I just bought a portable DVD player, an impulsive purchase for me. I thought it may help me with therapy sessions after watching a few youtube videos of ABA. I know tv works to motivate A, who I will be working with tomorrow, but it means taking him out of the room and having more distractions to deal with. Hopefully having a dvd to play will help extend his attention at the table. I am also wanting to try to use this with C to get some more enjoyment out of his rewards. I havent tried tv with him but apparently he watches Dora and Cartoons. I know he likes music too, so a bit of experimentation is in order. He had a crappy day the other day. Most of the time after lunch he would scream and cry if I asked anything of him. I don't want him to try to avoid the therapy. I will find out tomorrow how the tactic works. His mum has a few DVD's there I can try. I will probably go to the library to find some for A as he likes any sports with balls and horse races. One method of teaching, widely used for children with Autism, is video modelling. You edit video footage of the child to show only the correct response, which can then be viewed repeatedly. Apparently this can work better than watching someone else. If I get to work with the new child with aspergers we will be modelling social skills and I think video will work well with that. I also plan to slow down the individual trials I get them to do, with longer gaps for play in between. I think I may rush them to much. A short enjoyable video between each one should achieve this.
I worry when reading about aspergers, that I don't have enough instinctual social skills to be of benefit. I interact cognitively. I examine and analyse how others behave, in order to discern my response. Neurotypical people respond intuitively and don't think so much about how they are doing socially. With the young ages of the children I work with, I have enough knowledge to be able to help them, but as they get older, well I would feel like a hypocrite teaching them how to socialise in school when I wasn't the best at it myself. That is probably the reason I have studied aspects of personality and behaviour over the years. Hopefully my own learning and experience, paired with the understanding of having to process the information coming in cognitively, will be an advantage rather than a deficit. I think I recall saying on this blog that I wanted to be able to teach introverts how to deal with the world. I guess that is what I would be doing.
I have been watching Bones videos recently and some of The Big Bang Theory. They both have characters that are based on a stereotypical undiagnosed aspergers type scientist. They rely on empirical evidence and find the intricacy of human interaction irrational and difficult.
I wonder if slight tendendcies towards this type of wiring is why I had problems with the Myers-Briggs typing. As a typical female I orient towards prioritising relationships over objects and tasks. However I do this in an analytical and evidence based way, which made me question my dominant criteria for Judging. I think it helped to understand Jung's interpretation of the words thinking and feeling. Orientation towards people and relationships being feeling, and orientation towards tasks and objects being Thinking. Thinking, (or task and object orientation) is a typical male characteristic, and a characteristic of autism. (Statistically far more males have autism than females, and even then there are some gender differences in their outward behaviour.) An exaggerated version of this, is why they will focus on a fan spinning, or stacking blocks, instead of noticing the people in the room. Then because the people are only background, they don't observe their actions, or create the neural pathways that help them interpret non verbal communication. My guess is that a few of the contestants on the "Pick-up artist" have an impairment in the social connections of their brain. By learning rules that they can aply to different situations they can improve their ability to interact. Knowing rules is how some of us introverts get by in the extrovert world. However having to use the brain to consciously analyse the data coming in is draining, and so we need a break from trying to socialise appropriately. Anyway I am supposed to be playing wii, and it is hard to concentrate while taking bowling breaks every few minutes,.
Karyn, I think the fact that you interact cognitively rather than intuitively is going to be a huge bonus to you as a mentor to these children and young adults. You know what it's like to have to develop social strategies that don't come naturally to you! You can relate to what they are going through. If I had Asperger's, I would much rather have you as my guide than someone who never had to think about social skills or break them down analytically.
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