Al Capone Does My Shirts and Autism movie

Personally I do not have a depth of knowledge about disabilities or special education.  While reading Al Capone Does my Shirts, discussing disabilities in class, and watching the movie on Autism my interest has been piqued.  I found it interesting the difference between the autism presented in Al Capone does my shirts with Natalie compared to the woman in the video with autism.  In the video a doctor who studies autism said it is believed that autism has to do with how the brain is wired.  Some connections seem to be wired correctly and others are not.  This definition gives me a little bit of a clearer picture of how autism occurs and what the difference is between a person with autism compared to a person without.

I also found it interesting in both Al Capone Does my Shirts and the movie how the mother of the child with autism reacted to the situation.  Within the novel the mother is very protective of Natalie and really wants her to go to the Ester P. Marinoff School so she can get better.  The mother puts a lot of responsibility of taking care of Natalie onto Moose, the 12 year old boy.  She always puts Natalie first, which is partly understandable because of her disability but I think she was giving too much pity versus empathy to Natalie.

In the video the mom used surprising language to describe her daughter.  She used retarded and handicap to describe her daughter. This seemed unusual to me because of the connotation these words have.   Like Linton discussed in his article these are perceived and taken by the disabled community as "nasty" words.  Maybe the language the mom used had to do with the time period that the movie was created in, I am not sure when it was created.

Along with the mother, the woman with autism also used interesting language to describe her condition.  She continued to refer to her behaviors as awful autism behaviors.  I understand that the woman may wish she did not have these tendencies, but it also seems like she has had them her whole life and should grow to live and accept them.  She is functioning so much better than previously, you would think she would at least be thankful for this part of her life.  I am not saying that she was not grateful but I thought it was odd for her to call her autistic behaviors awful as opposed to just saying she was working towards eliminating them.

After reading Al Capone Does my Shirts, having a discussion in class, and watching the video on autism I am interested in learning more about disabilities in general and about autism. It is very valuable for me to be knowledgeable in this area so I am prepared for any type of student and so I can learn about others who are different from me and learn and grow from these differences.

Bronx Masquerade and African American Stereotypes

I enjoyed my group's book talk for Bronx Masquerade.  I was able to share my question with my group and hear their opinions on the question I raised.  This question was,  "why does Tyrone express feelings of understanding and acceptance of others differences, but still seems to stereotype his peers?" My group members agreed that Tyrone seemed to stereotype others and we were not sure if this was the purpose of the author or not. I thought Kat's insight into the book was nice to hear as well.  Even though I had considered the stereotypes in the book, I hadn't considered every role the characters had (like the teen mother, basketball player, rapper...) as being stereotypical like she pointed out. I also thought the discussion we had about language was interesting.  I had not thought about that before class either.  I see both sides of the discussion. On one hand I would think the language the students used would have been much more vulgar and profane.  But the book is often used in schools and may not have been published with different language.  I still really enjoyed Bronx Masquerade, but like each of the other books we have discussed it has its flaws.  This book can still be used to discuss diversity as long as discussion intervenes with the reading of the book in a classroom.