We are looking for new and innovative ways to enhance awareness and perception of autism worldwide. Any suggestions to share with us? Thank you.
Prepare short biogs of 10 famous people with (largely unrecognised) autism, starting with Theresa May and Margaret Thatcher. This goes a long way into understanding their successes and ultimate failures.
Here is another real story: ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uq-FOOQ1TpE;
Forget what you know | Jacob Barnett | TEDxTeen )
" When Jacob Barnett was two years old, doctors told his mother Kristine that her son would probably never be able to talk, read, or even tie his shoes. He had moderate to severe autism, they informed her.
Indeed, Barnett seemed to have gone silent. Over about six months, the toddler had lost all communication skills and eye contact—he wouldn't even say "mommy" anymore. Per the experts' recommendations, Kristine put Barnett into an intensive therapy program, and into a preschool for kids with special needs.
For dozens of hours per week, professionals would work with him, trying to get him to do what he couldn't or wouldn't do. But he wasn't getting any better. After a while, Kristine went against everyone's advice and pulled him out of special education. She figured that her son would be better off if he spent those hours focused instead on what he could do—what he wanted to do.
So Kristine started teaching him herself, honing in especially on his outsized passion for math and science.
To say that this approach got her son talking again is an understatement. Suddenly, at age three, he spoke four languages. He could answer complicated astrophysics questions, despite the fact that no one had taught him the subject matter.
Around that age, he was also completing 5,000-piece puzzles, teaching himself Braille, making elaborate string diagrams in neat mathematical patterns, and faithfully recreating street maps on the floor using Q-tips—early evidence of his photographic memory.
At age eight, Barnett audited a physics class at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis. His mom sat with him in the lecture hall, so people assumed that she was a student who didn't have a babysitter. But after Barnett started speaking up in class—and after he got an A on the final—the university invited him to enroll.
First, he had to complete the curriculum for grades six through 12, which he did in just over a year. Teaching himself high school math was the easiest part—he absorbed all of algebra, geometry, and calculus in two weeks. The fact that he remembers literally every math problem he's ever encountered helped. (He sees them pictorially in his mind's eye.)
At 10, he was officially a college student. At 13, he became a published physicist. At home, his parents couldn't stock paper fast enough to keep up with how fast he was writing equations. So he'd move on to whiteboards, then to windows.
"I've always had a deep curiosity to understand how the world works," he says. "It has been both fascinating and humbling to believe that life's diverse patterns could emerge from simple mathematical expressions."( https://psmag.com/magazine/jacob-barnett-30-under-30 ).
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