The Autistic Mind

On the blog Free Technology for teachers I came across a very interesting article that I think ALL teachers can use! It was about how the autistic mind works. There is a video from a woman named Temple Grandin, and autistic woman who speaks about her experiences growing up and how she think and how teachers can benefit from this. Here are a few things I took notes on: Autistic children think in pictures. When you hear a word and think of that, you get a generalized picture in your mind, autistic people get a slide show of sorts in their mind of those things that they have seen. There is a movie about Temple and in the movie they give and example of what her mind sees, someone says "shoe" and she has a flash of LOTS of different shoes in her mind.
The autistic mind is good at one thing and bad at another. She talked about how she was horrible at algebra but excellent at trig and geometry, she was never allowed to move on to these things because she couldn't pass algebra.
There are three types of learners, the first is the photo realistic visual thinkers, they are poor at algebra. The second are the pattern thinkers who are great in music and math and the third are the verbal mind who are poos at drawing.
Autistic minds are similar to animals in that they are sensory thinkers they don't think in language, they think in pictures.
Autistic minds tend to be fixated. If there is something they are into like race cars, use that to help them with the subject they are having trouble with. We need to help students who have unique minds to be sucessful.
Give autistic children a specific task, break it down into exactly what you want them to do in order for them to be successful.
And finallyy one thing that truly stood out to me from a teaching stand point is to think about the different kinds of minds. This is something we need to think about when teaching. How to make something work for so many different students. How would you be able to do that?