of working out complicated factoring problems in his head but is so overwhelmed by unfamiliar visual or verbal stimuli that sometimes he shuts down, holding his hands over his eyes or his ears while he groans or screams. He abhors physical contact, new environments and the colors yellow and brown.

“Haddon manages to bring us deep inside Christopher’s mind and situates us comfortably within his limited, severely logical point of view,” The Times continued, “to the extentthat we begin to question the common sense and the erratic emotionalism of the normal citizens who surround him, as well as our own intuitions and habits of perception.”

“The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time” is “unlike anything you’ve ever read,” Fudge said. “It didn’t make me sad; it made me enlightened. That’s what I liked about it.” ANIMAL ANSWERS

Haddon’s hero says he likes dogs better than people.

“You always know what a dog is thinking. It has four moods. Happy, sad, cross and concentrating. Also, dogs are faithful and they do not tell lies because they cannot talk.”

For Temple Grandin, it was cows.

“Summer trips to my aunt’s ranch introduced me to ... cattle,” she wrote inthe foreword to “Temple Grandin: How the Girl Who Loved Cows Embraced Autism and Changed the World,” a biography by Sy Montgomery. “As I became more and more interested in cattle, I had increasing concerns about how they were being handled and treated.

“In the early 1970s, when I started working with livestock,” she continued, “many of the cowboyswere really rough with the animals. This motivated me to find better ways of handling cows when they were run through a chute for vaccinations.”

More than half the cattle in the United States and Canada and many more overseas now enter slaughter facilities through equipment designed by Grandin - and they do it without fear. She knows what scares them because, she said, her brain functions much like that of a prey animal. She sees and hears the out-ofplace things that frighten them - a jacket flapping on a fence post, a shadow on the floor that looks like a hole, a machine that hisses like a snake - and she fixes them.

By the time the little girl her father wanted institutionalized earned her master’s degree, people were beginning to listen to her. Grandin went on to complete a doctorate in animal science from the University of Illinois in 1989, has written more than half a dozen books, appeared on scores of television programs, was named one of 2010’s 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine and was the subject of a 2010 HBO biopic starring Claire Danes.

BEING AUTISTIC

Grandin speaks and writes on all kinds of topics,from animal handling to autism, and sometimes her talks run that gamut. She hopes she touches parents, teachers and employers who might have people with autism in their lives.

“I want them to know how big the autism spectrum is,” she said, “from Einstein and half the computer programmers in the world to those who are severely handicapped.”

For adults never diagnosed or recently diagnosed, knowing the challenges of autism can help them understand things that have always been difficult, like relationships, she said. For parents, knowing the best-case scenarios of autism can encourage them to expect more that Grandin’s father did.

Asked about him, Grandin answered briefly.

“He was probably on the spectrum. He had problems - and a temper.”

He was never Grandin’s role model, she said.

Instead, she looked to Einstein, for years keeping a poster of him on her wall.

Also on her wall was “On Creativity” by Alan Ashley-Pitt, which states in part: “You can dissolve into the mainstream, or you can be distinct. To be distinct, you must be different. To be different, you must strive to be what no one else but you can be.”

Style, Pages 25 on 03/07/2013

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