Hm.

[ladydreamer]

White Frog- Indie film coming out with Harry Shum Jr. Also, Tyler Posey's in it. It's about two brothers: the older one dies, and the younger one has Asperger syndrome.

I'm tentative so far, from seeing Booboo Stewart's attempt to mimic cripface the mannerisms of someone with Asperger and his "research" from basically googling it and reading

Comments

[mimiheart]

My newest student has Asperger's, and I worked with him for about 45 minutes yesterday. I've worked with him before, on and off for the last two years, and I tutored his older sister and his younger sister. (Both sisters have MD, and the younger sister has learning disabilities along with the MD

[ladydreamer]

I don't know anyone who talks like that. Of course, I know that people are different, and the sampling of those who make it to college aren't representative of the whole, but that's just.. Why is he doing it like that? And why is the director letting him suck? I hope it doesn't distract from the movie too much because it looks like some people put a lot of work into this film.

Yeah, I don't know about some of this training. I know someone who was taught to count the seconds between sentences and pauses for commas. How are you supposed to focus on a conversation while working out a system to fake eye contact and count seconds at the same time?

This makes me want to rewatch Community as a healing balm.

[mimiheart]

I'm thinking back to my last few kids with various DX's and non-DX's... nope.

Shia LeBeouf actually did a pretty good job portraying a kid with some sort of unspecified mental something in Tru Confessions.

With some of the music therapy I've done, there's various tricks to get kids to speak to a beat, but that's with some more severe forms. (I worked with one girl who stuttered and would move onto the next word only when whoever she was talking to guessed what she was saying, if she or someone was tapping, she would complete the word. She would get incredibly aggressive if someone couldn't guess what word she meant, so the tapping trick, once we worked with her to do it herself, helped tremendously.) For the most part, though, if it's going to be more trouble to fake it, then it's not worth doing, IMO. Counting seconds between pauses? I have no idea how long to pause between a sentence. It certainly wouldn't sound natural to do it.

[ladydreamer]

That's not bad for the Disney channel.

I'm not saying all therapy is crap, just that some of it sounds so obviously stupid/abusive. Music therapy doesn't sound invasive, and if it didn't work, oh well. Sounds fairly benign. Why not try it? I think there's a very obvious difference between trying to force someone to mimic normality and trying to help someone learn/communicate better. They aren't necessarily the same thing, and some of the advice I've heard takes the first as its goal without caring much about the second.