Bill Gates has Autism

Bill Gates has Asperger's, which is a form of Autism. He is one of the most successful people in the United States. I was just watching some videos on Autism and I found this one of Bill gates rocking back and forth in a business meating. Videos of the Miscrosoft moqul, Bill gates, displaying the rocking sterotopy reinforce the idea that self stimmulatory behaviors can exist without impeading a person's success. In school, I see teachers telling kids to put their hands stop or to sit still. Maybe we shouldn't put our focus into trying to make these autistic kids look "normal". You should watch this video, it might give you some new perspective on socially accepted behaviors.


I enjoyed this video of Bill gates because it shows his sense of humor. People tend to think that the autistic have no sense of humor.

Fun with Autism

Friday was full of excitement. Andrew perseverates on the grills of cars because they look like smiles. He talks to them, yells at them and laughs at them (even if they are not in his sight). I can't imagine having a brain that keeps me stuck on one thing for so long. Its hard for him to learn, do work or talk to friends because he is only thinking about the smiling cars. In the lunchroom, he can see the parking lot filled with happy cars, from his seat so he even had a hard time eating because he was so busy laughing with the cars. After lunch, I took his best friend (does not have autism) and him outside to look at the cars. I asked his best friend to show us the right way to look at cars and to tell us what he was thinking about the cars. Then I asked Andrew if it made sense what his friend was saying, he said yes. For the rest of the afternoon, when he started to get silly about the cars, I would ask him if that was the way his friend would act. That kept him focused for the afternoon. What would you do?

No worksheets

I have had time to work with Andrew again. He has PDD.NOS which is a confusing form of Autism. His language skills are very low and he gets frustrated very easily because it seems that he understands exactly what you are saying to him but he has no idea how to respond. Math is very difficult for him, he figures out the addition problems on his fingers says the answer than immediately forgets what he says. He usually ends up tearing up his paper and screaming. So we have started writing math facts on Popsicle sticks. He pulls a stick out of the container, reads the problem, solves the answer and doesn't have to write it down. We got through 20 math problems today in about 5 minutes, I remember it used to take over an hour for him to write the answer to just one problem. The best solution for him is no worksheets. We then played number games with a giant number grid and he actually had fun with math instead of throwing a tantrum.