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I love the things they come out with to help special needs children. Especially if it helps in more than one aspect and it doesn't even feel like a type of behavioral therapy.

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It's sad that people back then wouldn't give people with special needs the love and care that they needed to live the life they were supposed to. Just because somone's brain functions different than yours doesn't mean you get to treat them any less than what anyone deserves.

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I loved this article. Everyone should help and treat anyone with special needs like this. Most people just stood and stared but he didn't. He was quick to move and help and especially when they have episodes in public places, the less people who stand and do nothing but stare the better.

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I thought this article was awesome. Especially when someone has a disorder that gets in the way of every day life, giving Sam the job

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If people wouldn't worry so much about "categorizing" people & just accepting them for who and what they are the world would be a better place. At the end of the day we are all people & were not made to be the same & that's the unique part of life and some people don't see it that way.

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This article in my opinion was about how the worker at the apple store didn't care that people were staring at the mom and boy on the floor, he went and sat down with them and helped them & didn't judge them or make them move, he just helped them in any way he could.

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This article was very inspirational to me. The employer took the time to train Sam & make him feel welcome & make him feel like he had " real meaning" to his life. it was very touching.

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The Power Pumper is a technological advancement! Not only does it help the children with special needs out but it allows them to enjoy progressing to become stronger/ and it inspires them that things are getting better. Not only does this "toy" help kids increase their academic responding, but the power pumper also decreases "problem" behavior. This device shows that advances in medicine are here and they will only continue to get better so all we have to do is use what we have and look forward to what we are going to get in the future.

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My thoughts are that for many decades and still to this day people with special needs are judged solely on the fact that they are "different" when in reality they aren't that different. Yes, they may act a different way but they understand things the same ways and in some cases their intellect is more advanced than ours. I believe that everyone is made the way God wanted us to be and everyone is perfect the way they are. People need to stop judging based on how people look, act, speak, or handle themselves and accept people as they are. It would be a more functioning society.

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This Article shows that everyone has the same qualities and its whether they decide to show them or not. Wall showed his personality and proved that he was very caring and helped the mother of James in any way that he could. He didn't care what they needed all he wanted to do was help.. And I believe a lot of people want to help they just don't know the right way to go about it..

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I find this article very touching, I think that its a great opportunity for Sam to be able to do what he dreams of doing. I also find it touching that someone took the time and the effort and spent the time and put the commitment into helping sam achieve those dreams, and for giving all the people that go into that store the enjoyment of seeing someone who thoroughly enjoys his job.

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Your coment would go here. Do 1 sticky per article!

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Below are 4 articles/videos related to autism. Read/watch all four. Post a sticky note below each in the following format: For the title enter your name. In the body of the sticky note leave a comment. The comment is just a brief "what are your thoughts?". Don't forget your name! Yes, this is a grade...and due FRIDAY. I have pasted a "hard link" in case you have trouble clicking the photo (in other words, no excuses ;-)

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http://autismdigest.com/featured-product-the-power-pumper-car/

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Dancing Barista: Toronto Starbucks Worker With Autism Has Serious Dance Moves

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Dancing Barista: Toronto Starbucks Worker With Autism Has Serious Dance Moves

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http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2016/01/25/dancing-barista_n_9069480.html

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Apple store worker wows mom of son with autism

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Apple store worker wows mom of son with autism

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http://www.wltx.com/story/news/nation-now/2016/01/26/apple-store-worker-wows-mom-son-autism/79346444/

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The Boston doctor who studied autism before autism

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The Boston doctor who studied autism before autism

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https://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/2016/01/26/the-boston-doctor-who-studied-autism-before-autism/YivSAVdQFRXDrFwHLTLFsK/story.html

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Over the course of months, he and other experts would examine hundreds of Massachusetts residents with intellectual disabilities. At the time, most such people were either kept at home for life, or became wards of the state. There were few resources for their education.

Howe saw children and adults with a huge range of cognitive disabilities. But one finding surprised him in particular: As many as 100 people he studied did not appear to fit common notions of the mentally disabled. They were "easily distracted," in constant motion. Many were mute, or communicated only by "echolalia" - repeating the words and phrases of others. Yet these patients demonstrated varied, often startling levels of mental acuity.

One patient, listed as Case 27, had committed to memory more than 200 songs, and "will instantly detect a false note in any of them," as Howe wrote in his 1848 report to the state Legislature. Another, Case 360, could quickly calculate the number of seconds a person had been alive. Others could "perform many simple mathematical operations with a great deal more facility than ordinary persons."

These people were widely grouped with others with cognitive disabilities as "idiots." Recently, however, three writers have identified Howe's outliers quite differently: They say these Massachusetts residents might have had autism.

In their new book "In a Different Key: The Story of Autism," coauthors John Donvan and Caren Zucker claim they're the first to recognize Howe's research as an early inquiry into a group of people who could be retrospectively diagnosed on the autism spectrum. In fact, as they note in a related article in the current issue of Smithsonian Magazine, they were inspired by the similar findings of James Trent. Trent, a professor of sociology and social work at Gordon College in Wenham, studies the history and policy around intellectual disability and is the author of a 2012 biography of Howe, "The Manliest Man."

These three writers agree that Howe's identification of this distinct group marks a key contribution to our understanding of autism, a condition that has seized the public's attention over the past few decades as diagnoses have rapidly risen. Until now, the search for people on the autism spectrum prior to the child psychologist Leo Kanner's popularization of the term in 1943 have largely focused on speculation about famous historic figures, from Mozart to Einstein.

In their book, Donvan and Zucker note several frequently cited cases, such as the feral child known as the "Wild Boy of Aveyron" and the 18th-century Scottish nobleman Hugh Blair. Author Steve Silberman, in the recent best-seller "NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity," recounts another story, that of the renowned British scientist Henry Cavendish, whose eccentricities and "shyness" led the late Oliver Sacks and others to suggest he had Asperger syndrome.

But Howe's 19th-century group research offers stronger support that autism has always been present in the human race, according to Donvan: "It challenges the notion that autism's existence really begins only when the diagnosis was made in the 20th century." It's a powerful counterargument, he said, to those who contend that autism is a modern phenomenon - the product of vaccines (a discredited theory) or some undetermined environmental factor. Instead, it offers some hint that the diagnosis rate might have skyrocketed largely because the public and the medical community have become so much more familiar with the telltale signs.

Howe's scientific approach is compelling, Donvan said. As a phrenologist - a doctor who believed, as did many in the 19th century, that a person's intelligence and character traits could be seen in the shape of his skull - Howe was driven by numbers and measurements, the author noted. As a result, "he provided data" - charts, tables - "that was unprecedented, across a broad population."

"The whole subject of idiocy is new," Howe declared in his report to the Legislature. Intrigued by new developments in France, where educators were working for the first time with the mentally disabled, Howe and colleague Samuel B. Woodward (who was superintendent of Worcester State Hospital, which was recognized as pioneering in the humane treatment of people with intellectual disabilities) hoped to convince the public of the benefits of educating the "ineducable."

Trent, in his Howe biography, mentioned that the patients Howe and Woodward identified sounded to him like they may have been autistic. "I note that in the book, though I don't develop it very much," he said. But it was an earlier book by Trent, "Inventing the Feeble Mind," that tipped off Donvan. Though that book doesn't mention autism, it does cite Howe's overall study. Donvan, intrigued, tracked down the source material-Howe's report to the Legislature.

"That's when my heart sort of stopped," he said. Some of Howe's descriptions of his patients, like the one with perfect pitch, sounded to him like proof there were people with autism long before it had a name.

"I've developed good radar for this," Donvan said. "We're hedging a lot, but I'm pretty convinced. These are real, anonymous, not successful people, people who are often left out" of the historic record rather than quirky celebrities, he added - and that, in some ways, makes their stories particularly valuable.

For those in the autism advocacy community, Howe's report offers a tantalizing kind of prehistory. Lydia Brown, chairwoman of the Massachusetts Developmental Disabilities Council and a former policy team member of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, said in an e-mail that it's "fantastic to learn more about a marginalized community's history in part by looking to see evidence of our existence in the past. . . I think it's important and beautiful to look for traces of disabled people - and autistic people in particular."

In Howe's report, the doctor noted that his era's medical experts had names, lamentable as they may seem today, "to mark the idiot, the fool, the simpleton, the weak-minded," as well as "the man of common sense, the strong-minded man, the man of talent, and the man of genius." But the medical community was lacking categories for "the thousand intermediate grades" he and Woodward acknowledged.

More than 160 years later, one of the categories they observed might have a familiar name.

James Sullivan can be reached at jamesgsullivan@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @sullivanjames.

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The Boston doctor who studied autism before autism - The Boston Globe

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Over the course of months, he and other experts would examine hundreds of Massachusetts residents with intellectual disabilities. At the time, most such people were either kept at home for life, or became wards of the state. There were few resources for their education. Howe saw children and adults with a huge range of cognitive disabilities.