Temple Grandin

Hey guys,

I recently watched a movie that really impacted me and I think every single person needs to watch it. It’s really one of those movies that stays with you for a few days. The movie is called Temple Grandin. If you haven’t…. watch it!!!

Temple Grandin is an Autistic woman. Her way of thinking allowed her to study cows in a way that nobody else could. She studied and spent a lot of time around cows and developed humane ways to slaughter and take care of them. She was highly functional meaning she didn’t need someone to change her diaper or feed her like some mentally retarded people. She was just different. Not less, different. I don’t know a lot of scientific things about autism however my mom is a special education teacher and was in the past so i grew up knowing people with autism and other mental conditions. People with Autism think completely differently than we do. They have a lot of social problems mainly because they don’t relate to other people as well. It’s hard for them to understand facial expressions and things that we don’t realize we do when communicating. Autistic people often are extremely smart in some categories while really lacking in others. Temple happened to excel in science but not at all in language or math. The movie is about her and just her life in general.

The hardest thing about the movie were the many scenes depicting how others would make fun of her. She grew up in the 50s/60s. People were a lot less knowledgeable about mental retardation than they are now. Temple was just thought of as a weird girl to her classmates. Nobody cared to work with her. It didn’t bother her because she didn’t really grasp the concept of being made fun of. She understood that they did not like her but those kinds of things didn’t matter to her. It is still really hard to watch despite the fact that she didn’t care so much. It makes you think about those incidents that go on today. People are 100 times more considerate now but things can still be hard. I think one thing that movie really opened my eyes to was to really never judge a person by what you see or how they act. You have no idea what someone is capable of. Temple used to spin to calm herself. If you stumbled upon someone spinning like a mad person you would probably think that they are seriously disabled. You would have no idea that it’s just their brain needing stimulation to calm them. In reality that spinning girl could be a genius and discover all kinds of things that normal people’s way of thinking doesn’t allow.

I can’t really do the movie justice just by talking about it. Just go see it. Please. You will probably cry a few times but that’s okay. Claire Danes, the actress, won a Golden Globe for her performance and it was well deserved. Temple Grandin.

~King A

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