He generally reads to himself but asked me to read to him a bit at bedtime so I did. When we came across the following paragraph in the Attack of the 50-Ft. Cupid

Franny’s mom … might not have chosen to have a mad scientist for a daughter, but that’s what Franny was.

my son asked “Mom, what would you do if I became a mad scientist?”

I answered “Well, you kind of are a mad scientist already, aren’t you?” and gave him a kiss. He smiled. (He has just finished playing with Ooze: The World’s Slimiest Science Kit made by Be Amazing Toys. By the way, Growing Tree Toys has a much better page for this product, with a picture that you can enlarge to see it better.)

We didn’t talk about the paragraph that followed:

And since that’s what Franny was, her mom had spent a lot of time trying to learn about mad scientists.”

I love this paragraph — it rings so familiar!

But my son wouldn’t understand if I tried to explain to him why I like this sentence so much. He doesn’t have any idea how much time I’ve spent already trying to learn about him. And I’m nowhere near being done.

I think I’ll read the other books in the series too.

I already mentioned Beyond the Wall: Personal Experiences with Autism and Asperger Syndrome, by Stephen Shore, published by the Autism Asperger Publishing Company (AAPC), in the post “Understanding Autism (for Dummies, by Stephen Shore)” but I’d like to add a few words about it.

It’s an autobiography and while someone might think that writing an autobiography is an exercise in vanity, what makes this autobiography so interesting is reading about growing up and life in general from a point of view of a person with autism.

Overall, Beyond the Wall, game me a lot of “Oh, that’s why..” moments. Stephen Shore remembers (and writes about) events that happened when he was very young and pretty much non-verbal. He explains how he could not explain to his parents that the reason he hated haircuts was because he could feel each single hair being pulled and that it hurt. He also recalled how trips to a grocery store used to cause sensory overload because of the overpowering mixture of smells in the produce section and the flickering of lights overhead. After reading that I finally understood my son’s behavior whenever we go shopping – the sensory overload may be just too overwhelming for him and that’s why he goes “wild”.

The parts about living with autism as an adult are quite fascinating too and point out how some things that most people overlook might be overwhelming to people with sensory differences – such as (but not only) the ticking of the clock at night, the singing birds in the morning, or the smell of people on public transportation. (Personally, the ticking of the clock at night used to drive me nuts so much I got a digital clock which doesn’t bother me, as long as I turn the clock so that the green numbers “shine” in another direction and not in my eyes.)

Check it out, I hope you’ll find this book interesting and learn something new as well.

The title of this post is taken from the title of a book about autism – Understanding Autism For Dummies, by Stephen M. Shore, Ed.D., and Linda G. Rastelli, MA, published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. in September 2006.

Our regional Special Education Parent Advisory Council (SEPAC) recently had the pleasure of meeting Stephen Shore and listen to him talk when he agreed to participate in a workshop on autism we organized for the Autism Awareness Month.

Stephen Shore, currently in his forties, was diagnosed with autism when he was a child and was non-verbal until he was four. His parents were advised to institutionalize him, but didn’t do it. Instead, his mother “worked” with him until he was ready to be admitted to school. That was the sixties, before “Early Intervention” and any other mandated support for disabled children existed. Now Stephen Shore has a doctoral degree in education, is a very-well recognized speaker on autism, and in addition to Understanding Autism For Dummies, is the author of Beyond the Wall: Personal Experiences with Autism and Asperger Syndrome (Second Edition), and editor of Ask and Tell: Self-Advocacy and Disclosure for People on the Autism Spectrum.

If you ever get a chance to see Stephen Shore talk, go. You won’t regret it – he’s a very engaging speaker. You can get a feeling of what he’s like from the clips he posted to his web site, in the “In the News” section.

What I liked about Understanding Autism For Dummies is that although it starts with the basics, it is not just any old introductory book to autism. I actually bought the book for myself, for future reference, after reading a copy I got from the library. Even the introductory section, titled “Understanding Autism” has a wealth of information – it covers the current diagnosis, talks about the spectrum, the present understanding of the causes, and brief discussion of available interventions, all in a plain, simple to understand language.

On the publisher’s web site you can see part of the first chapter and the complete table of contents in pdf.

In closing, I just want to quote here briefly the beginning of the section titled “Living with Autism as an Adult.”

“Adults with autism often get less attention than children with autism. We believe this needs to change, […], and we’re not the only ones. Adults with autism and Asperger’s need help choosing careers, navigating the complexities of higher education, and understanding social relationships.”

I have just finished reading IQ: A Smart History of a Failed Idea, by Stephen Murdoch, published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. in June 2007.

I first heard of this book on July 3, 2007 when I was listening to the interview with the author (New Book Raises Questions About IQ Test) on the National Public Radio’s program “Talk of the Nation.”

When I exchanged e-mails after the show with one of the callers I know, who primarily deals with gifted children and who earns her living in part by administering various tests, she said she wished she could have said more because the author was “spewing so much misinformation it was amazing.” That made want to read the book myself.

Overall, the book does not say much about the gifted part of the population and how the IQ tests affect them, except for a couple of places.

Chapter 1 titled “The Problem with Testing” describes a well-off, highly educated family from Washington, DC who were terrified that their 3-year-old son scored very poorly on an IQ test because that meant he would not get into one of the elite private schools in DC his daddy went to. The child got some speech therapy and occupational therapy while in preschool and went to a public kindergarten. He was tested again at five, at six, and at seven. While he scored in the 34^th percentile when he was five, by the time he was seven he scored in the 98^th percentile and was finally accepted at the school his father went to. Murdoch doesn’t say whether the child was “prepped” for the test by the overanxious parents. He probably was and that might explain the score difference. The author does make a strong point that although the most often used IQ tests claim to measure “intelligence,” they really measure learned information and can definitely be prepped for.

Chapter 10 talks about the eleven-plus tests in the United Kingdom and how this one test, supposedly again measuring “intelligence,” but according to the author heavily relying on educational knowledge gained in the elementary school, determined to what school a child would be sent at eleven years of age. So a child who went to a crappy elementary school that did not teach to the test and who had no private tutoring was highly unlikely to score well on the eleven-plus.

Other than that, Murdoch mostly writes about how the IQ tests were misused to mistreat people with low IQ scores, those on the left side of the bell curve. He describes how in the 1920s the U.S. began forced sterilization of the “feeble minded” which apparently continued until 1970s, and how the Nazi Germany carried the idea of not allowing the “feeble minded” to procreate into euthanasia, or basically murder. It’s truly terrifying.

I’m not a psychologist or a professional test administrator, so I cannot say if, and how much, misinformation there is in this book, but overall, I found it quite interesting and informative. And it did make me wonder about this whole IQ test business and whether it really measures anything meaningful adequately (which seems to be the main thesis of the book). Murdoch does make a good point that someone’s IQ score and a difference of a point off the scale can have too much weight in some situations—whether a murderer is executed or spends life in prison, whether a person with low IQ qualifies for a subsidy from the government, or whether a child gets into the gifted program or not. He also makes a good point that someone with high IQ scores will not necessarily have a great and successful career and happy life.

This brief description of the book is of course just a (very small) nutshell and does not really do justice to the book. Go read it for yourself. It really is interesting. Here’s the table of contents.

By the way, in the chapter titled “Alternatives to IQ” Murdoch writes about Howard Gardner’s idea of multiple intelligences, proposed in Frames Of Mind: The Theory Of Multiple Intelligences, published in 1983; Emotional Intelligence, written by Daniel Goleman, and published in 1995, and Robert Sternberg’s Successful Intelligence published in 1997. So, my list of “books to read” has just expanded.