When your heroes aren't human

An Autistic's guide to autism: When your heroes aren't human

It is a common trope in science fiction to make alien or robotic characters unable to understand or use the nuances of verbal communication. Often portrayed as either emotionless or infrequent in their emotional displays, they stumble through social interaction, misunderstanding the use of sarcasm and humor constantly. At times they provide comic relief: the perfect companion straight man-woman-alien-robot-thing to any character. At other times they are moral centers, certain and unfettered by emotion in their beliefs of right and wrong and of the common good. Spock and Data, the Vulcan and android of Star Trek fame, immediately come to mind as prime examples of such characters.
As a child, I loved them. Their logical thinking and scientific minds helped to inspire my own love of the sciences, and their unwavering certainty in doing what was right – no matter the personal cost – inspired the strict morality that I still adhere to. They were my role models, my heroes, and not just because I thought their uniforms were super cool.
As a young autistic child, these characters were also often the only people I could relate to. Like many autistic individuals – and like my idols – I had difficulty understanding and making sense of the nuances of social interaction. What was and was not appropriate to say and do in different social situations was challenging, and often impossible, for me to grasp. Sarcasm and innuendo were my nemeses, my ability to communicate limited to the most literal of speech. During a time in my life when the world around me was confusing, these paragons of reason were people I could understand. But, like any other form of hero worship, this conception had consequences.
Characters like Spock and Data are portrayed the way they are because they are based on a fundamental assumption throughout science fiction, an unspoken truth that permeates our society and our concept of ourselves: that to be emotionless is to be inhuman, alien, other. As an autistic person, I do not experience emotion in the same way other people do, and so to others I can seem at times emotionless. So when looking on these inhuman characters, who were more like me than my parents or teachers or friends, I too felt inhuman.
When aliens and robots are more like you than your family is, you start to question some things. In my childlike innocence, I did just that. Why is my family so different from me? Why am I so different from everyone I know? Do I really belong? Am I even human?
I would continue to doubt myself well into adolescence, and it would not be until years later that I put my questions to rest, and accepted that even though I was different, that did not mean I did not belong.
A big part of this acceptance came from meeting other autistic people. Many autistic people say that growing up, they felt as though they were from a different world, and had been born on the “wrong planet.” However, knowing that we are not alone in our experiences of the world has led an entire community of autistic people to spring up, both online and in real life. This sense of belonging was something that I experienced far too late, and so I try to share it with as many young autistic children as I can. What I now wish I had had, in retrospect, was a role model who was also autistic. Not a character that was like someone with autism, but someone that was openly autistic, who lived the life of an autistic person, who struggled with the same things I struggled with, but who could overcome their difficulties. While I still love my childhood android and Vulcan (I cried when Leonard Nimoy passed away) and still enjoy our similarities, I try to remember that they are characters written to convey a story, and not real people living their lives one day at a time.

An Autistic's guide to autism: Most people don’t like math: the flaws in modern math education

Most people don’t like math. While this may not be so true of the Bowdoin populace (the population of Searles at any given time should attest to the inaccuracy of “most” in the case of Bowdoin), it is certainly true of the general public. There is a stigma that surrounds mathematics, a perception of math as an esoteric subject only the odd enjoy. Some might have found high school geometry pleasing, others may have enjoyed algebra, and some may say that they at least found calculus interesting, if not enjoyable. However, the vast majority of students can attest to having found at least one math class insufferable. “I hate math” is not an uncommon phrase in a math class.
Why is this? What part of mathematics is so intolerable that it can evoke such wrath, from children and adults alike?
I believe the flaw lies not with mathematics itself, but in the way it is presented.
Take as juxtaposition an art class: art assignments might range from painting a picture, to sketching an object, molding clay or capturing a photograph. These tasks are often simple, for the purposes of teaching, just as in math class one starts with the basics: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Unlike in mathematics, there is an unspoken, almost unthought-of assumption and understanding that runs through any art class: that there is more beyond this. An artist practices his or her art so that he or she may move on to do better art, knowing full well that others have done this in the past. There is a cultural knowledge of art that, while not deep, is widespread. A child in their third grade art class is aware that art isn’t just making macaroni sculptures and drawing crayon flowers. They have heard of figures like Van Gogh and Picasso, perhaps not specifically of their accomplishments, but at least that they are artists and that they are important.
The same cannot be said for mathematics. Even a well educated individual may be under the impression that math stops at calculus, and even those interested in math— labeled as being gifted in the subject —may be under the impression that professional mathematics is like a competition, where mathematicians pose each other problems to solve, and whoever does so quickest wins. In reality, mathematics is a subject-spanning body of knowledge built up from logic to reveal truths about itself and the world. Modern mathematics comprises an enormous body of work, done by hundreds of thousands of men and women over the course of millennia, and stretching in scope from the simplest properties of numbers and shapes, to the truly abstract objects by which no real world object could ever hope to be modeled.
Modern math education teaches mathematics as a cut-and-dry way of finding answers to problems that ,to most students, didn’t need answering anyway. If instead, time was spent introducing children to the great accomplishments of mathematics: from simple to state problems like Fermat’s Last Theorem, to theorems which place limits on our ability to find definitive answers, like Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, to the problems which have yet to be solved, like the Riemann Hypothesis, then they may not have as much reason to hate the subject. If children knew the stories of great mathematicians like Euler, Gauss, Cantor and Galois, perhaps they might realize that there was more to math than saw in the classroom. Perhaps, their curiosity would be sparked, and one day they would go on to solve the great problems they had learned about. Pleasing ‘if’s indeed, but it is difficult to be curious about a world you do not know exists.

An Autistic's guide to autism

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Ben York

Columnist

October 23, 2015

It is a common trope in science fiction to make alien or robotic characters unable to understand or use the nuances of verbal communication. Often portrayed as either emotionless or infrequent in their emotional displays, they stumble through social interaction, misunderstanding the use of sarcasm and humor constantly. At times they provide comic relief: the perfect companion straight man-woman-alien-robot-thing to any character. At other times they are moral centers, certain and unfettered by emotion in their beliefs of right and wrong and of the common good. Spock and Data, the Vulcan and android of Star Trek fame, immediately come to mind as prime examples of such characters.

As a child, I loved them. Their logical thinking and scientific minds helped to inspire my own love of the sciences, and their unwavering certainty in doing what was right—no matter the personal cost—inspired the strict morality that I still adhere to. They were my role models, my heroes, and not just because I thought their uniforms were super cool.

As a young autistic child, these characters were also often the only people I could relate to. Like many autistic individuals—and like my idols—I had difficulty understanding and making sense of the nuances of social interaction. What was and was not appropriate to say and do in different social situations was challenging, and often impossible, for me to grasp. Sarcasm and innuendo were my nemeses, my ability to communicate limited to the most literal of speech. During a time in my life when the world around me was confusing, these paragons of reason were people I could understand. But, like any other form of hero worship, this conception had consequences.

Characters like Spock and Data are portrayed the way they are because they are based on a fundamental assumption throughout science fiction, an unspoken truth that permeates our society and our concept of ourselves: that to be emotionless is to be inhuman, alien, other. As an autistic person, I do not experience emotion in the same way other people do, and so to others I can seem at times emotionless. So when looking on these inhuman characters, who were more like me than my parents or teachers or friends, I too felt inhuman.

When aliens and robots are more like you than your family is, you start to question some things. In my childlike innocence, I did just that. Why is my family so different from me? Why am I so different from everyone I know? Do I really belong? Am I even human?

I would continue to doubt myself well into adolescence, and it would not be until years later that I put my questions to rest, and accepted that even though I was different, that did not mean I did not belong.

A big part of this acceptance came from meeting other autistic people. Many autistic people say that growing up, they felt as though they were from a different world, and had been born on the “wrong planet.” However, knowing that we are not alone in our experiences of the world has led an entire community of autistic people to spring up, both online and in real life. This sense of belonging was something that I experienced far too late, and so I try to share it with as many young autistic children as I can. What I now wish I had had, in retrospect, was a role model who was also autistic. Not a character that was like someone with autism, but someone that was openly autistic, who lived the life of an autistic person, who struggled with the same things I struggled with, but who could overcome their difficulties. While I still love my childhood android and Vulcan (I cried when Leonard Nimoy passed away) and still enjoy our similarities, I try to remember that they are characters written to convey a story, and not real people living their lives one day at a time.

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