My entire adult life has been devoted to those individuals with special needs, twenty-six of those years, professionally. I have worked with students whose diagnoses span a vast array of medical terms. Some of my students had medical names for their diagnosis that when written out, were as long as...
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This past week I read an article about a special education teacher that ended up quitting due to the the ridiculous and inappropriate testing that was being required of her students. As I read through the story, and the subsequent comments on the story, I found myself shaking my head...
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Hollywood would have us believe that those individuals with autism are savants (think of Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man) or are completely in their own world and can't be reached. Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) share certain characteristics, but each diagnosis is also unique, unique being the key word. Within autism...
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I mentioned in my previous blog post, that something has happened in the last thirty years, that has caused a huge uptick in children being diagnosed somewhere on the autism spectrum. Even with better, more comprehensive diagnoses, the numbers show a climb at an unusually fast rate. Something is...
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Are you one of the families touched by autism? If not, do you know someone who is? Autism is a spectrum disorder that is characterized by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) as:

• Persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction across multiple contexts;
• Restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior...
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I will be writing a new blog series on autism. To give some background, I thought I'd begin this series with some posts I wrote several years ago. I wrote the first post in 2007, and the second post in 2013. In the past two and a half years since...
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