Public Education is HELL for Aspie children!

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I was behind in school than the other kids. I struggled in math in second grade because I didn't understand carrying and borrowing because I was behind in math because I was stuck in special ed for two years so I didn't learn the same things normal kids learned. I was given the same school work over and over and I already knew how to do them. I already knew how to add and subtract and they never taught me anything beyond it.
It was until I was told anything that is ten or higher, you always carry the one. Then I finally was able to learn to cross out the number and put up the lower number above the number you crossed off and put a one next to the number you are subtracting from.
But I didn't have problems learning multiplication and division but I struggled with fractions when I was in fifth grade. Took me till the end of sixth grade to get it. My school did not start fractions till fifth grade. They wait till you're in that grade to teach you them.
I really started to struggle in every subject starting in fifth grade because it's when my learning disability started to kick in. The work got abstract, the answers out of textbooks aren't direct anymore like they are in the earlier grades, math gets complicated because of the algebra. I never learned how in elementary school and then we moved to Montana and the middle school is already doing it so I was behind once again in math and I was never given any other lower grade math so I could catch up in education like my last school did by giving me first grade math and I was finally able to understand carrying and borrowing. Plus the teachers make things so complicated as you get older. When you're little, you just copy things right from the book but starting in middle school, you have to use your own words and I find that so difficult because I repeat what I read or hear so how do I make them my own words?


I was bullied and teased in school too and taken advantage of. Even my own friends were mean to me. By the time I was in sixth grade, the bullying was very bad and I had no friends. None of them wanted me around.
Kids were allowed to be mean to others kids just as long as you kept your hands to yourself. And the school had the respect rule? What a joke. How is teasing and bullying someone being respectful?

School in general is a really difficult thing for me. I don't mind going and listening to a lecture and just learning for the sake of learning. I can listen to professors talk for hours and have no problem. I'll retain most of what they've said, and everyone wonders how I know everything. I tell them it's because I was paying attention instead of chattering all the time like they do.

If school were just about learning, I would have no rival.

I'm even really good on tests. They usually don't make me that nervous (unless the subject has been really difficult for me), and I tend to get really good grades as long as the tests are not ludicrously long or difficult. It takes me longer than most of the other students. I presume it's because I carefully read and consider every question before answering. If I don't remember an answer, as is often expected, I have a way of going through the information in my head and reasoning it out. I can meet the challenge and pass all the tests, except when I can't finish them in the given class time (I've always been given special accommodations for extra testing time, but teachers often don't respect them, which is probably illegal - and when they do, I don't need it).

Anyway, if school were about testing your knowledge and measuring your real capabilities, I would do just fine.

But school is not about these things. School is about meeting quotas on standardized tests and pleasing politicians by playing to statistics. If you please them, you get extra funding for that nice new gymnasium that the PE classes really need so badly (because they can't just go outside). Who cares if a few people fall through?

The teaching methods, of course, are catered to the average student who doesn't really get what you're trying to teach, understand why it's important, or care enough to pay attention when you try to explain it. Constant homework forces them to think of it over and over, forcing it into their memory, at least long enough to get them through the test and ensure that those federal dollars come in as planned.

And the average student can apparently handle that. But I can't. Busywork is irritating. If I have to answer that annoying question one more time, I'm going to flip out and start throwing my massive stack of homework at whoever is nearby. And it's truly massive because every teacher thinks you can dedicate every waking second to their class. They pretend they understand your dilemma. They keep saying all week that you won't have homework on Friday because they know all the other teachers will load you up for the weekend. But when Friday comes, there it is: the assignment you were promised you would not have to do this weekend. The only thing that's more annoying than busywork is empty promises.

And these assignments, they're not exactly pleasant. Most of the time you get a list of boring, repetitive stuff that you should know how to do once you've tried a couple. But you won't have a couple. You'll have 50. And if it's not that, then it's some ultimately pointless writing assignment, in which you're expected to pretend you care about something that doesn't really matter.

Personally, I've always had a lot of difficulty with writing. It's not that I don't like writing. I do. And it's not that I'm not a good writer. I am. But for me, the process of a writing assignment is fundamentally backward. Essays are, by their nature, a medium for communication. When an author writes an essay, it's because he has a something to say, but an assignment asks you to come up with something to say because you have to write an essay. My creativity comes from an idea. The idea cannot come from the need for creativity. The very nature of the thing has always made me uneasy and usually gets in the way of productivity.

In the end, I'm not sure if the fault lies with the school system for being such a poor match for me or if it lies with me because I'm simply a terrible student.

Back in the 1970's, when my local family group had settled down and started having children, we realized that we could not, being conscious beings, send our kids to public schools. Some did, but some got together and sent their kids to our own home school for primary education, where we hired the teacher and had control over what was being taught. I'm not sure, but I suspect the teacher may have been an 'aspie".

We were fortunate to have become a very close, and unusually patient and tolerant group, considering that our group is neurologically diverse, and so far, I'm the only one who has "come out" as an 'aspie'; I don't know if there are any other aspies in the local group so far, or if there's others in other parts of the world where we live, as yet.

The "Alpha-NT's" don't send their kids to public schools; they go to the best schools for the best and brightest. It's the hoi-poloi whom the public schools are designed for.

Ultimately it does fall to all those parents, whether HF-NT's or HF-Aspies, who care enough and are conscious enough to want to do something about it. The obstacles are huge, which means that only those who can think outside the box can solve the problem; we can't wait for any HF-NT's to provide the leadership needed to solve this problem, we have to come up with the solution. and are probably the only ones who can.

I like to remember the official slogan of the U.S. Army Corp. of Engineers:

The Difficult we do Immediately, the Impossible takes a little time

This requires planning; planning for the time. Education is a deadly serious issue, and our own future hangs in the balance.

The responses here show a common experience, and Glen Seaborg would be proud of our understanding.

WurdBendur, your experience was so much like mine, and you discovered that "special ed" was just somewhere to file you away. You found out, as all of us did, that the schools were not Knowledge based instutuions of learning, but simply diploma mills where you were expected to memorize facts, and try to learn maths by rote, like the stupid kids around you, many of whom had the same difficulty of dealing with a system that didn't make any effort to teach them how to reason, or what the fundamental ideas were in subjects like maths so that people could understand the principal, instead of memorizing rules.. We already have that reasoning function fully operational at birth, as you have demonstrated; you used it to learn what they couldn't teach.

Here's a quote, from a Web Page you may find interesting:

"In a recent interview, a corporate recruiter said "We need people who can deal with ambiguity ... Schools must produce students with higher-order thinking skills, and this must be done for all students, not only for the elites."

There's nothing wrong with your scholastic abilities, it's just that very intelligent, rational people, especially aspies, can't function properly in an "educational" environment that is irrational in and of itself without getting rather depressed by the madness of it all.

Don't put yourself down by comparing yourself to the world of Ignorance; you belong to the world of Knowledge.

Ivan Illich proposed a different model of "public" education. His most famous book, "Deschooling Society", is available in its entirety on the net, free.
He suggested that education should be organised in three different ways, to be used according to taste and need, and none of them obligatory at any age.

One organisation/system to teach things like foreign languages, multiplication tables, and other skills which are often best learned by rote or intense repetitive sessions over short time periods.

Another to be a variety of presentations, lectures, hands-on guided workshops, and "one-to-one "tutorials", ( provided by those who wish to share their passion in life) etc in a huge variety of subjects where individual reading, study or research is not so effective, available to ANYONE who is interested , "adults"and "children" at any stage of life, in any order, in any mixture.

The third to be training in work environments, also available to "children" aswell as "adults".

The advantages of this approach would be the abolition of the childrens-ghetto that school currently constitutes, the massive mental-health benefits this would bring, and much much more efficient learning!!

Naturally there would also be excellent libraries, mediatechs, web-centres etc open to all.

Last edited by ouinon on 23 Dec 2007, 2:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The American public education system is a frigging joke. facts and knowledge are treated like unquestionable divine revelation, and thus education is far more about memorizing current facts and knowledge then using critical thinking and the scientific method, contrarian attitudes are not tolerated (I got detention once for trying to debunk anti-marijuana BS taught in schools and got in trouble another time when I attacked the abstinence-only BS being taught in health class). Kids are taught how to function in the world without really understanding the world, and unless you understand the world it's hard to conceive of alternatives to the way things are, which is why the corporate elites have no desire to see the public education system fixed, indeed, they like things like No Child Left Behind that make education even more based on rote memorization instead of understanding.

Yep, it's a definite joke. Do you know how many total idiots exist in this hellhole?

I'm not sure if I can even TRY to count that high. See, to me, bullying is a major issue. What people don't understand is that we're primary targets except for ourselves. I only wish I went to private school...

I went to private school K-8th, and I got bullied plenty. Just going to a private school doesn't mean the other private school students aren't going to bully you.

As everyone has realized that had the private school experience, you still went to schools designed for NT's, and these are the Apha-NT's, who are much more aggressive than either we or the average NT's are. An NT private school can easily turn out to be much worse than a PS for an 'aspie'.

One has to feel sorry for the low-function NT's who constitute their majority sub-set; they aren't the ones doing the bullying, and they go through school never recognizing that anything is very wrong with the system that's destroying their minds as welll as ours.

And, any so called "special education" for "disabled children", because that's still how some, if not most, NT's look at us, was constructed by woolly-thinking NT's.

The morose political world doesn't want to fix the problem; their brains are so deteriorated from gamma radiation from the use of nuclear devices and atomic fallout, that they cannot comprehend that they are slitting their own throats and selling their own children's future down the river of no return.

I pretty much agree. Most teachers with creativity and integrity don't last in "the system." That's why I refuse to work at a school. I'm a music teacher, and I have my own business.

I can perfectly understand that AS kids have trouble with public school because of how highly-placed social interaction and popularity are, but this isn't my personal experience. I've been going to public school all of my school-age life and I've had a relatively easy time with the public school crowd, getting along with all of the kids who might be considered quite exclusive towards most Aspies. I don't know any kids who are definitely Aspies (though I have suspicions about a couple) and so I can't speak from observation, but just from personal experience I never found public school to be an unbearable place.

I absolutely refused to go back from the age of 13...it was just hell...and I went to a Brit "direct grant" public schoool that had a very high proportion of Aspies...

BUT...what I really posted to say was that I remember something called "school phobia" being "discovered" as a new phenomenon in about '73...

Was that actually AS?

Maybe a little of it was, but there are dozens of reasons why a student wouldn't want to go to school, and some probably not even having to do with their peers' treatment of them. It may depend on the age group and particular school of the kids in question.

Oh no, I mean it was a big, national "3 pages in the tabloids" issue in the UK.

M

As everyone has realized that had the private school experience, you still went to schools designed for NT's, and these are the Apha-NT's, who are much more aggressive than either we or the average NT's are. An NT private school can easily turn out to be much worse than a PS for an 'aspie'.

One has to feel sorry for the low-function NT's who constitute their majority sub-set; they aren't the ones doing the bullying, and they go through school never recognizing that anything is very wrong with the system that's destroying their minds as welll as ours.

And, any so called "special education" for "disabled children", because that's still how some, if not most, NT's look at us, was constructed by woolly-thinking NT's.

The morose political world doesn't want to fix the problem; their brains are so deteriorated from gamma radiation from the use of nuclear devices and atomic fallout, that they cannot comprehend that they are slitting their own throats and selling their own children's future down the river of no return.

I missed all that, I graduated from High School in '76, when this whole thing was starting. This all goes back to '57, when Sputnik made the US think we weren't teaching the 'right' way, and the Russians were all going to be smarter than us. I cut me teeth on New Math (still haven't healed.. which emphasized 'different ways to solve problems was more important than just finding one way that works (is that too much to ask?...

For all the harshness, you were expected to graduate. I only knew a couple of people who dropped out of High school. Our parents would 'kill us' if we didn't graduate.

When my daughter was in Middle School, I went for a day with her (this would be about '02 or so). It was a revalation; where we'd spend three weeks learning fractions from A to Z, they would do 3 pages of fractions, then 3 pages of percentages, then 3 pages of Geometry; her math book looked more like a cookbook.

And the 'no difficult child left in school' act let her know she could bail at 16, and we couldn't stop her. Sigh...and she's NT at that.