I have just encountered a rather interesting article about temple Grandin online. It would seem that perhaps Grandin has spent a tad too much time at her livestock job once again and is recycling the waste products that the denizens of her slaughter houses produce. Grandin makes the unsubstantiated claim that reported cases of severe autism have gone up while the higher functioning cases and Asperger's have been stable. The 2003 California report produced by the state regional center seems to contradict that fact. They have found great increases in the reported IQs on average of their clients, suggesting that perhaps the reported rise in autism cases is at least partly due to greater awareness that people of normal and above average intelligence can have autism. She then goes on to say that it is the quirky and odd children who get tormented by school bullies but not the overtly handicapped children. Apparently she never went to the schools I went to, where as an overtly handicapped autistic child I was severely tormented. The article reports that Temple speaks from personal experience as she was diagnosed with Asperger's. This is in spite of the fact that what mainly differentiates Asperger's from high functioning autism is the fact there is no speech delay in the former but there is in the latter. The article goes on to state that Temple had a speech delay and could not talk until she was 3. I don't know if Grandin told the reporter that she was diagnosed as asperger's or whether this is misreporting and/or ignorance on the reporter's part.
Next Grandin is quoted as saying that "everyone with autism is detail oriented" as if she knows every single autistic person. Stereotypes like the ones she used to make about all autistics being visual thinkers are common for her. She seems to think all autistics fall into her unique mode of being when she has only met a fraction of all of the autistics in the world.
Grandin once more goes into her tired cliches of channeling obsessions into careers, saying if a kid wants to draw trains let him do so as it might lead to a career in graphic design or a career in the railroad industry. It is such juicy irony that she would pick the railroad industry after all the mishaps of Darius McCollum who was obsessed with trains and became an expert on the New York Transit system after befriending some of the people who worked there during his childhood. Instead of a job as a train driver, McCollum has spent a good portion of his life cooling his heels in prison for taking trains for joyrides due to his obsession. Grandin then pulls a rabbit out of neurodiversity's hat, claiming that kids who have the potential to be computer programmers end up being dishwashers because society tells them they can't do it.
Grandin goes on to say that the problems of autistic children could be mitigated in school if all school children were forced to wear uniforms, then the autistic people who don't wear fashionable clothes would have an easier time of things. She claims that in some countries such as the Phillipines she has seen first hand how school uniforms help autistic children. Welcome to the military! thanks Temperamental. I wonder how American school children who would certainly be culturally different than children in third world nations would feel about this. What if they found out they were forced to wear uniforms because of autistic children. I can't help thinking the retribution that would take place against autistic children in schools would make the bullying they currently have to endure look like a love fest.
Grandin then continues to branch out her expertise from livestock facility design into the economic state of the U.S. currently, talking about the recession and the bailout making the bizarre claim that the wall street bankers should have been engineers and how they failed to see the big picture.
I believe that Grandin presents some dangerous propaganda with her simple quick fixes not only for autistic children but even the U.S. Economy.
Recently an anonymous poster in another blog post i made commented on how the same autistics who can get the name recognition, e.g. temple, donna williams, stephen shore, lianne willey, etc. are constantly recycled (apparently in the same manner of the waste products of the cattle that Grandin works with). Though I am an agnostic and practially an atheist I will say metaphorically, God protect us from recycled autistics like Temple.
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Maybe Temple Grandin will think I'm good enough if she ever finds out I just earned an A in Visual Basic and a B in Intro to C++ after having earned a bachelor's in criminal justice from a Florida University. I will continue taking additional classes until I get a certificate in Web Development Specialist at my local community college while trying to work my way up to the job market in this horrible economy patiently despite having autism- not Asperger's Syndrome- a condition which she does NOT even have that the article mentioned.
Her advice on me trying to volunteer at the medical examiner's department to get into the back door of a career there was just as terrible as her temperamental opinions she pointed out from the article. All I ended up doing was filing and a bit of paperwork at the medical examiner's within the bureau investigations department (as if I was going to get a job at that area anyway) for close to 6 weeks, only to eventually be told the place hasn't been that busy and I should try volunteering elsewhere until around January where work may possibly pick up again. The only positive part of the whole thing was adding additional volunteer experience to my resume, but that wouldn't be good enough according to Temple, would it? No way! So what excuse does she make for someone like myself who doesn't have a job, yet? That the employees of the Wall Street Journal should have been engineers so their talent was wasted! That kind of remark just shows you how flawed her logic truly is and/or how much denial she is of her own disability, not realizing she's successful IN SPITE of her handicap.
Since when did having school uniforms prevent teasing autistic kids? I was required to wear one in middle school- at a Jewish private school- and it did not control anyone's decision to pick on someone like me at times. I mean how was a damn ignorant middle school kid in the 90's supposed to be supportive and accommodating over particular sets of collared shirts and navy or brown shorts/pants/skirts? What if the other students don't even want to bother trying so hard to give in every time it's the type of kid who follows at least one particular peer around every day and asks if he/she can come over to his/her house while the
peer(s) doesn't/don't really want to be his/her friend despite not living with the disorder from a first-person perspective or even having a speech-language pathologist stop by the class at times to observe the student's behavior and educate them what's going on inside the kid's head, or possibly coming up with a way to temporarily alter the nuerotypical students' brains similar to the way an autistic's brain as quickly as possible just so they can be more accommodating? That's just not going to work!
While mainly my mother did spend time with my teachers, principal, vice principal and a couple other team members of my elementary school for my IEP, and I believe she got my Kindergarten teacher to let the other students know about my disability, the kids asked me questions like, "Why don't I talk?" (when I in fact was talking, just not conversing, only it never occurred to anybody to explain it to me in that manner), believed I could be controlled (and it is true to a certain extent if I react on impulse the minute someone tells me something, only he/she was really joking), and then for some reason the students were no longer informed about my disability by an adult by the time I hit first grade, only some of the kids already knew from knowing me from Kindergarten (and it JUST somehow popped into my head mostly likely due to the speech therapist I had as a child as well as other therapists in the late 80's to early 90's not realizing she (and they) was (were) accidently re-wiring my brain to cause me to forget about these actual incidents in my early childhood. It's also possible that it's the cause of some of my processing problems and why I grew up saying and believing in certain things.
In conclusion, Temple's beliefs may be a possible cause as to why she'd make some of her idiotic statements and opinions (i.e. AS kids getting teased for being weird and not having an overt enough disability because don't forget- Temple's problems are quite obvious to society and always have been due to the public school systems and everyone else she's encountered her whole life because she has autism (not Asperger's) and partly due to the ignorance of what the speech therapist did to poor little Temple with the little knowledge of autism that was known back in the 50's (that wasn't the therapist's fault obviously but wouldn't be surprised to get falsely accused of offending any one of them who came across this post).
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