What is/was high school like for you, AS people?

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Back then, I was mostly just the "quiet guy" who didn't have many friends. I was made fun of quite a bit, but oddly enough, never to my face. I just heard people saying things behind my back. I didn't shower much (every 3 days) because I figured it wouldn't make people like me anymore anyway. Academic wise, I was a D student. I got As on almost every test in every class without studying, but I was incredibly lazy and never actually did any work/projects besides tests. It wasn't really until after I graduated (I'm 20 now.) that I pulled myself together, showered every day, and tried to be more outgoing and less of a hermit.

Basically same as you with some variations on the theme. Very much a silent, withdrawn, academically unremarkable, socially clueless, athletically inept "loser".

It was grand

Awful. I had poor hygiene standards (only washed once a week) so people used to spray deodorant at me, refuse to sit next to me etc. Other girls used to grab me in a sexual way and make comments, as a way of making fun of the fact that I was so asexual.
People took advantage of my naivety, including the teachers, who put me in the impossible position of "choosing" between them and the respect of my classmates. If the class was acting up, for example, the teacher would pick on me to go and tell the head of year, thereby shifting all the pressure onto me. If I didn't go, I would be in trouble with the teacher. If I did go, my entire class would hate me. I couldn't win.

I was obsessed with The X-Files, Forever Knight, and horror/sci-fi books. For a while I thought it was cool to speak like Mulder and use lots of 50-cent scientific terms. Then I went through a phase where I thought it was cool to speak in ebonics and I called that "creative speech." I had horrible fashion sense. I cut my bangs all the way to the back of my head and wore clothes that just looked bad on me. I once programmed all of the screensavers in the computer lab to read "Watch The Golden Girls with an elderly lover" (this was at an all-girls Catholic school and I almost got busted for that).

I spent my free time writing parodies of TV shows, such as "Nut House" (parody of Full House), and showed these to my classmates. I also enjoyed writing strange stories in my English classes just to see what the teachers would say. One of the stupidest things I did was giving a book report, in which an incest scene took place, and describing it in detail in front of the class. I actually thought there was nothing wrong in doing that.

Basically people thought I was really strange, but amusing. They recommended I become a comedian.

Primary school was hell on earth, high school was not as bad as the bullying was more infrequent.

Highlights of my schooling years:

- having a person who I thought was my best and only friend turn around out of the blue and tell me they hate me. This happened twice (in primary and high school).

- Having tanbark stuffed down my neck and back, being slapped across the face, having stuff thrown at me, and people pulling my hair then hiding behind others so I wouldn't know who did it.

- Being trapped in a tunnel someone had peed in by children blocking both ends

- being bullied by not only everybody in my grade, but also everybody in the grade below.

-nobody ever deigning to sit with me on the bus, even if I tried asking people weeks in advance

- sticking my hand down a toilet bowl, climbing the school fence into a construction site, and running across a busy street as dares to try and make people like me.

-being cornered in the playground and then teased by gangs of children on many an occasion (two of the more memorable ones starring me being pushed against the fence and forced to say swear words, and being conned into playing my recorder to subsequent gales of laughter).

-crying and eating lunch in the toilet

-being called by my surname in grade 5 and 6 when all the other kids referred to each other by their first name (I hated my surname for years after this, and also the colour that was in it)

-searching for friendship groups who'd managed to shake me off at lunchtime and go someplace I couldn't find them

-hiding from bullies and trying to be non-conspicuous

-most of the verbal abuse and ostracizing is hard to explain so clearly and concisely, but I'm sure everyone knows what that's like.

high school for me was a varied experience.
in australia, "high school" is from year 7 (age 11-12) to year 12 (age 16-17)

i was 11 when i entered high school. i was accepted into a highly acclaimed private school that was quite religious. after 9 months i was expelled, but the school was not necessarily hostile toward me, and they suggested that i go to an adolescent unit, and i did.

i then became embroiled in psychiatric investigations, and i enjoyed that, but i was only allowed to stay for a maximum of 1 continuous year (it was 6 months for other kids).

then they found new main stream schools for me to go to, and i lasted an average of 6 months in them, and i always wound up back in the adolescent unit.

eventually, i left the adolescent unit at about 16.5, and i made a mess of the rest, but i still have made a comfortable life for me to live.

Elementary school was awful-bullied and teased relentlessly-the upper grades weren't much better-had very few friends-people used me to copy off of as I was a pretty good student and was used for the things I could do-not into sports and no memories about school like my peers had-I missed that-and in a way the bullying has continued into my work life-it never ends.

Two words.

It sucked.

Biggest waste of time I've ever been through. Yeah, I learned a lot, but didn't learn squat about anything I really needed to learn, like how to be social. Funny how people dis homeschooling because it supposedly "deprives" kids of the social aspect of public schools. Well, when it came to kids with Autism, in the Seventies at least, high school was anything BUT a good social experience. All I ever wanted to do was get the hell OUT.

By my senior year, I found a way.

Drugs.

That's probably the one thing I learned more about in school than anything else.

Many thanks indeed to the public school system.

For the first two years of high school I pretty much was tormented everyday. All learned how to do in high school was not to trust anyone and how to throw a proper punch and kick.

OP already described my situation, however, I can add a few things.

I liked two teachers, I liked to talk to one about world (physics included).

There were people, who made a website about me and bullied me on it, no details here, don't want to be recognized. They were my source of long lasting desire of revenge and mild paranoia. I wasn't good enough to find out who did it, but I finally know why.

Believe me, the public school system hasn't improved much since the 70s. I went in the late 00s and it still sucked. As for me using drugs to cope, well, my name on here is the chemical name of heroin. XD

My experiences are likely different than everyone else's here, but here are some positive high school experiences:

After 7th grade I swapped school systems out of the standard public school. I went to an Essential school (a specific type of Charter school), and after 3 weeks of 8th grade was moved up to the 9th grade. The summer before what ended up starting in 8th grade, was also when we determined that I was likely an aspie, as I was seeing a pysch person who helped me determine whether I should start in 8th or 9th grade (we determined 9th, one of the leaders of the school refused, and then saw that we were right) as she was focusing on social anxiety. She diagnosed me, ended up saying that she was pretty sure I had Asperger's, but she didn't feel qualified to diagnose me and didn't think it was worth a diagnosis at that point, and then I started high school...

Once I was in the 9th grade, it was great. It was the first time I really had multiple good friends. The teachers put a lot of effort into each and every student. When they moved me up to the 9th grade, they actually explicitly placed me in classes such that a particular person would be the only logical one to show me around because they thought she'd be a good friend to me, but she didn't care about the popularity aspect, as most people who showed newcomers around did. She took me under her wing (figuratively, she didn't actually have wings, but she felt like she did when it came to protecting certain people), and easily became my best friend.

9th and 10th grade had some issues. We changed groups for classes every 6 weeks and there was one time they tried to take me away from my friends and put me in a different class, one which had mostly the people who didn't care at all about learning, and I had a breakdown after school in the building. After that they put an official accommodation of they couldn't put me in a class without one of the people I knew best (labeled because of social anxiety, which I had been diagnosed with recently at that point). The school was really a school of extremes - the top students and the bottom students, and very few average students. This caused interesting challenges, but wasn't a huge problem. It actually works better to have the top and bottom students, because it is far easier for the teachers to focus on each individual student. My teachers did a lot, like I said, and took every student into consideration. The fact that there were only 60 of us in the 9th (and then 10th) grade helped too.

For 11th and 12th grade I swapped to a different high school - a two year junior/senior year exam school for students advanced in math and science. They choose the 50 students they wanted a year out of the applicants.

This school is best described, for me more so than others but for most students, as an amazing experience because of how hugely challenging it is while you're there. Junior year, they push you so hard that you learn how to make do with less than perfect because its a requirement.

My aspie traits came out full force here. I had a teacher who ended up convinced that I was lying constantly rather than doing my work, because I didn't know how to ask for help and because I was nervous when presenting things I wasn't fully sure about. In another class I didn't know until the end of the year that the teacher was unaware of how much I actually understood of the language because I didn't participate much (as I couldn't talk about baseball in English or in Spanish). I ended up needing to get help with those traits and we found someone who worked with autistic spectrum kids without a diagnosis, and she did enough to keep me in the school.

Both academically, and socially, the fact that I had been pushed so hard actually was a positive thing though. They helped me a huge amount. It might have meant I wasn't sleeping then, but it was the foundation of what I needed. Before that point I hadn't been challenged academically really. While others, including my parents think it was a negative experience, I completely disagree. It was an incredibly hard experience, which caused me to grow a lot and which I'd knowingly go through again.

Senior year was just college classes and was a huge relief. I also found (via being physically dragged to) the social group I associated with throughout college, which is the most aspie friendly group I've ever found. There were so many of us because we happened to show up in the same group if we had any interest in science fiction, fantasy, gaming or such.


As a whole, I was lucky. High school was positive experiences for me, unlike school before that point. Getting out of the standard public school system was the best thing that could have happened to me both academically and socially. I'm still jealous of people who were homeschooled, mostly because of my pre-highschool schooling, and still plan on homeschooling any children, but we did manage to find high schools that worked for me, at least for the points in life were I was at the time.

Normal, I mainstreamed special ed and I went to normal classes, I was in choir and did cooking class and art class. I also had meltdowns and I spent lot of time on the computer too looking up autism and mental health conditions. Then I would spend my time in the library during lunch and look at old magazines and I also listened to music in front of my locker or played video games. I also did softball and track and those were the only sports I ever did in high school. I have done after school activities too and that was pottery.

In my senior year my brothers friends would talk to me and I remember these freshman girls in my choir class would talk dirty to me and then one day one of them wanted me to lick her boobs and when I said no and told them she would have to ask someone else to do it.

Plus some kids would try and get me to pull the fire alarm for them or ask me to beat someone up for them and I always refused.


Plus some kids were mean to me like they didn't like me socializing with them when I join in or get mad at me for asking too many questions. They get mad at me for no reason when I talk to them so no wonder aspies have a hard time socializing.

Plus the school work was very hard so I had help with it.


But overall I still say it was good because I wasn't tortured and tormented and I got the help I needed and it was a small town.

It was hell, just another thing that contributed to my current mental state.

some days sucked, some days were okay.

I have a cousin that is home schooled and a lot of my relatives feel that way about it. I think I would have been much better off being home schooled because the torment I went though in school probably made me worse and I never "learned to get along with the other kids" like people thought I would in school.

I didn't really go to high school. In ninth grade I was attending school at a day treatment program in a mental hospital and in tenth grade I was living in a reform school. Then I quit.