Different . . . Not Less. Temple GrandinЧитать онлайн книгу.
I Loved to Read Books about Special Interests
Academically, I was almost a grade behind in most subjects and was often surprised when I got promoted to the next grade. However, I still had my special interests, in areas such as astronomy, airplanes, electricity, natural history, weather, cats, music, and the like. I spent hours at my desk, reading stacks of books on my favorite subjects. One day in the 3rd grade, I was busy taking notes and copying diagrams from a stack of astronomy books on my desk during a math lesson. My teacher told me that I’d never learn how to do math. Yet somehow, I’ve learned enough math to teach statistics at the university level! The good news is that today, an educator would likely notice such a special interest and find a way to incorporate it into a child’s curriculum.
Sometimes I wondered if there was more to school than sitting at my desk, reading my favorite books. Often, just figuring out what teachers wanted was a perpetual challenge. Until I went to college, school always seemed like a bit of a game, as I tried to guess what the teachers wanted me to do. I think my teachers did not know how to reach me, and since I was not a behavioral problem, they just left me to my own devices. In those days, before there was special education law, it was probably for the best.
My Parents Supported My Special Interests
My parents supported my special interests. When I was focused on collecting seashells, my mother and I spent hours sorting and gluing shells onto a cover of a cardboard box. We also wrote the English and Latin names for the shells below them. When I was interested in astronomy, a telescope appeared, and we would stay up late at night, looking at the moon, stars, and constellations. My parents supported my interest in chemistry by providing me with a chemistry set and eventually a lab bench in my room.
I followed the Apollo space program closely and had a model of the lunar module at home. I read every book I could get my hands on that related to aviation, space exploration, and astronomy. At the time, I desperately wanted to fly on an airplane and thought about becoming a pilot. One of the highlights of my life was my first flight from Boston, MA, to Tampa, FL, to visit my grandparents. The feeling of takeoff was pure nirvana. Knowing what I know today about sensory integration, I was underresponsive in the vestibular and proprioceptive senses, and I was a sensory seeker. This may explain why I was and continue to be attracted to airplanes.
Some of my favorite sensory-seeking activities as a child were riding my bicycle into a snow bank as fast as possible to launch myself over the handlebars, climbing a tree about 20 feet in height and jumping to the ground, and swinging high on a swing set to find the perfect launching-off point, so I could sail through the air and land softly on my feet. To this day, I still enjoy take-offs on airplanes, as well as when the ride gets turbulent.
MIDDLE- AND HIGH-SCHOOL YEARS
In contrast to many, if not most people, middle and high school were better for me, probably for the following two reasons: (1) I started using words as my primary means of interaction with my classmates, instead of sound effects from the environment, and (2) I was able to engage in my special interests. The middle- and high-school years are when courses, clubs, and activities begin to form around particular interests. At first, I took a shop class in electronics and finished the material in about 3 weeks, when there were 9 more to go. However, the shop classes at my school contained bullies. My teacher saw that bullying was beginning to be a problem, so I was transferred into band.
In the band, I now had a structured activity in which to mediate my interactions with other students. Music was a place I could be successful and “geek out” with other like-minded students. My interest in music may have stemmed from the music my parents used for our home-based “early-intervention” program when I was young.
When I was 6 years old, my parents had found a teacher to give me music lessons. However, the lessons went badly. I think the most important thing I learned from these lessons was how not to teach children with autism how to play musical instruments. While I was taking those lessons, however, my parents remained very strict about having me practice 30 minutes a day to prepare for my time with the teacher.
I Learned to Play Most Musical Instruments
I became so taken with music that I would spend hours in the instrument closet with introductory music lesson books, such as A Tune a Day, to learn how to play most of the instruments. A leading factor in my choosing music education as an undergraduate college major was that one of the requirements was to learn all of the instruments!
How I Coped with Physical Education
Physical education was often problematic to me, owing to the challenges I had with motor control, and, later, bullying in the locker room. One day in middle school, I noticed a chart on the wall of the locker room that read “100-Mile Club,” with a bunch of names on it. I asked the gym teacher what it was, and he said that anyone who walked or ran around a track 100 times during the semester got their name on the board. I requested to use my gym period to work on that very task. Upon his agreement, I queried as to whether I could walk or run in my “civilian” clothes, to which he assented. This was great, because now there was no more dealing with locker-room bullies, and I didn’t have to engage in all of those ball-oriented sports I was so bad at. Rather, I could work on something that was a strength for me—running around a track.
In those days, there was no Individualized Education Program (IEP) and no special services for kids with autism. I was lucky to have a sensitive gym teacher who must have agreed I needed to get my physical education in an alternative way.
In high school, I had an opportunity to design an independent-study curriculum for myself in physical education. Bicycling was a special interest of mine, and I developed a weekly training schedule to prepare for long rides of 100 miles a day, as well as bicycle races.
I never had a problem with physical fitness, per se, but rather the social aspects and coordination needed to play team sports. Additionally, I had great difficulty with catching a ball because I always thought it was going to hit me, and I’d run away or duck. This was probably due to my visual perception issues.
Other enjoyable middle- and high-school activities included joining a rock-climbing club, where we went climbing with ropes and carabiners (a metal ring used to hold the ropes when climbing). I also convinced one of the teachers to sponsor the bicycle club I wanted to start, where I’d lead rides of up to 25 miles. It was great fun drawing up maps for the ride by hand, as there were no Google Maps at the time.
EXPERIENCES IN COLLEGE
As an undergraduate in college, rhetoric class was especially hard. It was essentially a freshman course to develop writing skills. Analyzing music from the romantic era posed a real challenge, as I found the forms to be less structured than compositions from other periods. I also found physics of music to be incredibly tedious. The subject interested me, but I found the teacher to be horribly boring—possibly owing to a lack of structure in the class. And, I was still afraid of doing math—statistics class was particularly daunting, until I took it as a summer course. The grade-school teacher who had told me I would never be able to learn math years before had succeeded in scaring me away from all math-oriented subjects. However, in college, when I decided to pursue an accounting degree in addition to my music degree, I faced the sizeable hurdle of required courses in mathematics.
With much trepidation, I took the first two required courses during the summer, when they would not interfere with my other coursework. Those courses went well. Emboldened, I started a statistics class that had the reputation of being incredibly difficult. That class was notoriously a good way to bring down your cumulative average, because poor grades were commonplace and it drained away study time from other coursework. After 2 weeks, I found this to be true, and I dropped the class.
Conquering the Dreaded Statistics Class
The following summer, I took the same statistics course again, all by itself, figuring it would be my lone “D” (and hopefully not an “F”), but at least it would not interfere