Splinter skills
Splinter Skills and Autism success
Splinter Skills are (my idea of them) are areas of instant genus or knowlege,a learning hallway if you will for someone on the Autism Spectrum.
In my own case my splinter skills were cars when I was younger and that grew into anything mechanical as I aged. In school everyone absently figured out I could do about anything if it was in context of a car. I could not figure out division on a chalkboard and was tutored for it (math in general) all the time. BUT my Dad figured on a hunch I'd be able to figure MPG on a car,,,,Walla it turned out to be the same thing. They took splinter skills so far as to say If a blue car hit a yellow car in a traffic accident the scratch would be green.
I have a lady I correspond with and her son is fanatic about trains and has learned how to count, tell time (train schedules) and read maps of train routes. He has even studied other countries and their rail systems. She has even shows him old films featuring trains and told him this is how people dress and behave while on a train.
Eventually all of this knowledge simply spills over into the world at large, and actually broadens our knowledge and insight........ The trick is to get an aspie to talk about their knowledge in some form the traditional person will understand. That can be done and has been done many times. People in my anthropology are typically not social butterflies we do get along in general and usually strangers don't realize we are aspie. CO workers and others close to us know it but it isn't a problem.
Again if we have identified interests, they can be our learning hallway. Aspies it seem have some ability to get along in the real world but it needs to exploited. Obviously modern autism is on another page. Splinter skills, make our lives successfull.It seems all of us work in realm of our splinter skills, and we often times are ground breakers in our fields. "We have lots of Computer programmers."
Please don't Ignore the Key to Aspie success, It is an odd way to learn and to do things but it is our best shot at traditional life. To see how this scenario really played out in real life read the book The Enigma by Andrew Hodges on Alan Turing Aspie and Father of the computer. If Alan would have lived longer the would have another Temple Grandin.
Splinter Skills are (my idea of them) are areas of instant genus or knowlege,a learning hallway if you will for someone on the Autism Spectrum.
In my own case my splinter skills were cars when I was younger and that grew into anything mechanical as I aged. In school everyone absently figured out I could do about anything if it was in context of a car. I could not figure out division on a chalkboard and was tutored for it (math in general) all the time. BUT my Dad figured on a hunch I'd be able to figure MPG on a car,,,,Walla it turned out to be the same thing. They took splinter skills so far as to say If a blue car hit a yellow car in a traffic accident the scratch would be green.
I have a lady I correspond with and her son is fanatic about trains and has learned how to count, tell time (train schedules) and read maps of train routes. He has even studied other countries and their rail systems. She has even shows him old films featuring trains and told him this is how people dress and behave while on a train.
Eventually all of this knowledge simply spills over into the world at large, and actually broadens our knowledge and insight........ The trick is to get an aspie to talk about their knowledge in some form the traditional person will understand. That can be done and has been done many times. People in my anthropology are typically not social butterflies we do get along in general and usually strangers don't realize we are aspie. CO workers and others close to us know it but it isn't a problem.
Again if we have identified interests, they can be our learning hallway. Aspies it seem have some ability to get along in the real world but it needs to exploited. Obviously modern autism is on another page. Splinter skills, make our lives successfull.It seems all of us work in realm of our splinter skills, and we often times are ground breakers in our fields. "We have lots of Computer programmers."
Please don't Ignore the Key to Aspie success, It is an odd way to learn and to do things but it is our best shot at traditional life. To see how this scenario really played out in real life read the book The Enigma by Andrew Hodges on Alan Turing Aspie and Father of the computer. If Alan would have lived longer the would have another Temple Grandin.
posted by Pre Rain Man Autism | 8:09 AM
1 Comments:
From Rich Shull Blog Owner
Dear Reader's; This is one of my most read posts and it generates some wonderful corrspondance from people all over the autism spectrum both young and old and parent and aspie. I hear of great things happening in our lives when Splinter Skills are allowed to develop and are allowed to be followed. Many people like me absently followed Autism Splinter Skills on a whim and when our teachers and tutors and parents seen the progress it was obvious what ever we were doing worked. Indeed some of us were the once noted "little professors of autism" long before it was designer fad and epedmic whose experts totally forbid any type of Splinter Skill useage. Splinter Skills were the very frist thing abolished with modern autism 's Rain Man Era. Please urge Modern Autism to rediscover it success stories from the past, Perhpas your very own loved one will be the better for it. Rich Shull Nov, 2007.
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