Did you/do you zone out in class?

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I used to all the time, I bet if I were to find myself back at school now I still could (I HATED school).

I hated it too. I think it all began in kindergarten when the teacher decided to make us all turkey and pilgrim hats and when it came my turn to be measured she started to laugh saying something along the lines of *you've got such a big head we've got to use 2 strips of construction paper!*

Yeah. WTG teach. Nice way to instruct - shaming a kid for having a big head!

I am always zoning out in lessons and as a result have to do a lot of catching up at home where I can ingest a load of caffeine in order to focus. It's a major problem.

Definitely. I mean, I always did my work and did well in school, but if we weren't doing an assignment and the teacher was just giving a boring lecture, I totally zoned out. Usually I could still kind of half-follow what was going on, but a few times I missed important directions etc.

My coping mechanism was to learn to write as fast as the teacher talked and write down every word that was said. It had the curious side effect of keeping at least one part of my brain focused. Laptops were a godsend, I could already type that fast!

I always zone out, unless I am listening to something I am interested in. Since I was bored by 99.9% of what I learned in K-12th grade, I spent most of my time zoned out. Heh. The last years of college were better though since I had more choice over the classes I was taking.

Oh yeah totally. I don't think I ever did any class work ever. I'd just sit there and day dream or zone out. I wish I knew then, what I know now and perhaps my school may have been more lenient or something.

Used to.

Don't anymore, now i'm doing stuff I love.

ya, i often zoned out in class, i still do at times. The reason why i space off in class alot is because of social stress (inability to talk with others effectivly) so spacing off puts me in another world, and reduces the stress to almost nothing.
You may just have to force your son to pay attention in class, i know i pretty much had to throughout grade school.

Oh yeah, all the time. I usually focussed long enough to get a grounding in whatever concepts they were discussing, then went off into my own world. Often, though, that world consisted of applying those concepts in my head and seeing how they worked. This was mostly math, chemistry stuff. It was really noticeable when I went, when I was 17, from a teacher who'd work with me to explain why certain mathematical problems worked the way they did to a teacher whose philosophy was "you don't need to know why, you just need to know this is how you solve the problem, so do it." My scores plummetted, from 94% in exams one year to 26% in another year, and I dropped out of the class. I suspect in an ideal world, I'd have had a great aptitude for physics, but the teachers all followed that route - learn by rote, don't understand just apply what I tell you, and I bombed in those classes.
But yeah, definitely, I'd zone out if I wasn't interested or particularly if I wasn't understanding and there was no interest in explaining to me why.

Wow, this is an amazing response to the question. It seems absolutely 100% practically, that EVERYONE zones out in class, and that there's not much that can be done about it.

Honest to gosh, I would homeschool my son, both because I think he would enjoy it AND it would take a lot of pressure off of us trying to reteach stuff that is taught during school. The trouble is, my son actually LIKES school. Yeah, he's zoning out -- especially in high pressure classes, or where the teacher is boring, or when things get too difficult -- but he has friends, he's socializing, and out of eight teachers, only ONE is bad, and even that one isn't horrible.

So I'm caught in this kind of, sort of, win-lose proposition, where he's doing somewhat well socially, he comes home completely happy from school, and then we stress over every piece of homework because I'm not fully equipped to teach him what he's missed at school. I don't think changing meds is going to improve this situation.

Kris

I did that too. As a result, my school labeled me a "problem kid". I was always getting in trouble for it. I did very few assignments and never did my homework. But I was bored because the school just spent a lot of time going over the same boring material--I wasn't learning. I found it a lot easier to pay attention in college and grad school classes because they teach you something new every day.

Is your son just AS or does he have something else?

I was constantly in trouble for "zoning out" and "daydreaming" during school. The only thing that saved me was that I was smart enough to still make decent grades while not paying attention in class.

Even now, as an adult, I zone out during work meetings.

Honestly, my gut is that if he has AS and he's able to socialise well at school, leave him in there. If he's a bright kid, with AS he ought to be able to figure out academics to a degree on his own, but social skills aren't easy to come by for someone with an Autism Spectrum Disorder, and aren't something you can teach at home nomatter how hard you try. I'd certainly try to keep an eye on him to check he isn't hiding social problems (my parents never knew, and to this day still don't, how badly I was bullied and how close I was to suicide multiple times while in High School, but that by no means guarantees his experience is similar), and speak to his teachers and make sure they are looking out for that also, but I wouldn't pull him out.
It may just be the case that the homework struggle is the price you have to pay. There were, at my school, teachers who helped kids who were falling behind 1-on-1 during lunchbreaks or after school, or you could also look into tutoring if you think that might help? Given his situation, the school might also be willing to have an assistant in class with him for when he zones out? Does he know why he's zoning out? Boredom? Lack of understanding? Uninterested? Thinks he can do it already?

Although, I was just thinking, I think almost everyone has a problem with zoning out. I feel that I zone out differently than NTs because I got into a fantasy world, but pretty much everyone I know zones out in a boring class. It's not that much of an autistic trait.