What is special educaton like?

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TTRSage
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22 Nov 2010, 8:35 pm

starygrrl wrote:

I was not put in "special ed" classes because I was determined to have normal to high intelligence despite having severe difficulties socially and fine motor coordination issues.

And having normal to high intelligence is a part of the DSM definition of AS, thus by the standards imposed on you, no Aspie would ever be put in special ed. Perhaps it was fortunate that I did not find out I had AS until late in life, because I might have otherwise been put in special ed and not learned as much as otherwise. Closer counseling might be a better option for those on the spectrum (or not) whose intelligence is not impaired.

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22 Nov 2010, 11:14 pm

Georgia wrote:

I don't know much about the upper grades, but from my experience as a parent of children in elementary and pre-school, public special education is very hard to navigate. If I weren't also working in a special ed school, I would be much more frustrated. When it comes down to it, there are not enough skilled staff, and the rate of turnover is too high. Adequate training for us un-degreed assistant teachers (as well as a livable wage) is rare. The parents that come across as disinterested (probably stressed by tons of other things) are chastised. Involved parents are treated like they are just looking for something to be "wrong" with their child. WTF?

The majority of teachers that I have worked with (or have met with about my own children) view ASD and learning disabilities as something to cure. Some actually think that if we teach the kids how to play party games at school, they will be prepared for when they get invited to real parties by the "normal" kids. That is the extent of their curriculum. Beyond condescending approach in my opinion. Why not challenge them more than that?

My (maybe unrealistic) hope is that as neurological research advances, so will the ways we educate children.

Thats pretty much the reality of it. Now with NCLB, teachers are teaching kids to pass the tests, not really to educate them. Example: a friend of mine is a english lit teacher for high school. One year they put her in the specail ed class for her to teach (she usually teaches gifted kids). Well she was ready to pull her hair out. The kids she was teaching most of them were reading at a 3rd grade level, but NCLB mandanted that she teach them what irony was. NOt only could they not grasp the idea of irony, they could not write well enough to explain what they thought it could be. She could not bring them up to grade level on their reading or writing skills because she had to teach them irony or else she was in trouble

.
NCLB has a very bad flaw, it mandates that kids pass certain educational checkpoints, but allows no wiggle room for those who fallen behind to catch up. I think it does the opposite of what it was meant to do for that reason...one that could be corrected.

but when I went to special ed...it was just a warehouse for kids till they dropped out...I wrote about that near the begining of the forum.

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Todesking
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23 Nov 2010, 12:45 am

j0sh wrote:

Todesking wrote:

I was in special education and there were no ret*d kids in any of the classes. :roll:

They put a lot of the kids with AS in the 70's and 80's into special education because they thought they had ADHD like me. My doctor said he found no signs of learning disabilities just Aspergers.

Heh, mine said the same thing. I was saying something about the SLD classes and she kind of barked out "that's one thing I don't agree with. You're not learning disabled!"

I responded to her "Well you weren't around then. Trust me, I had problems. But I've compensated over the years. I have no global learning disability, but that's because I've used the things I'm really good at to overcome the things I struggled with. The only reason I keep bringing this up is to illustrate neurological differences that were diagnosed in early childhood, so you don't forget it as evidence."

She agreed with that. I think part of her reaction was her trying to make sure I didn't underestimate myself. But at the same time, I was trying to not sound conceded about my IQ scores and current professional performance.

I have a really bad memory it even showed in testing so my doctor thinks that is what landed me there.

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23 Nov 2010, 12:59 am

Like short term memory problems?? Have you ever played the game "memory"? Some card game where you put a bunch of cards face down...and you are only allowed to lift two up at the same time, but the object of the game was to select pairs...once a pair was selected...it could be removed from the table. But it took memory skills to remember where you saw that card you are looking for to find its match.
Anyway...in pt I always had to play this game due to memory problems.

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23 Nov 2010, 2:50 am

jojobean wrote:

We usually did this a lot in 1st grade along with other games in order to teach memory, tactile and coordination skills...

Until 5th grade, I was at a special ed school for autistic and disabled children, However it was more well-oiled than many foreign special ed systems, and was better able to cater to the individual child than many special ed programs outside Denmark.

Education was about two years behind regular schools in some respects, but in some areas (math, science) it was at regular school level for those who needed it or could handle it. For instance, I was about two years ahead of my peers in math and was put in a regular class for math lessons, and was put in higher classes for Danish and later, English.

Considering the scenario if I had continued there, I wouldn't have been where I am today, instead i'd probably be etiher on welfare, in jail or at a protected workplace of sorts working at minimum wage. Many jobs here have quite high requirements on education, which would have barred me from about 98% of the Danish job market and pretty much half of the colleges, considering they didn't teach German at the time.

But I guess the quality of the special ed class depends on where you are, and how much money the school allocates to the class...

Jojobean: Irony, at least over here, is one of the most important things to try and teach autistic and AS kids, mainly because irony and jokes are used a lot in Denmark, even when conversing with people higher up on the social ladder (ie your boss)... it's pretty much used everyday everywhere with no distnction on who you are...
But as even regular tourists have problems with Danish humour (especially against bosses or other higher-uppers) it's quite easy to see, at least over here, how important it is to teach about irony, even though it may be hard.

It seems to me that NCLB hasn't got the hat on straight, much less considering kids in special ed humans with special needs. As said, irony is important, but when it's impossible to teach about it, it's impossible to learn.

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23 Nov 2010, 8:18 am

Well, it's odd. First of all, I was lucky to get the kind of education that I got. I was sent to a mainstream school with a special unit specifically for people on the autism spectrum. This unit not only provided my schooling, but a team of speech and language therapists would also work with the unit (we would have weekly sessions and be grouped depending on our age and level of development). The therapists and the teachers worked quite closely and we also had classroom assistants to help out. The classes were quite small (I suppose to ensure that the children got the most out of their teachers and were in a more controlled environment). Each child obvious had an IEP and had an annual review.

One of the the main goals of the unit was to try and get kids to improve their social skills well enough to integrate into the mainstream (and obviously to learn important life skills). Some kids were able to go into the mainstream with minimal support or no support. Some kids (like myself) went into secondary school still needing this support. I wasn't fully mainstreamed until I was I was about to start my higher exams, actually (although I did do most of my classes in the mainstream when I started my standard grade stuff). I knew some kids that were not high functioning enough to go into mainstream and were instead sent to a special school. They seem to be doing fine (from what I'm told). Obviously they have their own lives.

I was very lucky to go into a secondary school with a similar system (some of my friends were forced to mainstream or get home schooled).

The unit I went to in primary school catered to people from various ends of the spectrum (literally from the barely verbal to the barely noticeable). My secondary school was mostly concerned with catering to people on the high end of the spectrum. I suppose this is because my primary school was always about finding potential and trying to see what people were capable of. If the child didn't benefit from their support, they would (obviously) arrange for them to get the help that is suitable for them.

I feel a little uncomfortable talking about my education because it's not usual for support to be this- well, supportive. It saddens me to say it, but I'm part of a minority that was actually satisfied with their education. Okay- it wasn't perfect. I do have a few complaints, but they are extremely benign compared to what the people on this forum have to complain about. A lot of people who end up in special ed are unlucky because nobody seems to be prepared to deal with them. One of my best friends spent her secondary school years being patronised by her teachers and severely bullied by her peers to the point where her family had to intervene multiple times. When the school finally tried to do something for her, it was more patronising BS. Well, f**k 'em; she's in Aberdeen getting an honours degree right now.

Many educators just have absolutely no clue what to do for disabled students and in some cases, I'm pretty sure many of them don't really care about their students. It's infuriating. I don't think you should be allowed to teach if you can't teach your students (and especially if you WON'T teach your students).

TTRSage wrote:

starygrrl wrote:

I was not put in "special ed" classes because I was determined to have normal to high intelligence despite having severe difficulties socially and fine motor coordination issues.

First of all, aspies are not, by definition, highly intelligent. We are just not likely to be mentally ret*d. Also, just because you are intelligent, it doesn't that you do not require special support. I, for one, simply could not learn in a mainstream environment (not without without first having extensive speech and language therapy). I needed to be gradually mainstreamed (like I said, I didn't go to all my mainstream classes until I was in my late teens). I hope you don't think that my intelligence is impaired. Not that i think it's shameful to have impaired intelligence- it's just not what I am.

In fact, even non disabled geniuses require special accomodations and putting them into a gifted children's program is special ed. If it's different than what the mainstream are doing, it's usually considered special ed.

Last edited by MindBlind on 23 Nov 2010, 8:31 am, edited 1 time in total.

CockneyRebel
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23 Nov 2010, 8:26 am

Why do you want to know, Corp?

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23 Nov 2010, 9:39 am

MONKEY wrote:

The SEN department at my school was a bit like that. It was sh** and the ones who were badly behaved chav types ended up with the special needs kids, and that pissed me off because they don't belong there, they just didn't care about their education. People with actual problems got sh** off the badly behaved pupils, and they even bossed the staff around. The staff treated the aspie kids like walking textbooks and made generalisations, they spoke to the milder ones like me in the same high pitched patronising tone they spoke to the most severe people with. I hated the SEN department at my school, I didn't really have much to do with them, the only reason I saw them so much was because my friends and acquaintances were part of that crowd. I never had lessons with them, I was with all the normal kids (as far as I'm concerned I was one of the normal kids, not special needs at all).

It was a bit like that in my school. I'm so glad I never had to go to SEN classes. I had learning mentor I saw once a week as a way of getting out of PSHE. In that environment they were glad to just have an AS kid, because the learning mentors usually deal with some seriously traumatised children (refugees, abuse survivors, etc). There was one other spectrum boy who saw the learning mentor, and he stalked me :lol:

. Though I have friends with dyslexia who spent a bit of time in SEN. It sucks if you really have a learning difficulty, or really have ADHD. I also had schoolfriends who had learning disabilities (brain damage, etc), and SEN did help them with life skills, but the bullying they had to endure was pretty bad (they either didn't notice it, or they ignored it).

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23 Nov 2010, 12:00 pm

MindBlind wrote:

TTRSage wrote:

starygrrl wrote:

I was not put in "special ed" classes because I was determined to have normal to high intelligence despite having severe difficulties socially and fine motor coordination issues.

Thank you for sharing your experience. It was kind of similar to mine. I was behind in English, but ahead of average in Math and Science. I also started out with more special ed assistance primary school,and gradually was mainstreamed in my teens.

I disagreed with the posters you quoted too. It's VERY common for people on the spectrum to be really good at one type of processing, but really bad at another. I don't see why some people can't understand that some types of bad processing can result in some learning challenges.

It's frustrating to be a minority among a minority group. I'm not a visual thinker... I know not all Aspies are, but it sure seems like the majority. I can't do it AT ALL. That's part of the processing imbalance that I have; as part my how Autism was expressed in my neurology. I get the impression that some of the visual thinking Aspies question my diagnosis or my intelligence when I talk about challenges I have/had with things that come very natural to them. It's frustrating.

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23 Nov 2010, 12:04 pm

Mindblind, I honestly wish I was in a situation like you, but the choice was back when I was in school that you are either mainstreamed and get outside counseling, or you were placed into poorly grouped "special ed" classrooms. I didn't have the same functionality socially and there were major consequences for that. But at least from an academic perspective I was able to keep up. If anything it had more to do with my own adaptation more than anything that things started to work out somewhat in high school.

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23 Nov 2010, 2:18 pm

League_Girl wrote:

Special education is not for students with mental retardation only, it's for kids who have other problems and need help. Many also mainstream it.

Anyway I was put in a classroom with special needs kids full time when I was six and seven. Kids in there had all sorts of problems anywhere from autism to mental retardation, learning difficulties or behavior problems. I was placed in there because of my speech delay. But instead in that classroom, I was given the same work over and over and never learned anything new. I didn't learn things normal six year olds would learn or normal seven year olds. I was given the same math problems over and over and doing my name and address over and over and I already knew my address because I learned it already. They never gave me anything new. So school was nothing for me, boring and full of play time and field trips and I thought that's what school was. This was back in the days when they stuck kids with disabilities in one classroom and they had no inclusion. They did assign homerooms for some of us and we go to a regular ed classroom for PE, music, or library and that was it. I can remember being eight (the year I was taken out of that class), these two six year olds would go to regular kindergarten for toy time. When I was six, my whole class would go to music with a regular ed class and we also went to another regular ed class to go to lunch with.

Then when I was put in a new school in regular ed, I mainstreamed special ed and I was given some reading and math and it was harder. I had to do first grade school work to catch up. I also did speed reading and speed math.

In middle school and high school it was giving me help with my normal school work. Lot of kids went in there to do their assignments or got help with their school work. But we didn't call it special ed, we called it the resource room. Special ed had a very bad stigma to it so the school district called it something else. It was a way to not make kids feel bad and have them feel like they were ret*d or dumb just because they needed extra help so they end up refusing it.

I also remember back when I was nine, we worked on reading comprehension, I would read a story that be a page long and then answer the questions about the story. I remember going back reading something over and over to answer the question because I wanted to get the correct answer and get mad at myself if I get it wrong. If I got all the answers right five days in a row, I moved up a level and the more answers I got correct, the more stickers I earned. We all got stickers to put on our picture for working and participating and after we get certain amount of sticker, we got to take the card home with us.

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23 Nov 2010, 2:34 pm

Todesking wrote:

CockneyRebel wrote:

I'm not going to answer that. That's personal. Also I have AS, not Mental Retardation. I respect people who have the MR label. They're people like everybody else.

I was in special education and there were no ret*d kids in any of the classes. :roll:

They put a lot of the kids with AS in the 70's and 80's into special education because they thought they had ADHD like me. My doctor said he found no signs of learning disabilities just Aspergers.

One of my aspie friends was also placed in special ed in the 80's and he had ADHD and he also had hearing loss so that's why he was put in there, they didn't know about AS then so he was diagnosed with ADHD also. But back then parents didn't have to have their kids in special ed if they didn't want to because his mother got him out of there when he was about ten and it caused him to repeat a grade. Well after he was taken out, other parents did the same to their kids and the teacher held a grudge against my friend for years and then in high school, he was caught trying to tamper with his school records to keep him from graduating.

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23 Nov 2010, 5:07 pm

jojobean wrote:

you dont learn anything...they teach the same stuff year after year, and they usually put the behavior ed with special ed thus you get bullied by the ones who have behavior problems.
The teachers are crappy and unqualified. They usually dont hire teachers with special ed experience, just first year teachers who are cheerleader coaches (at least that is my experience) Basicly they warehouse kids in there until they are old enough to drop out. I was the only one out of my entire school that was in special ed that got a high school degree, the rest of them either got a special ed diploma (which is what you get when you are not educated well enough to pass the graduation test and is not accepted by secondary education) or they dropped out. My math levels are about 5th grade when I graduated. Special ed is a scam on taxpayers.

I was going to be put into special education starting in third grade. I have the psych evaluation the school gave me somewhere that labeled me as being emotionally disturbed and recommending that I be put into a self contained education program. This was back when all the children in the whole county who were labeled as such went to one school and before my parents signed anything they demanded they see the school.

Many years later when I had my first talk with my mom about aspergers she told me that when they went to the school they never saw such a circus before. As soon as they set foot in the door they could hear nothing but kids screaming and crying and some of them were running around in the hallway unsupervised. They walked out before they even got ten feet into the building and told the school district it wasn't going to happen.

Thankfully special ed was something I never had to endure.

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23 Nov 2010, 6:24 pm

Scoots5012 wrote:

jojobean wrote:

You are lucky your parrents were thoughtful enough to check it out before signing, it is a circus ...at best

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23 Nov 2010, 8:38 pm

School tried to do that to me and ended up being threatened with a lawsuit. That was in elementary, they did have me in there a few times to try to work on my handwriting skills but that didn't get anywhere. Finally, I ended up with a word processor for my use at about 4th or 5th grade that I had at home.

I was given access to a computer/word processor in classes in middle school. I was pretty much always in normal class rooms, normal home room, the only difference was study hall and my "locker" (problems with combo locks) were located in the Resource Room. I also had normal classes in high school, only using the Resource Room for study hall.

I will say that people in Special Ed were way behind me as far as what was being taught. I'm glad I had regular classes and my parents kept them from putting me in special ed, I would have been bored to tears.

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24 Nov 2010, 4:45 am

Never was in special ed. It's disappointing to hear that you don't learn anything.

And from these posts it sounds like they teach everyone in special ed the same. Shouldn't each kid in special ed get a different education from the other kids there since they all have different challenges, rather than making the work exactly the same for all of them?

Wouldn't be that difficult now that we have computers. Just type in a bunch of numbers representing the students abilities in different areas, learning difficulties, codes for how information should be presented, and then have the computer configure the appropriate material. A good programmer could figure out the right setup for this.

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