This is Elizabeth Bonker with non-speaking autism…her high school principal said ‘The r*tard can’t be valedictorian’….she proved him wrong when she graduated Rollins College as the class of 2022 valedictorian 🙏
— Wu-Tang Is For The Children (@WUTangKids) May 12, 2022
*BTW I’m not crying, you’re crying pic.twitter.com/Ydxtpp34I7
May 13, 2022
Valedictorian.
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24 comments:
There is autism and then there is autism.
People with sever autism would not be able to attend and pass classes in any high school.
This sounds like one of those stories where the girl with no arms or legs is voted homecoming queen.
I'm calling bullshit for now.
Either way, the 'retard' quote is out of bounds...
So would you still buy it if the picture were a dog?
How ironic. Her name is Bonkers and the school principal is bonkers.
Be those people.
Omg 🥹
The Bridge (seasons 1-4) Sofia Helin as an aspergers detective is great. She said it was hard to learn to do. Showed up as The Tunnel (seasons 1-3) which was good but suffered from having a cop-out ending, England-France instead of Sweden-Denmark; and an unwatchable The Bridge in US-Mexico form.
The initial season of each follows some preexisting script and following seasons are screenwriters' independent extrapolations.
You get to follow a woman whose head is not made of fluff, with advantages and disadvantages.
I don't know if this valedictorian is feelings-bound or has another angle. Sounds feelings-bound but perhaps she had help in the script.
It is odd that the speech area of the motor cortex would allow typing and not speech. Broca's area controls all communication. Interesting case.
It's 2022. The retard definitely can be valedictorian. Now let's all pretend that was fair to the other students.
Or else.
They bleeped "retard", a perfectly good word that offends (as it should when used like this) some. Karen said so.
I'm damned tired of words being eliminated from our lexicon.
Being offended by someone is great. It illustrates who we should avoid.
From wikipedia:
Facilitated communication (FC), or supported typing, is a scientifically discredited technique[1] that attempts to aid communication by people with autism or other communication disabilities who are non-verbal. The facilitator guides the disabled person's arm or hand and attempts to help them type on a keyboard or other device.[2]
There is widespread agreement within the scientific community and among disability advocacy organizations that FC is a pseudoscience.[3] Research indicates that the facilitator is the source of the messages obtained through FC, rather than the disabled person.
The speech was probably better than most.
Under what circumstances would her former high school principal make that announcement? I didn't see a reference to it in any of the three MSM articles on the "silent" commencement speech I browsed through.
Neuralink might help her.
I hope I am wrong, but I suspect this story is a load of horse shit.
I wonder if we asked her to write another speech with a totally different 'Communication partner holding a keyboard' if it would have the same message?
The use of a 'communication partner' is highly suspect and has not passed blind tests. If it is real in this case she should go get the million dollars offered by James Randi for anyone who can present a valid case of this kind of communication.
There's a ten-year-old video of the girl on youtube. I guess she's about 14 at the time. She and her mother (the facilitator) are being "interviewed" at a live event. The girl appears oblivious until she spots the interviewer's ipad. Then she reaches for it. She holds her arm out in a deliberate way that says "Can I have that, please?" The girl reads the guy's cues and gently takes it from him only after he acquiesces. Then, in a smooth, practiced motion, she turns the tablet toward herself with one hand and tries to use it with the other. Mom immediately snatches it away.
Is she a genius with communications difficulties or a severely retarded girl being used as a puppet by her mother who, it turns out, is also an author? The title of the video is "Virginia Breen & Elizabeth Bonker - Q&A at TEDMED 2012". Check it out for yourself.
I had a student who turned in "A" level work at anything she did at home, but couldn't put two sentences together in class. I had the choice of calling her mother a liar or just letting it pass. I passed the decision on to the principal, and he let it pass. There was no way this student was ever going to be a fully functional adult, but she might have learned more if her mother had accepted her limitations. My guess is the young woman's mother in this story learned a lot in college and might be the one who who deserved to be valedictorian. The student who deserved the title might be disappointed, but it's part of going to a "woke" college.
I doubt the "31 million" figure for silent autists.
I also doubt that facilitated communication is a complete hoax. If that were so then the later-career physics work attributed to Stephen Hawking would actually be the work of a therapist. Elain Mason or possibly Judith Croadsell.
She holds her arm out in a deliberate way that says "Can I have that, please?" The girl reads the guy's cues and gently takes it from him only after he acquiesces. Then, in a smooth, practiced motion, she turns the tablet toward herself with one hand and tries to use it with the other. Mom immediately snatches it away.
That was interesting..
Makes you Wonder what she would type without mom to move her hand. Mom Sure didn't want us to find out.
I wonder what sort of poems a dog (or an inanimate object) would be able to "compose" with the mom "assisting"
I Also see (now) that she is valedictorian at a "college", not a highschool
If we separated the girl from the mom..
then showed a colored block (say red) to the girl..
Then reunited the girl and the mom..
and then asked the girl to type what color the block was..
I wonder what she'd type (with the mom's "assistance")
The principle is one of those highly educated experts, we parents are not allowed to disagree with, on anything involving my child.
Highly educated, in a very specific field. My parents were midwest farm hicks. Us kids would have been lectured if we would have use the work in a derogatory manner.
If the leaders of the schools with all the education and string of letters behind their names, have created such a rotten educational process, my only conclusion is they are succeeding in attaining their goals. A mass of clueless dependents. As insty often quotes, 'beggars are much easier to please.'
Googled that 4 different ways and cannot find that "front page story" anywhere referenced. Until this tweet, it does not seem to exist? Was anyone able to find the story?
The use of a 'communication partner' is highly suspect and has not passed blind tests.
I must confess I've wondered about Helen Keller, at least in her public appearances. I don't doubt that she was indeed communicating; I've just wondered whether Anne Sullivan added some gloss and zing to what Keller was saying on the way by.
And of course Keller had seemed to be a cognitively normal child before her illness, and so was probably not mentally impaired.
Was it in South Africa that the guy jumped onto the stage when some luminary was giving a speech, and started signing the speech, except that his signing was meaningless (to everyone but him, anyway)? Communication is a two-way street - there had to be a receiver.
And one other thought: anyone remember Terri Schiavo? Apparently in a persistent vegetative state? Her family was willing and eager to take over responsibility for her care and was convinced that her behavior showed signs of awareness. Her husband, who wanted to marry someone else (perhaps just a coincidence - how could I say?), relied on some passing, and private, to him only, comment she'd made years before about how she would or wouldn't want to live, and successfully received court permission to withdraw her feeding tube, the only form of life support she was on because she couldn't swallow; in all other ways she was physically just bedridden.
I thought then, and I think now, that the people willing to care for her should have prevailed. Maybe they were right about her having some awareness, or maybe it was wishful thinking, but it's sort of a Pascal's Wager for me to go with the side of life against the side of actively causing death.
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