Book post #3

In today’s discussion one of the main things we talked about was the growth of Christopher.  How he was able to go from a confused child who was scared to do almost anything new, to a mature young man who was able to go all the way to London by himself.  In the beginning of the book, Christopher was not able to process any emotion, he couldn’t tell when he was happy or sad, and when he tried to tell what other people felt, he would get frustrated and scream or groan.  At the very end of the book, we get a sure sign that his condition will get better when he is able to process the feeling of joy that came from passing his math exam and tell readers exactly how he felt.  I wish my group had a little more time to go over more though.  I don’t believe we covered other Characters in the story as much as we could.  I think his mom had also grown a lot since she left, and I think his dad had worsened after Christopher left.  Also I wished we spent more time discussing his social problems.  It seemed that whenever he tried to communicate with strangers they would get mad at him.  I am still curious about if people are aware of his disorder, they might have thought Christopher was a bad kid who was being smart with them.  From what I can tell from reading the dialogue Christopher responded to people just like a bad kid would.  I think we can get a lot out of this book.  I have changed my mind about people with disabilities like autism.  I used to not be able to see how they could think, it seemed impossible t tell what was going through their heads, but now I see why.  Their minds are simply not able to process emotion, but the effects of this go way beyond not being able to tell if someone is happy or sad.  They can’t interact with others properly, they cannot think about certain things, and they do not have the same feelings as you and me.  The reason that someone like Christopher seems so weird to us is that we seem even weirder to him.