Grandin’s message on autism still resonates
Author, activist will speak, answer questions at Tuesday Writers Institute event
When Temple Grandin was born in 1947, she did not speak for the first three and a half years of her life. Later on, she would be diagnosed on the autism spectrum, but at the time of her birth, most often children like her would be institutionalized.
“The doctors wanted to do that, but my mother wouldn’t let it happen,” Grandin said.
Today Grandin is a respected animal behaviorist, a college professor at Colorado State University, a best-selling author of 11 books and an animal rights activist. She is best known as someone who was able to clearly document what it is like to live on the autism spectrum and the insights she has gained. She was also the subject of the (2010) HBO Emmy and Golden Globe-winning biographical film “Temple Grandin” starring Claire Danes as the title character.
On Tuesday, Grandin will have a conversation and question and answer session at Page Hall on Western Avenue of the University at Albany Downtown Campus. The talk will begin at 7:30 p.m. and is presented by the New York State Writers Institute and cosponsored by Albany’s Disability Resource Center and the Office of Diversity and Inclusion.
“I’ve had many mentors along the way,” she said. “When I give presentations, I always speak about the importance of having mentors in your life. I would never be where I am today without my mother, who always pushed me to do new things. I also had a wonderful speech teacher who never gave up on me. Too many kids who get labeled get overprotected, but my mother never did that and neither did my third-grade teacher.”
Grandin said when she entered third grade she could not read and when she left third grade she read on a sixth-grade level.
“My teacher and my mother taught me with phonics. I learned how to memorize sounds. My mother bought me books I wanted to read, and when she read them she’d stop at an exciting part and have me sound out four or five words. Today I try to be a good mentor to my graduate students.”
Grandin has also been a valuable resource for parents with autistic children. Her first book “Emergence: Labeled Autistic” (1986) is considered the first narrative to go inside the brain of someone with autism and show how different the world looks and sounds to someone on the spectrum. In that book, Grandin shows how autism has affected every aspect of her life: Her difficulty in being physically touched, her struggles with loud noises, finding the right kind of comfortable clothes and how she needs to avoid an overload of her senses.
In 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated the prevalence of autism in the United States to be 1 in every 54 births. More than 5.4 million adults in the U.S. have been diagnosed to be on the spectrum, and the rate of autism diagnoses is the fastest growing of any developmental disability.
In her 2013, book “The Autistic Brain” Grandin referred to the three types of thinking. “Since I wrote that book there’s been a lot of research to document how we think in three diverse ways. Some of us are visual thinkers. like me. I think in pictures. There are also the music-math thinkers who think in patterns, and the verbal-logic thinkers who think in word details. We need all these thinkers in our world, but the first step is to realize that different thinking exists. When I was in my 20s, I thought everyone was a visual thinker. I didn’t realize people out there thought verbally.”
Grandin’s ability as a visual thinker has allowed her to have total recall as if she is watching full-length movies in her head. “What has helped me understand animals is that I think in pictures. Animals live in a sensory based world. Like me, they don’t live in a verbal world.” She added that she was pleased in how the HBO film based on her life depicted visual thinkers like her.
When Grandin gives talks to schools and organizations around the country, she often talks about the different minds, but one of her favorite topics is on animal behavior. She is a strong believer in the humane treatment of livestock for slaughter, and developed a center track conveyor system for holding cattle, which is used at many large slaughtering plants today. Grandin believes the system she designed is respectful and compassionate for these animals.
She also has some strong beliefs about our American education system. “What I’d like them to do is put all the hands-on classes back in, shop, sewing, woodworking, theater, music and art. Kids at a young age are very creative in building with Legos, but how many of them are given tools to build with? I’ve seen kids create something with Legos without a kit. That kid should be given a chance to be as creative in a machine shop when they get older.”
Another one of Grandin’s complaints is that college students are not writing well anymore. “It’s a really big problem. They’re writing in run-on sentences. They can’t explain things in a clear way. Teachers need to copy-edit the student work. We need to have them write book reports so they can learn how to summarize, and they need to write term papers so they can learn how to find research.”
Even though she is not a verbal thinker, Grandin learned how to write and found the skill valuable beyond measure. “I wrote for the State Farm Magazine years ago. That’s how people discovered who I was, and they respected my ideas for how to treat livestock.
“If I had never done that, I would never have achieved all this.”