On Tuesday, Courtney Stanton, Lauren Resetarits, Lisa Totaro and I went to see the film Temple Grandin which depicts the life of a girl living with autism. After the movie, there was a panel featuring J-Mac, a boy from Rochester who has autism. J-Mac has been on Oprah for playing in a basketball game during high school, when he scored numerous three pointers. Basketball is his dream. The film was very well done. Before the film, I had no knowledge of who Temple Grandin was. Temple Grandin was a girl who was diagnosed with autism at the age of 4. The movie was an excellent way to see in the mind of someone who has autism. Temple Grandin was sensitive to noises and didn’t like being touched by others. More importantly, Temple had an amazing mind and was a magnificent visual thinker. It was amazing to watch Temple come up with contraptions, and perform studies on her own. She could glance at a page, and have the whole page memorized. The message I obtained after watching the film was that everyone should develop and strive to achieve goals in life, regardless if you have a disability or not. The message for parents of children with autism is to never give up and persevere.
The second part of the presentation was a panel with J-Mac, his coach and father, an autism specialist, and a mother of an 18 year old with autism. I thought the panel could have been better. Jason only talked a couple times and I would’ve liked to hear more from him about his remarkable story. A lot of the questions from the audience were personal, and I felt that people should’ve asked more general questions about autism. It was really interesting to hear people from the audience say, “my autistic child,” or “my autistic grandchildren,” instead of putting the child before the disorder, a concept that has been drilled into use this past year. We repeatedly spoke of this concept during case studies as well. I wanted to hear Jason’s perspective on living with autism, but we learned later on during the presentation that he doesn’t like talking about autism. One good question that came from the audience was if the experiences with Temple were similar to what Jason had experiences. Jason’s father replied and said that when Jason was a baby, his ears were very sensitive to noise. His father said a dump truck would go past the house, and Jason would scream. I thought the autism specialist did a nice job answering questions from the audience and she answered a lot of thoughts I previously had. For example, everyone with autism does not necessarily have a unique talent. Some do have extraordinary abilities, but others with autism have harder times functioning. Additionally, it was interesting to hear that the incidence of autism has increased dramatically. Now, autism occurs in 1/150 children, and the ratio of boys to girls is 4:1. One reason for this dramatic increase is both genetic predisposition, and environment.
Overall, I would recommend this presentation to anyone, especially the school age population. Majority of the audience at this presentation were older adults. I feel that people our age and middle and high school students should go to this presentation to become aware of autism disorders and learn from people with autism spectrum disorders. People should be educated at an early age help decrease stigmas and bullying. Both the film and the panel were very informative and brought me insight into the lives of people living with autism.
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