I’ve started teaching summer school, in a special program for local high school students and a course on translating Virgil’s Eclogues. The Eclogues are pastoral poems about shepherds and poetry and…….ok, that’s a bit too far from the usual discussion on this blog. The other class is on Psychology and Literature and, as of today, we’ve read this, this, and this, and discussed Freud’s theories of psychosexual development (the oral stage, the anal stage…..) and Erik Erikson’s 8 stages of psychosocial development—-and I’ve been reflecting on how different Charlie’s development has been.
I know that these theories are “just” theories; that …read more

The highpoint of the week for us was Thursday night’s reading in conjunction with the Artistic Spectrum exhibit—–and Charlie also had a lot of things to say himself.

Did Your Child Reach Her or His Gross Motor Milestones?
Some parents note that their children had gross motor delays (Charlie did), while others said their child did not. Indeed, some parents whose children met all their gross and fine motor milestones then had other delays in social and communicative skills.
About This “Autism Dilemma”
According to health journalist Alison Rose Levy, there is an “autism dilemma” afoot, in which parents of autistic children speak emotionally …read more

“Happy is he who knows the causes of things,” writes the Roman poet Virgil in Book 2 of his Georgics. Virgil was writing about the stars and the sun and the moon, about why there are eclipses and earthquakes, about natural phenomena, about the cosmos—-and his words can be applied to a much more specific concern, the discussion today about the cause of autism. The need to figure out “what causes it” seems, indeed, to be the main goal of so much research about autism.
Certainly this need is what principally fuels the discussion/debate/issue about vaccines and autism. Today in Washington, …read more