Interesting discovery

The deep freeze has hit Ohio along with the snow. I have been cooped up in the house since coming home from work early yesterday and I have already gotten the call that school is canceled for tomorrow. That means I won't be seeing my students until Wednesday. They get a nice little mini vacation. Monday is a holiday and Tuesday is an inservice day for the district. I am glad I didn't have to work today because I have the beginnings of a pretty nasty cold and I know that no matter how sick I am to become I would not have called off. I have been trying to desperately get warm. I am an my warmest pajamas and have on my trusty Ohio State sweatshirt and am wrapped up in a blanket. I have spent the day reading and just browsing online throughout the day. I stumbled across an interesting news article that actually pertained to my job. A DVD has been released that teaches children with autism the meaning of emotions and facial expressions. As a special education teacher, I know first hand how difficult it is for children on the spectrum to grasp such an abstract concept. A professor in England has been conducting research for years and is responsible for the program. The professors last named seemed familiar and it turned out he is a cousin to the comedian Sacha Baren Cohan or Borat as most people in the US know him. He did a study with the materials developed and found that if a child on the spectrum were to watch his DVD for 15 minutes a day for a month there was a significant increase in their understanding of emotions and facial expressions. It seems he paired motorized vehicles such as trains and buses, etc. and real faces to create the DVD. I was curious so I went to the website. They had a link for you to watch an episode of the video on YouTube. I was amazed at how they were able to integrate the actual human faces onto the vehicles. He choose trains and such because of fascination children with autism seem to have with them. I checked out his research and it is very interesting. Those children that watched the video for a month equaled their typical peers in facial/emotional recognition. My only question would be how severe were the cases of Autism? Where on the spectrum did they fall? I wonder how many of the children actually fell into the severe end of the spectrum. I want to be excited about this discovery but at the same time I am skeptical. I will give him credit. He stated both in the article and on the website that this was not a cure for Autism. He also had an interesting theory about Autism. Since it is predominantly a male disorder he felt it had something to do with the wiring of the male brain. Women, he feels, are more capable of discerning patterns in everyday occurrences. Men however aren't. He feels that figuring out emotions and facial expressions is exactly that, the figuring out of a pattern and making sense of it. Interesting theory. For anyone reading this interested in Autism, the link for the website is www.thetransporters.com. Even if you don't know anyone with Autism or work with that population, I strongly recommend checking it out. I found it very interesting. I might just try to talk my speech therapist into ordering it.