For many autistic people, trying to keep one’s eyes on the speaker will impair listening. In fact, for me at least, if I’m looking away from you, or off to the side of you, or my eyes and head are moving about, it means I’m actually processing what you’re saying. It can be difficult and distracting to try and focus one’s eyes on the speaker. The eyes of many autistic people tend to wander, as a natural means of regulating visual input. This is the one that I mentioned my confusion with in the beginning. Plus, I bet it doesn’t even entirely ring true for every neurotypical person either.Īllow me to explain by going through a few of the points to point out how these don’t make sense from an autistic perspective. The terribly ironic part, though, is that for autistic people, what’s listed here looks essentially like the complete opposite of actual engaged listening. Supposedly, this is what it looks and sounds like if someone is actually “actively” listening. Okay, maybe that’s a bit much, but I think you understand my feelings. Like, I want to organize a national tear-down day of posters like this, where everyone tears them down, rips them to shreds, and then burns the pieces in a big bonfire where we all dance on the smoldering ashes as they consume those ridiculous googley eyes. Seriously, it is so wrong on so many levels that I honestly don’t know if I can handle it. Oh my gosh, this poster makes me want to punch something. I will warn you, however, that this is probably the most irritating thing I’ve ever seen written on a poster, and some of my readers may feel the same way. In fact, I think I’ve seen this exact poster before hanging in schools I’ve attended. To demonstrate what “active listening” is supposed to be, I’ll post a picture of a poster intended for elementary-aged kids about active listening. There’s this whole concept called “active listening” that’s been going for, I don’t know how long, but probably for a while. It made perfect sense to me, and yet over and over again I was told that you *had* to be looking at a person in order to listen to them. If you turn your head, your ear faces the speaker, thus enabling you to better hear what they’re saying. The reason this didn’t make sense was very simple. When I was a kid, this little bit for me was the idea that you had to be looking at someone in order to listen to them. I bet most of us, though, also heard something that just clearly didn’t add up or make sense. We have all likely taken a few of these little factoids to heart, hence the reason why Wikipedia needs a “List of Common Misconceptions” page. When we were all kids, we inevitably heard quite a few bits of questionable information.
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