Disability Highlight: Tim's Place

Here is a feel-good story about a man with Down Syndrome who owns not only lives on his own, but owns and runs a restaurant called Tim's Place in Albuquerque, New Mexico.


Now, as the story states, the restaurant is basically paid for and run by his father and other individuals. Still, the fact that he lives on his own and is able to do as much as he does at this restaurant is amazing. This is a great example of what great parenting, great life skills education, and an open-arms, inclusive society can produce.  This make me proud to be someone who works in Special Education.

Highlight of the Day: 10/5/2011

At my full-time job, it seemed even crazier than usual, but there aren't really any interesting stories to share.  At my part-time job tutoring job however,I had a moment with a student that I would like to share.

I was working with a young girl in middle school, and she was telling me that in a book she is reading, a physically disabled boy was labeled by a doctor as an "idiot", and then hospitalized.  She said, "That is what they called them back in the old days.  Isn't that sad?" 

I agreed with her that is sad, but fortunately, we as a society have gotten a lot better with the way disabled individuals are treated.  She talked about her disabled cousin who is "slow" (I took that to mean he had an intellectual disability), and wondered if he would have been labeled an "idiot" back then (he probably would have).  She then said she wondered if he was autistic. 

With that statement, the conversation took a sudden turn into a new direction.  I was not upset with her as it is quite common for individuals who do not work with the disabled to make that mistake. I explained that an individual with autism doesn't mean that they have an intellectual disability, and that often times, their intelligence is as good as or better than everyone else. 

I didn't spend too long explaining the difference between autism and intellectual disabilities (regretfully, I used the term "mentally challenged with her, which I will try and not do again).  Also, I didn't go into other areas of conversation, such as the fact that many people with autism who do test "mentally retarded" on a normal IQ test may not be so because such tests are not generally suited for the communication issues that go along with autism.  For one, she is in middle school.  And also, we had to get back to the math work we were doing.

Since I am on the topic, here is a great little article by a woman named Sue Robin.  Sue is severely autistic, and back in 2003 (when she was in college), she wrote a short essay about autism myths, including the one that most individual with autism are intellectually disabled.  Here is an exert:

As a really autistic person I am definitely qualified to address the topic of myths about autism and mental retardation.  The first myth I would like to attack is that 75% to 80% of all people with autism are mentally retarded.  Some professionals have reduced that number to 50% because so many of the young children now being diagnosed have Asperger’s Syndrome or High Functioning Autism.  Seventy-five, eighty, or fifty – they are all wrong.  Those of us who don’t speak, or speak echolalically, are counted as retarded.  We also score in the retarded range of I.Q. tests, so it is reasonable that we are assumed to be retarded.  What we have found through use of Facilitated Communication is that these low functioning people have at least normal intelligence with lots of movement problems masking their intellect. 

I am a great example.  Without facilitation I still test as a retarded person because I can’t manipulate objects to pass a non-verbal intelligence test.  When allowed to type, which I can do independently, I can answer the same questions.  For example, when asked to put similar cards together, I couldn’t do it.  But when the cards were labeled A, B, C, D, etc., I was able to type which cards belonged together.  Clearly I understood the task and could answer correctly, but not in the standard way. 

Highlight of the Day: 10/3/2011

Today, we did not work with students.  Instead, the teachers attended numerous in service meetings, and the paras watched training videos.  One video we watched really hit home with my old teaching job: teaching life skills to Intellectually Disabled students.

Specifically, the video was about teaching what is known as "The Hidden Curriculum" to students with Autism.  What this refers to is the instruction of skills to students revolving around social etiquette and what is generally considered common sense behavior in social situations that most of us learn as we grow up (without ever really being taught).  Examples includes when is the appropriate time to use profanity (not around adults or certain social situations), using tactful conversation with someone you may not see eye to eye with, or even when is it appropriate time and place to pick or scratch at oneself (that includes ALL of their body parts).

Some good examples of what an Autistic student might need to learn can be found on the video below.  You may want to mute the volume as you don't need it, and the music playing in the background repeats itself over and over (it gets quite annoying):




As the speaker in the video shared examples of the hidden curriculum, I kept thinking of the different autistic students I worked with.  At my current job, we have several students with Asperger's Syndrome, though I don't work with them as much as work with students who have conduct disorders and severe mental illness.  I hope that in the future, I get the opportunity to work with more students who have Autism, as they are an immense pleasure to work with.

A Couple of Points on the Recent GOP Debate

 Picture from Media Scrape

For the sake of disclosure, I did not actually watch the debate, but I still feel compelled to comment on a couple things.

First, Michelle Bachman made this comment on Governor Rick Perry's policy of instituting mandatory HPV Vaccination in the state of Texas after the debate to Fox News:

"There's a woman who came up crying to me tonight after the debate. She said her daughter was given that vaccine. She told me her daughter suffered mental retardation as a result. There are very dangerous consequences."

I am not an expert on medicine or vaccines and thus, I do not have much of an opinion on the HPV vaccine per se, nor do I have an opinion on this policy in Texas (it appears both sides have legitimate points). 

However, I am an expert on individuals with Intellectual Disabilities, and I can tell you that there is no link between the HPV vaccine (or any vaccine for that matter) and Intellectual Disabilities.  So, what cause one to become Intelectually Disabled?  There are numerous causes that range from likely to definite:

• Infections (present at birth or occurring after birth)
  • Congenital CMV
  • Congenital rubella
  • Congenital toxoplasmosis
  • Encephalitis
  • HIV infection
  • Listeriosis
  • Meningitis
• Chromosomal abnormalities
  • Chromosome deletions (such as cri du chat syndrome)
  • Chromosomal translocations (a gene is located in an unusual spot on a chromosome, or located on a different chromosome than usual)
  • Defects in the chromosome or chromosomal inheritance (such as fragile X syndrome, Angelman syndrome, Prader-Willi syndrome)
  • Errors of chromosome numbers (such as Down syndrome)
• Environmental
  • Deprivation syndrome
• Genetic abnormalities and inherited metabolic disorders
  • Adrenoleukodystrophy
  • Galactosemia
  • Hunter syndrome
  • Hurler syndrome
  • Lesch-Nyhan syndrome
  • Phenylketonuria
  • Rett syndrome
  • Sanfilippo syndrome
  • Tay-Sachs disease
  • Tuberous sclerosis
• Metabolic
  • Congenital hypothyroid
  • Hypoglycemia (poorly regulated diabetes)
  • Reye syndrome
  • Hyperbilirubinemia (very high bilirubin levels in babies)
• Nutritional
  • Malnutrition
• Toxic
  • Intrauterine exposure to alcohol, cocaine, amphetamines, and other drugs
  • Lead poisoning
  • Methylmercury poisoning
• Trauma (before and after birth)
  • Intracranial hemorrhage before or after birth
  • Lack of oxygen to the brain before, during, or after birth
  • Severe head injury
• Unexplained (this largest category is for unexplained occurrences of mental retardation)

Now, I don't want to say for sure that Michelle Bachman lied when she told that story about the woman in the crowd.  But given the accuracy of a lot of the information that comes out of her mouth, one must take an immensely large grain of salt with her claim.

By the way, the American Academy of Pediatrics has come out refuting Bachman's claim and defended the use of the HPV Vaccine.

I also want to address something that happened at the debate that a number of people are talking about.  This is when Wolf Blitzer was asking a question to Ron Paul about giving life-saving treatment to someone who is uninsured and whether or not society has a responsibility to take care of that individual.  When Blitzer asks Congressman Paul if "society should let him die", watch how parts of the Tea Party crowd react:




The way the Tea Party has conducted themselves as a movement in the past two years ranges from comical to ignorant to just plain greedy and cruel.  It is all the more terrifying that they have not merely developed into a major political force in American politics, but they are now the controlling block in one of the political parties of our two-party system.  The dangerous and troubling fact of what the Tea Party (and thus GOP is today) is best described by Andrew Sullivan in a recent post about this incident:

"Of course, even if such libertarian purity does make sense, that cannot excuse the emotional response to the issue in the crowd last night. Maybe a tragedy like the death of a feckless twentysomething is inevitable if we are to restrain healthcare costs. But it is still a tragedy. It is not something a decent person cheers. Similarly the execution of hundreds, while perhaps defensible politically and even morally (although I differ), is nonetheless a brutal, awful business. You don't delight in it. And the same is true of torture. Even if you want to defend its use in limited circumstances, it remains an absolute evil, no humane person would want to do it, and no civilized person would brag of it or dismiss any moral issue with it at all. And yet that is what Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney have repeatedly done. They are positively proud of their torture record.

The fish rotted from the head down. Last night, we got a whiff of the smell."