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Greetings, all. I've been on here for a week or so now. Thought I'd introduce myself.

I don't have Asperger's or any form of autism; I'm what's called NT around here. I even took the online Aspie test and flunked it. I'm taking a class whose subject is autism, and since I'm not good at reading scientific papers, I thought I'd come here to try and learn to understand how you-all see the world. It's been really enlightening, and I'm really happy for you that you have been getting together in places like this and in the real world, and getting organized, and sharing your experiences and knowledge.

One of my interests is intercultural communication. I try hard to understand people who are different from me in various ways. As a teacher of English as a Foreign Language, I've had students from 48 different countries. Maybe intercultural communication is an aspie-like obsession of mine, or just a professional interest.

I'm from the States, but lived in Ecuador for four years in the 1990s. Now I live in Vienna, Austria. Yesterday when I was at a public playground with my 14-month-old baby, I thought I understood, maybe, some of what I've been reading here about Asperger's, because I realized that I can't read Austrians' body language very well, and I certainly can't make small talk with them in German. This leads me to feel, sometimes, socially isolated.

I'm working on a PhD in Linguistics. Just started this semester, actually.

OK, that's about it for now. If anyone is totally baffled by NT behavior, I might be able to explain some of it. Let me know if I can be useful in this regard.

Welcome greetings, Arkadash, to the Wrong Planet neighborhood.

So interesting! So, which country's students did you find hardest to "read"?

Thanks, you two.

JetLag, I like your signature. I noticed it the other day when I was reading through the forum & thought about writing it down. It captures the complexity of the feeling of the arrival of an idea.

Leila, I don't feel like I have much difficulty "reading" my students. I think it's a talent teachers need to develop; I've talked about it with a few other teachers. "Sensitivity." We need to be sensitive to how they are feeling, what they are understanding, when they get frustrated, when they need help. The students I've had have almost never had difficulty communicating these things to me, especially when it benefits them and me. A huge amount of that is through body language. If I see someone slumping down in the seat, or distracted by what's happening outside the window, or frowning, I go see if they need help.

However, there was one situation when I had a class with people from various backgrounds, and there were three Korean guys in it. They were the only three Korean guys I ever had trouble understanding, and I think it's because they were behaving in my class as they are expected to behave in a Korean school. In a Korean school, the students are expected simply to listen to the teacher, not to volunteer any information or responses, but just to passively receive what is being taught. It annoyed me that I could not read their facial expressions, because they had absolutely no facial expressions--that is, their faces were blank. So I often ask whether my students have understood something I've said, and I put on my "questioning" facial expression--raised eyebrows, slightly protruding chin--and look around the class for non-verbal cues (for example, nods) as to how people are responding to what I'm presenting, and from those three I got no response. It took me a while to figure it out: they were behaving in a way that was normal and appropriate to them. All the other East Asians I've had as students adapted to being in a new educational situation, and did their best to communicate with me.

Welcome to the Wrong Planet!

I read on some military site that American Army instructors learned not to ask questions of any Iraqi Army student unless they knew the student knew the answer. If they asked a question the student did not know the answer to, the Iraqi would assume the instructor had deliberately set him up to humiliate him and would hate the instructor for the rest of his life.

That's really interesting and makes a lot of sense.

When I was doing my MA in Applied Linguistics, we learned about a problem that comes up sometimes when white teachers in the USA teach black kids. The black kids are raised to understand that when someone scolds you, you're not supposed to look back at them--it's disrespectful. So then when they get in trouble in the classroom, they politely look away, and the white teacher gets angry: "Hey, buster! Look at me when I'm talking to you!" The only way to avoid the situation is to know about it in advance.

I finally learned how to look into people's eyes without discomfort, and when I got to Rwanda, it's rude to look directly at people for any length of time.

My professor said that a lot of HFA guys in the UK are married to women from the Far East--maybe he said Thailand--and that the oddness that a UK woman would see in an HFA guy would be less noticeable to a woman from a different culture.

I always felt like an oddball when I was growing up; my mannerisms were a little off. When I traveled alone in Mexico in my early 20s, I felt totally freed, because people just figured I was a foreigner, not someone behaving oddly. A refreshing change.

Ah, I've just graduated to butterfly!

What were you doing in Rwanda?

To WrongPlanet!! !

Arkadash, I've been to Rwanda three times now with www.comeandseeafrica.org for the International Christian Student Conference at the National University of Rwanda in Butare and whatever else I found interesting. I fell in love with the Rwandans. We just recently had a Rwandan pastor stay at our house for a week and I drove him to engagements. I try to help his wife who is nearing her PhD in medicinal botany. I gave her some artimesia annua seeds and she is comparing them with seeds from three other provenences to see which will grow into plants with the strongest concentration of (artimisin?) effective chemical. If you brew a tea from the flower buds of artimesia annua and drink it, you can cure your malaria. Think of it! Any peasant can grow his own medicine. The country can grow it and export it to the countries in Africa that can't grow it. WooHoo! That is one example.
I also work with Pastor David Nahayo. One successful crop introduction has been giant golden amaranth. The leaves sell well at the market. And the plant grows to six feet compared to the 18 inches of the local varieties of amaranth. I had prepared and many people tried the cooked seeds of the amaranth which nobody in Rwanda had done before. They were pretty leery of the idea, but found they liked it. I'm hoping the idea catches on because grains are expensive in Rwanda. I'm also attempting to persuade the people to eat purslane, full of Omega 3 oils. They watch me in their gardens chewing on the purslane and they keep saying, "But it's a weed!" and they don't want to try it, even after I point out that weeds are the easiest crop to take care of.
And I've been trying to establish school libraries in Rwanda. I built up school libraries numbers 2 and 3 in the entire country. Through Books For Africa, I got four pallets of books I had purchased over a few years into Rwanda. The Come And See Africa people took over from there and this is the news I got this morning!! !!

http://www.newtimes.co.rw/print.php?iss ... icle=16482

One of the reasons I so enjoy Rwanda is that any oddness I display they attribute to my being American rather than to my being weird. I can jump and laugh and clap when I'm delighted, and it's ok.

Oh, and the cutest thing, I met the little girl I sponsor at a www.africamissionalliance.com school and asked her what her favorite gift from a box I had sent her earlier was. She said it was the blue Croc shoes. I asked through the translator why she wasn't wearing them, and she said she didn't want to get them dirty.

Three cheers for weirdos! It sounds like you're doing great work.

Can I ask you a serious question? You say you finally learned to look into people's eyes without discomfort. Another person who posts here, LabPet, made a video offsite in which she said she couldn't look into people's eyes except for a short amount of time. She said it felt like looking directly at a solar eclipse. Could you share any thoughts on (a) how widespread that might be, (b) what the feeling is like, (c)if it relates in any way to other Asperger's symptoms, and (d) how it affects ordinary social interactions?

I'm wondering because I'm dealing with a scientific paper that says that kids with HFA do better on set-shifting/mental flexibility tasks if they do them on a computer, rather than sitting at a table facing a researcher.

On a personal level, for many years I've felt able to look anyone in the eyes--with the slight exception of my wife when she's scolding me about something--in which case her gaze is painful to me: my eyes and my head both hurt. LabPet's analogy to the solar eclipse made sense: the feeling is not of a strong light, but of a strong radiation.

The story of the little girl's crocs is lovely....

There are quite a few eye gaze posts in the history of WP. One of them cited a research project that made everything clear to me. In the people tested, eye gaze in the NTs stimulated the limbic system in the brain. The Autism spectrum people, the amygdala was stimylated. Oh ho! When I was a child, I always thought that eye gaze hurt. Now I look back and can supply the word I didn't have then. Eye gaze aroused extreme anxiety. It felt somewhat like what I think PTSD feels like, which also goes through the amygdala, bypassing the cognitive system altogether.
But when I realized that people don't trust shifty-eyed people, I purposed to change. I did a lot of sweating as I practiced. Even at my own wedding, I found it hard to keep my gaze on my beloved's eyes. Decades later it is no big deal. Now I have to practice looking into people's eyes without staring. Sigh.
The gal from Sound Of A Miracle told me that eye gaze made her feel like people could see inside her and read her every thought, and that scared her.

Richie, thanks for the nice welcome.

Leila, thanks for that info on the research on the eye thing. It makes a whole lot of sense. This evening I was talking with a student of mine whose cousin is autistic and doesn't look people in the eyes, and I told her about that. She thought it was really interesting and maybe wants to sign up here to ask questions about possible ways to relate to her cousin.