Aspies/NTs your debate team or decathalon or chess club etc?

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Uh, I'm wondering what the people were like on your debate team or whatnot in high school or college. Were they mainly 'normal' intellectuals, or hardcore nerds, or what? Please go and post your experiences.

In my HS, lots of my HS debate team also did sports teams and some also did student government. My HS was small (~600 people) so people tended to generalize i guess. Also, some of them had a similar mentality to the sports teams and their hierarchies ('new people, sit there' or something - it didnt happen a lot thankfully). No formal 'captain' of the team. Oh, and one person who was in baseball and was mean to people in general and very knowledgeable with politics and internet wars (he participated in the YTMND/SA etc vs Ebaums DDoS stuff in 2005 and he said he'd become a lawyer JUST to put hin in jail or make him poor for Baum's stealing stuff from other sites.

Basically - are academic extracurriculars and whatnot full of aspies? or smart, social, normal neurotypicals?

Also - uh same thing for those summer health or whatnot academic camps/programs. From my esperience it was full of normal people (summer 2004 HPPSHI thing) >_<. Debate summer camps was also full of normal people.

Uh please elaborate.

bumpu.

I didn't get involved with anything like that in high school or college, but when I was in grade 8 the librarian convinced me to join "The Battle of the Books". Basically, each school had a team and they would compete two teams at a time. The ref would describe the book in a sentence and the team would have to answer with the title of the book and the author. I was really good at this, I had a really good recall of books and authors I hadn't even read. Whichever team answered correctly first got a point. We made it to the finals against another school but we lost by one point because my team didn't recognize The Hunchback of Notre Dame or know who wrote it. I knew that it was that book and that it was written by Victor Hugo, but there were three grade 8 students on the team so one of us had to sit out that round and I was the one sitting out. It was horrible, knowing the answer but I wasn't allowed to participate in that round.

Socially, I think the kids were split. There were the loner nerds like myself, but the other two grade 8 kids on the team were very popular and social. It helped me because one of those popular girls always said hi to me even though her friends asked her why she talked to me.

Thank you for the information.

I was homeschooled for high school so I never had the opertunity to do those things. I'd probably try debate club but kicked out my first day becuase I would get into fist fights (or worst) with people. My father has always said I could argue with a dead man and both him and my mother have been saying, since I first learned to speak, that I should be a lawer.

I want to join the debate team. I don't think my school even has one though.

Honest to gosh, sales have been some of my most positive experiences. The experienced sales people discuss a sale or a a prospective sale like two baseball players discussing a play (not always, but there was a lot of the analysis I love)

Also politics where there's a sales aspect, like staffing a table or asking people to sign a petition. And it goes without saying that I'm very respectful when doing this.

I've tried debating, but I process what other people say too slowly, can't take good notes at such a fast pace, and don't articulate myself very well, so it was a huge mess. I've decided to focus on things I'm better at instead, like writing.

The kids at my school's debate club are obviously the geeky, intellectual kids. Some of them like to brag about how smart they are. There's one kid there who's in one of my classes. In that class, he sometimes doesn't take notes, claiming that he remembers everything by ear. There's another girl with AS in the debate club, but she's very articulate. I don't know how she does it. I know that I absolutely can't do it without putting myself into an embarassing situation.

I've also tried the chess club when I was in grade 10. It was small, and there was one kid there who was really talkative and hyperactive. I remember making fun of each other being a nerd because we were part of the chess club. Unfortunately, the club was short lived. After 3 meetings, I think, the club disbanded because there were too few people attending.