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Thinking In Pictures
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p96 [At 2 and a half] I would tune out, shut off my ears, and daydream. My daydreams were like Technicolor movies in my head. I would also become completely absorbed in spinning a penny or studying the wood-grain pattern on my desktop. During these times the rest of the world disappeared..."
How does this sound to a Zen practitioner? Someone who has carefully trained himself to meditate.
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P 97 I was enrolled in a normal kindergarten at a small elementary school. Each class had only twelve to fourteen pupils and an experienced teacher who knew how to put firm but fair limits on children to control behavior. The day before I entered kindergarten, Mother attended the class and explained to the other children that they needed to help me. This prevented teasing and created a better learning environment. I am indebted to the good teachers at that school, who ran an old-fashioned, highly structured classroom, with lots of opportunity for interesting hands-on activities.
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P98 When I started school I was still diagnosed with brain damage. The teachers were aware of my diagnosis and were willing to work with me even though they had no training in special education. Two years of intensive teaching prior to kindergarten had prepared me for a normal school. I was now fully verbal, and many of the more severe autistic symptoms had disappeared. When an educational program is successful the child will act less autistic... My mind processes information slowly, and answering a question quickly was difficult.
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P99 It was Mr. Carlock, one of my science teachers, who became my most important mentor in high school. After I was thrown out of regular high school, my parents enrolled me in a small boarding school for gifted students with emotional problems. Even though I had scored 137 on the Wechsler IQ test when I was twelve, I was totally bored with schoolwork... The other teachers and professionals at the school wanted to discourage my weird interests and make me more normal, but Mr. Carlock took my interests and used them as motivators for doing schoolwork. When I talked about visual symbols such as doors, he gave me philosophy books.
That almost never turns out well.
Likewise, the psychologist and psychiatrist wanted me to get rid of my squeeze machine, but Mr Carlock defended it and went a step further... He told me if I wanted to find out why it relaxed me, I had to learn science. If I studied hard enough to get into college, I would be able to learn why pressure had a relaxing effect...
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P100 Dr. Kanner... noted that an autistic person’s fixations can be their way to achieve some social life and friends. Today, many people with autism become fascinated with computers and become very good at programming... The Internet... is wonderful for such people. Problems that autistic people have with eye contact and awkward gestures are not visible on the Internet, and typewritten messages avoid many of the social problems of face-to-face contact. [Now this is an interesting topic. One of the problems with communicating with text online is the likelihood of misunderstandings because of the lack of visual and audio cues that accompany normal conversation. This is why emojis and similar devices have become popular for adding some additional information to the text. In particular, sarcasm and irony can lead to misunderstandings and confused flamewars. Are the autistic more or less liable to all this? I would guess more. ] The Internet may be the best thing yet for improving an autistic person’s social life...
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P101 Tom McKean became frustrated during a college computer programming course because the professor flunked him for finding a better way to write a program. My guess is that the professor may have been offended by Tom’s direct manner... Tom would walk up to the blackboard and erase and correct his professor’s example... Tom was frustrated and confused when he failed the course. A more creative professor would have challenged him with more interesting and difficult program writing.
Now here’s a nice can of worms. This was a teachable moment, but not for that programming professor. He was the lesson. In many situations in the Real World, you have to determine whether what is wanted is the best solution or an authority’s idea of the proper solution. You can play this situation either way and come out ahead (ignore what the professor or client wants and pay the price, but get some compensatory reward, or play along and please the boss man. This also confirms my prejudice against learning programming in school since what kind of coder would be teaching instead of making tons more money as a programmer? The kind, to answer my own question, who couldn’t write great code to save his life. It surprises me that as both an autistic person and a woman, Grandin doesn’t make this point. I suspect, from what she’s written about herself in this book, that this is because she is still oblivious to it. She just forges ahead like a force of nature not really understanding the toes she’s stepping on.
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P 102 When I became interested in something, I rode the subject to death. I would talk about the same thing over and over again. It was like playing a favorite song over and over...
Sounds like Sachs and chemistry.
College and Graduate School
P102 ...
I developed a simple classification system for rules, which I called “sins of the system.” A rule designated as a sin of the system was very important, and breaking it would result in severe loss of privileges or expulsion. Students got into serious trouble for smoking and having sex. If a student could be totally trusted not to engage in these two activities, she could break some of the minor rules without any consequences... Once the staff realized that I would not run off into the bushes and have sex I was never punished for going out in the woods without a staff member. I was never given special permission to go hiking by myself, but on the other hand, I learned that the staff would make no attempt to stop me...
Again, what I find interesting here is that while she does, as she says but I don’t quote, learn these rules by rote, she still shows no indication that she understands what’s behind them. That the things you really can’t do are the things that can get the staff in trouble. You would think one of the things autistic people would be taught by rote is to consider what actions make the lives of people in authority either easier or harder. And that doing the former will either be rewarded or get you leeway while the later will end up making your life harder as well.
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P104 I wanted to do my master’s thesis in animal science on the behavior of cattle in feedlots in different types of cattle chutes, but my adviser at Arizona State University thought that cattle chutes were not an appropriate academic subject. Back in 1974, [OMG! I was there then as well] animal behavior research on farm livestock was a rarity. Once again my fixation propelled me. I was going to do my survey of cattle behavior in cattle chutes even though the professor thought it was stupid... Most of the professors in the Animal Science Department thought my ideas were crazy. Fortunately, I persevered and found two new professors, Dr. Foster Burton, chairman of the Construction Department, and Mike Nielson, from Industrial Design, who were interested... An idea that seemed crazy to conservative professors in animal science seemed perfectly reasonable to a construction man and a designer.
I would not want to be standing between Grandin and something she wanted to do.
There’s interesting stuff here about her research and her mastery of keypunching IBM cards, but I’m skipping it.
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P106 I still remember taking that vital first step in establishing my credibility in the livestock industry. I knew if I could get an article published in the Arizona Farmer Ranchman, I could go on from there. While I was attending a rodeo, I walked up to the publisher of the magazine and asked him if he would be interested in an article on the design of squeeze chutes. He said he would be, and the following week I sent in an article entitled “The Great Headgate Controversy.” ... I just could not believe it. It was plain old nerve that got me my first job. That was in 1972. From then on I wrote for the magazine regularly while I was working on my master’s degree.
Now I’m looking at this from the publisher’s point of view. I’m guessing one of the problems of publishing that particular trade journal (really any trade journal) is finding content that anyone wants to read. Walking up to him at the rodeo may have seemed bold to Grandin but he had everything to gain here and nothing to lose. Then she threw in a headline that even makes me mildly curious.
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P109 ...Free-lancing enabled me to avoid many of the social problems that can occur at a regular job. [Preach! ] It meant I could go in, design a project, and leave before I got into social difficulties. [Aside from the fact that I actually enjoying working on site, that was my approach to programming. ] I still don’t easily recognize subtle social cues for trouble, though I can tell a mile away if an animal is in trouble.
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Talking about how rare women were in the world of cattle at that time, she mentions she had to change clothes in the men’s bathroom at the ASU dairy. The dairy is where we got the manure for our organic garden at the ASU farm at that same time. Small world.
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