Excellent idea! :grin:
Better yet, how about approaching directors of similar courses at a large number of universities? There are many Aspies in academia, and many things that can be done to promote our views.
They were considered normal at the time, and held in high esteem.
Yeah I remember reading in, I think it was the book Escape from Sobibor, how some Polish Jews were happy at the Nazi invasion because thought that the "civilized" Hitler would rescue them from their Polish "neighbors" who had been attacking them as long as they could remember. That stayed in my mind as one of the more ironic misconceptions in the whole Shoa (Holocaust).
Those traits are not only found in AS but are also found in NTs and everone inbetween.
I recommend reading this article on the Ballastexistenz blog, which discusses the fact that autistic children are still learning and developing even when they may seem to regress:
http://ballastexistenz.autistics.org/?p=59
When my son was two years old, he could write a few words and seemed interested in learning to read. Then he apparently lost interest and seemed nervous and overwhelmed by the whole idea. Eventually he started reading and writing with his class in first grade.
I never saw that as a "regression" or anything like that. I just thought he had enough going on in his busy little life so that he didn't feel quite ready to tackle the big job of learning to read yet, once he realized how much effort was involved!
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You know that trend of teaching ("normal") kids to sign, as babies, so they can communicate before they can talk?
I am sure this has been tried with autistic kids, too, as sign is sometimes used with non-speaking autistics.
Does anyone know any study about whether sign is often useful with little autistic kids? I wonder, because while sign is different from speech, it is still a language... and I wonder if kids who have a difficulty with communicating by spoken language usually have the same difficulty with producing sign language? I need to ask my mother the deaf-ed. teacher if sign uses a different mental process than speech.
Like, has anyone read a study about communication boards vs. sign for autistic toddlers? I think that would be so interesting, and useful. Because nearly everyone wants to communicate stuff, and like DW says, that could be a big part of the frustration that a kid feels.
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I know someone who was ... not exactly nonverbal, but ... he didn't talk for a while, like, he could talk but he couldn't make words express his ideas... so he ended up not saying much at all, for years. Then he decided to study literature so he would learn to do that. And he tells how it was really frustrating for him, even as a young adult...
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Oh, that makes sense. I remember vaguely one woman that my mother worked with (this was more than 10 yrs ago) was having a hard time connecting sign to communication, also. So i guess it's a similar problem to voiced language. Except if a person had an auditory processing problem, that would be different.
Well, the artistic version of sign, like the poetry/drama/literature of that language, depends way more on face expressions, but yeah, it's a big aspect of sign.
However, deaf-blind signers just read the hands; they don't need to touch the face to read the meanings in the signs. Which indicates to me that the face is "decoration", to add style and inflection and some meaning, but the words part of the meaning is conveyed by the actual signs. I'm thinking of the sign "sick"
( http://commtechlab.msu.edu/SITES/ASLWEB/S/W3627.htm )
and remembering that if you are sick in your stomach you sign the sign there, instead of in your head... and make a more painful face if you are more sick. Things like that.
(dictionary link for the curious: http://commtechlab.msu.edu/SITES/ASLWEB/browser.htm )