Teachers make me move to the front of the class.

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as an australian born serbian, german, irish, celtic 16 yr old male with add asbhergers and asthma i dont take illogical instructions well at all....
every time a teacher tries to move me to the front for no obviouse reason i fight it, by firstly askiny "Why?" if they dont answer or their answer doesnt stisfy me i will do one of two things, 1. wait until they ask me to move again then simply repeat"Why?" 2. state that i will move if they tell me why but until such a time i will remain seated (yes i say it like that but louder and angrier). if they still refuse to divulge this information to me i say "NO" this often ends with an extreemly ammusing battle of the wits, luckily my ADD arms me with wave after wave of witty responces and my asbhergers makes sure all of them are both logical and plausible. as my school is largly designed to catter for people like me (we have a special unit devoted to 'learning disabilities')
i get away with it. now most teachers dare not attempt such follish acts and i can sit in the back left corner next to a window with no one behind me and the door in my periferals without a teacher moving me.

I suppose so...

I remember once in fifth grade one day I just took everything out of my desk and moved it to a desk that was off to the side and away from everyone else because I didn't want to be around them. The teacher just let me do it and didn't say anything. Later when we had a substitute something must have happened (I don't remember what) and they told me to "think about why I was sitting over there". They just assumed it was some kind of punishment when it was my choice.

This isn't a being made to sit in front thing but when I was in reform school and they noticed I was slow in changing my shoes and putting my scarf, hat, and gloves on they made me get in the front of the line all the time. New people weren't allowed to wear shoes inside and we did school in a separate building from where we lived so I had to do this 4 times a day. That was pretty awful. I was slow at tying my shoes and don't think I really started tying them until I was 14 and was 15 in reform school so I was slow at it.

I'm a teacher myself and I am on the spectrum. I'm actually getting fired next week but that is another story. I have aperger's syndrome and I can recall when I was in high school there were some teachers who learned the only way to control the classroom was to be tyrannical dicks. Becoming a teacher myself did give me a new perspective on it; classroom management is not easy.

But I'm going to print this out and show other teachers this. Yelling at kids, jumping on their asses like that, failing to listen to how they feel, its just not a good idea, especially if they are on the spectrum. I had to have a talk or two with gen ed teachers when I was an inclusion teacher doing support facilitation. I caught a history teacher who drove one of my kids to tears when he couldn't keep up with notes and didn't understand that he wasn't supposed to copy everything in the power point, only the important things. To her, he was being lazy or passive aggressive. To the student, the teacher was making him do something impossible and he was getting overwhelmed.

I agree with this. And yes, it does get better in college. The problem for gen ed teachers, is that that authoritarian style, I think is necessary for some students. There are many non-autistic students who are, there is no better way to say this, jerks. They are manipulative and need a high level of structure or they will walk over any authority figure they run across. They'll probably outgrow this phase of their lives in the long run, but to use a phrase another teacher, while they are in your class, "they will make you want to drink liquor." Part of the reason college is so much better is that these kids don't go to college, so teachers can be more relaxed and focus on the "teaching" part of teaching and not the "deal with billy's disruptive narcissistic BS" part of teaching.

Where it becomes a challenge is when you have a large class with very diverse needs. I remember being a student myself. I couldn't stand authoritarians. It's basically a hostile work environment. I had similar experiences as other people in this thread in middle school. I loved learning about the material but some teachers were so abrasive every minute of class was intolerable. I had been reduced to tears more than once by some teachers who thought I was lazy or thought I was rude. In the same class though that teacher was dealing with kids who genuinely were lazy and rude.

In high school I went to a college preparatory magnet school and say what you will about magnets, I don't think I would have survived going to a regular ed school. There, there were a lot fewer trouble makers and teachers could afford to have a more relaxed style. At the school I am working at now, which serves a socioeconomically disadvantaged community, It's just the opposite. Most of the kids need teachers who can provide the structure and demands that are missing from their home lives and as a result the few autistic kids in their classes aren't having their opposite needs recognized.

There is a middle ground but it is not the path of least resistance and its also one of those things that takes a lot of practice and experience to set up. Unfortunately some of these gen ed teachers are set in their ways, don't understand autism, or emotional handicaps beyond "that's a bad kid." and aren't willing to find a new, better way.

That's a great idea!...hopefully getting other teachers to read this will make them more aware and understanding of the needs of not just kids on the spectrum, but kids with other educational needs as well.