One of the world’s most renowned animal behavior experts and widely-recognized autistic professionals, Temple Grandin, blessed HWS with her presence by presenting a fabulous lecture on her professional life and how it has been affected by her autism. Students of all ages, professors of all subjects, and people from all over the state of New York migrated to the Vandervort Room to see her speak; so many that an overflow room was necessary and people were thus sent to the Stamford Room in the library to watch a live streaming of her lecture.
Grandin, born in Boston, Massachusetts, was diagnosed with autism in 1949 at the young age of two years old and was placed in a structured nursery program after being labeled with brain damage. Growing up, she experienced many lags in her developmental process that, when compared to her peers, put her behind schedule in areas such as speech development as she did not even begin to start talking until the age of four. Junior high and high school became time periods of unpleasantness and bullying as she became known as the “nerdy kid” and was constantly ridiculed by her classmates. But through determination and her amazing amounts of courage, she graduated from Hampshire Country School, went on to earn her Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology from Franklin Pierce College in 1970, her Master’s Degree in Animal Science from Arizona State University in 1975, and her Doctoral Degree in Animal Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989.
The lecture she presented to the HWS and Geneva community mainly consisted of her life being a diagnosed autistic. One of her main topics was the idea that every single person has their own individual and unique learning styles whether one is a visual thinker, a pattern and spatial thinker, a verbal and language thinker, or an auditory thinker. She also discussed her issue with the public school systems and their lack of “things” in which children have the ability to participate. Grandin suggested programs such as band, choir, and robotics clubs for students to try to engage in activities other than organized classes to try to find a specialized interest. Schools have also been neglecting to teach work traits and “real world” tools that would become useful to students in the future such as a “business week.” Overall, her lecture was extremely intriguing and really got your brain thinking from different perspectives and points of view. Her energy and passion towards this topic could not be ignored and left you feeling motived and inspired. If you missed her lecture on September 18, you can watch a recorded video of her talk below.