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October 27, 2009

Part Three: Talking with Dr. Temple Grandin, Author of "Animals in Translation"

By Joan Brunwasser

I couldn't figure out why I didn't fit in. It's very important to get these young Asperger nerdy kids into these specialized activities where they're going to have peers who are also interested in computers or playing music or playing chess or building robots or anything. If I hadn't had my science teacher when I was in high school, I would have been in a real mess.

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This is the third and final segment of my interview with Dr. Temple Grandin, noted author and animal handling expert. You mentioned before that connection between autism and genius, Temple. And in fact you have a whole chapter in your book about that. I'm sure that will be controversial. Can you give some examples for our readers?

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Temple Grandin
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Well, Einstein today would be labeled autistic. He had no language until age three and when you read biographies of Einstein, when he was a child he had a lot of autistic traits: not very social, a lot of solitary play with blocks and with playing cards, a typical autistic trait. There's two ways nature can build a brain: it can build a brain to be more a thinking and cognitive brain or a brain to be more social. It takes a kind of process of circuits in the brain to make a person really social. Basically, with the mild form of autism, which is Asperger's, you think of all the people who work in the computer field. There are tons of them that are not diagnosed, that are just Asperger mild autism. Geeks and nerds and Asperger's are the same thing. People on the spectrum tend to be more interested in things than interested in just social chitchat. And if you didn't have any people in this world interested in things, we'd still be living in caves.

The other side of that coin is that autistic kids often suffer from the insensitivity and cruelty of their peers.

I had a terrible time in high school. I was just teased absolutely horribly. It was terrible.

I'd like to hear about that. But I'd also like to discuss something else. At some point, you learned how to adopt some social graces in order to be able to function.

You have to learn social rules like being in a play. I didn't even know that people had all these secret little eye signals until I read about them in a book when I was 50 years old. I didn't even know they existed. You have to learn social rules like saying “please” and “thank you” and being polite and not pushing in line just like being in a play. Sort of like, you go to a foreign country; what are the customs of the foreign country? You have to just learn social rules sort of like you're acting in a play.

It's like learning a foreign language.

That's right.

How was it when you were in high school? Did you realize how different you were from everybody else?

I couldn't figure out why I didn't fit in. The only places I could get away from all the teasing was with the shared interests. The other students that were interested in horse back riding or science lab, they were not doing the teasing. Those were refuges away from teasing, those specialized activities. And I think it's very important to get these young Asperger nerdy kids into these specialized activities where they're going to have peers who are also interested in computers or playing music or playing chess or building robots or anything. If I hadn't had my science teacher when I was in high school , I would have been in a real mess.

Can you tell our readers in what ways he was such an important figure in your life?

One of the things he did was to get me to start studying. I wasn't studying. I didn't see any point in going to school. Once I became convinced that I wanted to achieve this goal of becoming a scientist, I stopped messing around and started studying. Because now I had a goal of becoming a scientist.

Let's go back to learning this language and being in a play and understanding how you have to function to get through life. You also had a mentor who walked you through it, which must have been important, who clued you in.

A mentor?

I remember reading that one of them men you worked with came and tossed a deodorant to you.

That's right. HBO is making a movie about me, starring Clare Danes, and that scene is going to be in the movie.

So, if it's not a secret, can you talk about it a little?

No, it's not a secret. One of the things I had to learn was not to be such a dirty slob. and I had to have people get pretty blunt with me to get me to change my ways. And I was real angry at the time when they did that, but then I changed my ways. Because I wanted the job.

And therefore you opened doors for yourself.

That's right.

So, that's a good segue to what I wanted to talk about now. What special challenges do high-functioning autistic students face in getting into college, taking college courses and getting jobs in the outside world?

Well, one of the biggest challenges is uneven skills; you can be good at one thing, and bad at another. For example, I can't do algebra. Algebra was impossible. I'm finding a lot of students that absolutely can't do algebra but they can do geometry just fine. They need to be able to take geometry. For them, algebra is not the prerequisite for geometry. Some of the kids who are brilliant at math, reading is hard. So, what some of them may need to do is maybe take a reduced load, take a little longer to get through college.

The other problem is bad test results. Lots of times you had to get in through the back door and the way I got into my undergraduate college is my mother went and talked to the dean and he let me in on probation. And I got good grades. How did I get through college math? Well, thank goodness, in the ‘60s, it was not algebra. The regular college math class in the late ‘60s was finite math. It was probability, statistics and matrices. It was a little less abstract. And with tutoring, I was able to do it.

Thank goodness.

Yes, thank goodness is right.

But who is there in high schools, and colleges, and college admissions advocate for autistic students?

Sometimes it's a mentor teacher, sometimes it's a parent, sometimes it's a guidance counselor. I had quite a few teachers who were willing to help me when I was in college. Mr. Dionne, the math teacher, I went into his office after nearly every lecture, and he'd tutor me.That was very nice of him to do that - and getting good teachers to take an interest in a student - and I had a number of good teachers.

The other thing is that good teachers get attracted to ability. And they could see the things where I did have ability. And when I was going out and starting my freelance livestock handling equipment business people thought it was really weird. But when I showed them one of my drawings they said “oh wow, you did that?” Then they had respect for me when they saw the drawings. One of the things I had to learn was that I had to sell my work rather than my personality.

That makes perfect sense. In many ways, you live the dream life. You split your time between your two loves - working with the meat processing industry to keep them on target with humane treatment of their livestock and traveling around the country and the world talking with groups about autism. What happens at the sessions regarding autism? Are they support groups? Informational for nonautistic?

They're usually austism conferences. And most of the audience is usually a mixture of parents and teachers, speech therapists and guidance counselors. and a mixture of parents and educators. And a lot of things that I'm telling you right now has come right out of my autism talk.

Do people keep in touch with you - by email or by phone?

I much prefer to talk to people on the phone than do correspondence by email.

But people reach out to you, they want to keep a connection with you?

Yes, if they give me phone numbers then I answer back. I don't do so well with email.

If you could, would you give up your autism and live a more traditional, conventional life?

No, I would not. I think I don't like the vague ways, the fuzzy thinking of normal people.

What haven't I covered that you'd like to talk about?

Mainly this article is about autism?

Yes. I find that what you write about - the human connection and how we all think differently and what you've done with that - is the most fascinating aspect for me.

One of the things I'm most concerned about in the educational system is they're taking all the hands on courses out - things like art, music, welding, shop, wood shop, automobile mechanics shop. When I was in elementary school, art was my favorite class. And I think that's a real shame. Yes, it's important for kids to learn reading and how to do math, but all the things where the people with good visual spatial skills will excel, they're going to get rid of that. I was really disturbed by an article I read recently in Science magazine that talked about this. The thing is, the people who think visually/spatially, they're the ones who will be the great engineers and artists.

I remember reading that you were talking about engineers and the new crop of engineering students who couldn't draw a circle freehand?

They were animal science students. In my class, I had my students lay out livestock handling facilities. And I had some students that didn't even know how to draw a circle with a compass. They didn't even know what a compass was. When I was in elementary school, we did compasses and protractors and we learned all about measuring angles and things like that. And there's less of that kind of thing being done.

You also talk about how we aren't outside enough and what happens when we don't spend time in nature.

For a lot of kids today, their lives are so structured, it's going to interfere with problem solving. When we were kids, we had to make up our own games, we'd make up bike racing games, building tree houses, putting up tents, just doing all kinds of stuff where we had to figure things out for ourselves. If you don't learn to figure some things out, you're not going to have very good problem solving skills.

That's very true.

One of the things we have to do with these quirky kids is we have to take these - this Asperger's is just a mild type of autism with no speech delay (another name for Asperger's is just geeks and nerds) - we need to take these kids that have uneven skills and develop the area of strength. If it's mathematics, maybe the 4th grade kid needs to be in high school math but he may need special ed. in reading. Or if it's visual/spatial skills and art, then the art ability needs to be developed. You need to take the thing that the kid is good at and build on it. I want to add autism is a very broad spectrum and half the people labeled with autism may not even fully have language.

Do you go and speak at schools at all?

I can't go to everyplace so I mainly speak at autism conferences and lots of teachers go to those conferences. A typical autism conference may have 400 people come to it, about a third of them will be parents and the rest will be teachers, speech therapists, guidance counselors, occupational therapists, and other professionals.

How long have you been doing the circuit of autism conferences?

I started some of the early ones back in the mid ‘80s but I really got on the circuit when Thinking in Pictures came out which was in 1995.

Do you notice much change in schooling or the way teachers look at things after coming to these conferences?

A lot of teachers say I've really given them insight. The other thing I talk about a lot in my talks is the sensory issues. A lot of kids with autism, dyslexia , ADHD, and other problems, they have problems with sensory oversensitivity. Like, loud sounds will hurt their ears or they may a real problem with tolerating fluorescent lights. They can see the flicker of fluorescent lights and that just drives them crazy because it's like being in a discoteque. Problems with touch sensitivity - like, I can't wear wool against my skin because it's like sandpaper ripping my nerves off.

Let's take that example. The wool sensitivity. You can choose to wear non-wool items. But what does a person do who finds himself in an environment with fluorescent lighting?

That's a real problem. I'd say when it comes to environmental problems that's big number one. One of the things that they can do is get a desk over by a window, bring in an old fashioned incandescent light bulb lamp. That will help blot out the fluorescent lights. Sometimes wearing a hat helps, or wearing colored glasses.

And you talk about this in sessions with the teachers? They're aware of this?

Oh yes. This is a major part of my talks.

It makes inexplicable things suddenly understandable.

Then you wonder why in a certain classroom, this kid is having a tantrum because he's feeling overwhelmed. Or the kid goes into the supermarket and throws a tantrum and it may be, from a sensory standpoint, that he's just completely overwhelmed.

Do you have another book in your head ready to come out?

I'm thinking of doing something more on autistic thinking. Then, I do have some livestock books that came out recently. Humane Livestock Handling- that's a book strictly for ranchers and then I have a book coming out, an academic textbook on improving animal welfare, a practical approach. It talks a lot about the auditing, how to audit things.

Who reads these more technical books?

That would be veterinary students, animal science students, ranchers reading those strictly professional books. Thinking in Pictures, Animals in Translation and Animals Make Us Human, those are for the general public.

Are you looking forward to this movie that's being made about your life?

Yes. I've actually seen it.

It's done?

Yes, and I've seen it. And it's going to be really good. And Claire Danes is going to play me in the ‘60s and the ‘70s when I'm in high school and college. The movie ends in the late ‘70s, just as I get my career started.

Will this be in the movie theatres?

It's going to be on HBO. It's probably going to come out in the first week in February.

That's pretty exciting! Temple Grandin, the movie star!

Yeah.

What else would is on your To Do list?

Well, keep doing the things I'm doing. I've trained four Ph.Ds and I've got three of them out there working really good in the animal industries so that's good. and I have a fifth one that just started and he's doing fantastic.

At Colorado State University?

Yes, they're students at Colorado State and I'm their major professor.

How can people learn more about your work?

My website is grandin.com.

It's been so interesting to talk with you. Thank you so much for guiding us through the worlds of autism and animal behavior. I have learned so much by reading your books and I highly recommend them. Good luck in your work, Temple.

Link to Part One

Link to Part Two

Temple's website



Authors Website: www.OpEdNews.com

Authors Bio:
Joan has been the Election Integrity Editor for OpEdNews since December 2005. She writes on a large range of subjects and does many interviews and reviews.

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