More books!

(My latest post from The Spring Reading Challenge):

I have a very personal confession to make. I’m a… well, a binge reader.  There, I said it.

Every year, I get hooked on an author or a topic or a genre and I just start wading through everything I can find by that person or about that subject or in that form. One summer, it was contemporary poetry written in traditional poetic forms (yeah, weird, but whatever). Last year, it was the novels of Ian McEwan. This year, the topic is autism. I have a niece who is “on the spectrum,” and more and more of the students in our school are coming to us already diagnosed with Aperger’s Syndrome or some degree of autism, and I just feel like I need to know more about it, especially since there is very little professional development for teachers who are not “special education teachers” being offered right now. Or yet, at least. I need to educate myself. So I have started a list of books on the subject to plow through this year, and I must say, it is a fascinating subject, and it still would be even if I had no personal connection to it.

Thinking In Pictures is not a new book, although the paperback version that’s probably in your local bookstore has been updated with lots of new information on the latest research. You may be familiar with Ms. Grandin and her work. She’s been featured on 60 Minutes, amongst other places. Grandin is a high-functioning autistic person who has actually used her autism to create for herself a brilliant career in agricultural engineering, specifically in designing and constructing more humane methods for handling and slaughtering cattle. In this book, she vividly and memorably describes what it’s like to be autistic, how she literally “thinks in pictures,” as opposed to the way you and I think in language. Her descriptions of her early education, the support of her parents, wonderful (and not-so wonderful) teachers she had along the way (long before the more specialized forms of “special education” became commonplace), her difficulties with human relationships, and the way she was able to empathize and communicate with animals all make for interesting reading.

Be forewarned, however. This is not a “smooth” read. Grandin is an amazing engineer, and has become a wonderful lecturer (see what’s posted on YouTube for a taste: there’s one 80 minute lecture on working with autistic kids that’s terrific), but she’s not an artistic writer. This is a very technical sort of book in many ways, in spite of the autobiographical aspects of it. There’s quite a bit of repetition, which can make for frustrating reading, and the sheer amount of information contained in what is a relatively slim text can be overwhelming. However, I am sure that this summer, when I have a bit more time (HA!), I’ll be going back and highlighting many passages, especially the stuff that focuses on what teachers can do to assist their autistic students. That information is presented in a very straight-forward fashion, and I am sure I will find it invaluable this fall when our next batch of interesting and talented eighth graders shows up.

Not Even Wrong: Adventures In Autism is by a professional writer, historian Paul Collins. In this amazing book (I could not put it down, and read it in slightly more than a weekend, at the expense of many ungraded student papers), Collins talks about how he and his wife came to grips with the undeniable (though they tried very hard to deny it) truth of their two-year-old son’s autism. At the same time, in alternating chapters, Collins lays out his own historical investigation of the history of the disorder we now call autism, starting with his retelling of the story of Peter the Wild Boy, the feral child who so fascinated so many well-known folks during the 18th century. From Peter’s Hollywood-worthy story, Collins moves on to early studies of autism, the many missteps that science took along the way, some hypothesizing about interesting characters from history who may have been “on the spectrum,” up to the current state of the science, with special attention paid to Austrian physician Hans Asperger, for whom the syndrome so many of us have heard about recently is named. All the while, Collins lovingly and emotionally documents who his young family coped - and is coping - with the challenge of raising a beautiful, talented, sometimes difficult, autistic son.

It’s a very moving journey, and one I sincerely recommend to you, whether autism is part of your life - yet - or not.