How many times does this bogus “miracle” have to be exposed? Look at this ABC News video, and watch as the poor child is looking anywhere except at the keyboard as she is supposedly typing her own words, while her mother is guiding her hand while staring intently at the screen instead of at her child. Notice that it takes ten minutes to compose a simple answer while the news crew is there, but she is supposedly able to compose prose and poetry that is “wise beyond her years.”
There’s the clue, you jackasses-she’s writing the same way someone her mother’s age might write!
I wonder if anyone has bothered to test her ability to read “with lightning speed” by having her read something her mother has not read, and then questioning her about it.
Soon she is going to get a new computer that she can use by scanning with her eyes, and so will be able “to write all by herself.” That should be interesting.
I suppose the parents can be forgiven for their self-delusion, but Stephanopolous should know better.
This reminds me…
My wife and I saw some special about some autistic girl who has a facilitated communication person following her around. When I saw what the special was about, I turned to my wife and said “Oh yeah, facilitated communication, it’s total bullshit. Learned it on the straight dope.”
Then we kept watching this documentary, and it came to pass that the documentary appeared to both of us to present fairly solid evidence that, in this particular case, the facilitated communication was working just exactly as it was supposed to.
But unfortunately, I can not remember what it was that we saw that made us doubt that it’s complete BS.
I believe the special was on one of the Discovery channel channels. Has anyone seen it? Can you remind me what was in it, and whether it could be debunked or something?
I was actually only watching out of the corner of my eye while attending to something else, ftr.
-FrL-
There is a current thread in CS called ‘You have 7 days left to de-throne me as the world’s worst writer.’
I think this from the girl’s essay would qualify
“My heartbeat is written on a stave, with crescendos and diminuendos, tacit bars and heart-stopping glissandos. But my breath is the libretto, with such glorious poetry and anarchic rhyme that I can’t make sense of it at all.”
This is pretentious BS obviously written by the parents.
The greatest genius in the world couldn’t have composed what this little girl supposedly wrote without years of standard education. Where did she learn the definitions of these words? Where did she learn sentence structure? Listening to classical music 24 hours a day wouldn’t have taught her the meanings of “crescendo”, “diminuendo”, or any of those other musical terms. If a normal kid of that age who never studied music, poetry or writing had turned in a paper written like this, I would suspect either plagiarism or that it was the work of parents.
I can’t find anything of this special, and the only thing mentioned on the Discovery Channel website is here:
I agree with the OP, even though that I don’t think all facilitated communicators have turned out to be frauds.
I remember watching an Oprah show featuring child prodigies. They had a child who had some kind of condition where he couldn’t talk, walk, or move in any purposeful way (he was about ten years old and his parents carried him out on the stage). He also had produced a book of poetry, with prose was as brilliant as the one linked in the OP. Interestingly, Oprah did not interview the child during the show. That alone makes me suspicious of the whole thing.
There was this documentary I watched about a severely mentally-handicapped 20-year-old and the mother who was determined to have him bar mitzvah’ed. This wasn’t an autistic guy of otherwise normal intelligence. He was truly mentally handicapped (the result of a genetic syndrome), and non-verbal to boot. But the mother could magically get him to communicate when she would hold up a piece of paper with letters on it. The guy stabbed the paper all over the place with his finger, not even looking at anything, and yet she managed to decipher a whole paragraph of words. The father was in total disbelief about the whole thing , but the mother–the saint she was–had complete faith.
The thing about it was, if this guy really was as intelligent as his communication suggested he was, then why did she talk to him like he was a child and allow others to do so? Why did she send him to a school for the severely mentally handicapped? It didn’t make sense, but I don’t envy her. It can’t be easy raising a person who you can’t communicate with, and I could see why it would be tempting to believe in any parlor trick that allows this.
Well, there’s “facilitated communication” and then there’s communication that’s facilitated. There are several legitimate systems for helping people with disabilities communicate (I’ve shared one before that a friend of mine uses - one person recites the alphabet and she looks up and to the right when we get to the letter she wants and repeat until she’s spelled out what she wants to say. Tedious as all get-out, but totally legitimate. You could ask her to read and repeat a word or sentence which I hadn’t seen and we’d get it correct together. You, once you’ve observed the method, could do it with her yourself and get the same results.) To the best of my knowledge, it’s specifically the keyboard or letter board method of “facilitated communication” when the subject isn’t even looking anywhere near the board and is using a one finger hunt and peck method that has been debunked. I’m a touch typist, and I still can’t hunt and peck without looking - I need the tactile reminder of the home row.
Try it for yourself. Take your wrists off the table, look away and use only one finger and try to type something. Here’s my attempt at “The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.”
thr wuick brie, goc jumprf ibrt yjt ldcu dig,
(Hmmm…looks like a drunk Scotsman!)
I don’t doubt the parents *believe *that their daughter is communicating with them. I’m just concerned about how they’re going to feel when she gets a new system and they discover they’ve been using her as a human ouija board all these years.
Band name!
Sorry.
It’s simple to determine if a child’s communication is being facilitated or supplied by the facilitator. If the child and facilitator are positioned so that the child can be shown a series of objects that the facilitator cannot see, the communication should still correctly identify the objects. When facilitated communication has been tested in this way, it has failed.
Welsh band name!
sorrier
What?? My mother was a saint! Get out!
So, what we’re talking about, then, is essentially an electronic Ouija board.
Even more baffling is that most of the readers who commented on that site appear to have no problem believing the story, and those who express skepticism are being are being accused of jealousy or “being mean.”
Frankly, I will be a bit jealous if the kid is that smart (purple prose aside)—but (and I don’t say this to be mean) at first glance, it sure looks like a horseshit tale. (Did ABC News really not think any verification was required? Or have we arrived at the point where publicity is so valuable and credibility so unnecessary, it’s okay to produce a B.S. story because then there’ll be a guaranteed follow-up story after it’s debunked?)
If the studio thinks they can get some cash out of it…
Ah, the Canterbury Tales in the original form always brings a smile to my face. Sweeter poetry I have never heard.
What?
Just last fall, a girl was taken from her home due to the lies her ‘facilitator’ typed for her, saying that the autistic teenager’s father had been raping her for years, and the mother knew and did nothing about it. They even took her brother from the home as well. The teacher’s aide at her school (my alma mater) was her facilitator. From the second they published the ‘breaking news’ it was obvious that the aide just wanted some attention and drama. She’d gotten the job with only two hours of training in the facilitating process. Fake it till you make it, eh?
You ain’t the only one, kid.
There should be a law against facilitating bad poetry.
Heh, I was involved in a court case once where someone tried to claim that a poem I had written (in four-line stanzas, with a refrain!) titled “Emotional Suicide” *, was actually a suicide note. :dubious:
(*You know, like “social suicide” or “political suicide”.)
I truly hope my reply won’t inadvertently offend anyone…I said that anyone who left a suicide note in the form of poetry probably deserved to die.