What do you wish NTs knew?

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Particularly teachers? I have to make a presentation about it for college and I'm struggling. I have to assume that the readers are not informed on ASDs.

I wish they knew how hard we have to work just to get through a social event or situation.

I wish they knew that we don't do it on purpose. It just...is.

Well, with teachers in mind:

If you want me to speak when I raise my hand, don't just look at me and expect that I know you want me to talk. Point at me and say 'yes' if you don't know my name. I feel pretty lame when I miss this cue, and when I am embarrassed and thrown off it is hard for me to get back into listening to the lecture.

When you look over my shoulder while I am writing or drawing, I freeze or get really uptight and I don't know what I am doing. Don't just walk up on me and please ask if it is okay to look at my work. Better yet, I will ask you if I need help and I will show you if I want you to see. You get to see my work for evaluation, you don't need to hover while I am working. I find this really upsetting. Give me space.

For those who insist that group work is essential to a learning community. No it is not. People are diverse and some of us are independent workers. We still make a contribution. Group work, for me, is an awful experience and the only thing I learn from it is that I don't like group work. It sucks away from my learning experience. If I would rather work on my own, don't press the point. I take classes that are not geared to careers which rely on group projects but rather on individual work that does contribute to the good of the whole in a different way.

I sit where I am comfortable and this is conducive to my learning. As long as I am not obstructing the view of another or am otherwise interfering, please don't mess with the arrangement.

I don't know if your remarks are meant to be funny or snide. If you are only teasing, please tell me so. I am not stupid for not picking it up so don't have 'fun' with that, either. If you are being snide, at least for me it exacerbates my social awkwardness if I misinterpret or if I miss and wonder later what it meant. This interferes with my learning. I don't let things go very easily and I will replay this a million times. I don't do it on purpose and it is not a weakness. This is my brain. No, we can't avoid everything in life, but as a teacher you can play a role in support and leadership.

If I ask you a question, please keep it short and clear. As close to yes or no as possible. That being said, sometimes I have trouble expressing myself and I need a bit of patience in doing so.

???

Don't expect me to read between the lines

I don't know why I did that. I am tired and I guess I was thinking of them as something like a cross between an ellipsis (... thinking this discussion would continue) and 'how does this sound'? Sorry for the confusion and I hope my input is helpful.

Just how different it is for someone with autism to cope with situations. It's not a matter of being a bit shy. It's not that I don't like noisy places or some foods repulse me. It's the physical feelings which come with all this which make life so hard to cope with. I don't think it IS something you can portray, but the best I've got to explaining it to NT's is "You can't empathise because you don't know." because they're always trying to say "Oh I know how you feel, I get awkward in social situations as well."

I would wish that they would know how it is to have ASD.

I don't even mean that they really have it, maybe just for one day or so, to have a better understanding about it, but this will never happen.

I wish that they had known that I was not lying about the alcohol and drugs being used by the varsity football squad.

How about:

If I can't answer something, please don't make assumptions that I did not do my readings or do not understand the material. Please don't make a comment to this effect in front of the class. I am very diligent and I care deeply about my answers. I am not stupid and I am not lazy.

If you see I would like to answer something, but I am having trouble finding my words, it is nice when you offer to give me a moment and come back to me. I have had this happen and I am grateful when it does. It gives me a moment to gather my thoughts and I feel like I mean something, that what I have to say has value. I feel like an important part of the discussion.

My intelligence is the attribute I value most about myself. My self-esteem is low and sometimes I feel like that is all I have. When you undermine it, I am crushed. I fit in so few places in this world, and it is important to me to feel both capable and valued. I don't mind being wrong when I am truly wrong, this just goes back to the assumptions that I noted at the top of this post. If I fail, I fail and I don't want favors or sympathy. Just please help preserve my dignity and recognize that I have endured a lot to get here and to be here. I am hard enough on myself.

I am fiercely independent and quite frankly I am ambivalent about authority. This means you, teacher. As much as structure can be comforting, it can also come with certain nuances that mean nothing to me or are just plain confusing in an institutional setting. Please forgive my misunderstanding of decorum. I do my best.

To add to what Fnord said, I wish they knew about how I have tried to stop people from harming themselves with drugs and how commonly abused they are. (Recently I gave up, one kid ignored my advice and came out minutes later coughing up blood. Let the idiots suffer or learn their lesson.)

I wish they also know what it was like to not be able to read body language. Verbal communication should account for more than just 7% of communication. For me it is 85%.

I wish they knew how hard it was to maintain a relationship that extended beyond functionality...in this world we are expected to have a lot of contacts merely for the sake of career advancement, but I don't care about many I meet. Few are interesting as most just conform to society and all its flaws.

I wish they knew how my art symbolism works. You don't need to talk about faces or have people in it to create symbolism. Mood can be made with colors, with line personalities, with many other ways. People are so shallow in their assessment of meaning in art, largely because society is shallow and many project their own feelings onto artwork.

Lastly, I wish they knew how hard it is not knowing your own intentions/emotions a large amount of the time. My binging is often entirely subconscious because of how immersive it is, and it can interfere with solving problems.

For me, it would be this:

1) If you want me to listen, please understand that I may need to stare at some inanimate bit of the room and/or fidget with my stationary if I am to hear what you're saying. My eyes need a source of steady visual stimulation (ie. one unchanging "snapshot" or consistent, patterned movement) to force my brain to stop trying to attend to what I see and put the visual-track on autopilot -- only then it will be possible to try to make sense of your words.

If you force me to "look at [you] while [you're] talking," then I will take in little or nothing of what you say because I can't watch you moving about at the front of the room and try to attach meaning to the sounds coming out of your mouth simultaneously. This is particularly true if I am not using an FM system (as in this case I will be struggling to filter out and/or cope with competing and sometimes painful sounds such as: ventilation and heating systems, the talking and footsteps of people in the hallways and adjacent classrooms, the sounds of squeaking chairs and cloth-scraping-against-cloth as my classmates shift in their seats or fidget, the sound of pens scribbling, the sound of your feet moving, of papers or overhead transparencies being moved/shuffled, of chalk or markers on a black/whiteboard etc.).

2) It is not "rude" for a person with visual sensitivities (specifically light-sensitivity) to wear a hat or tinted glasses indoors. Wearing a hat or tinted glasses protects my eyes from painfully bright lights -- preventing migraine headaches and limiting my physical discomfort in the classroom; This in turn makes it easier for me to focus my attention, take in information, and contribute to the learning environment in positive ways.

If you refuse to allow me the use of such tools to prevent sensory overload, you are forcing me to suffer and actively working against my efforts to learn, to participate, and to take responsibility for and regulate my own behavior (given that sensory overload is a common cause of the extreme stress that leads to disruptive behavior and full-blown meltdowns). If you punish me or lecture me in front of the entire class for wearing a hat or tinted glasses to deal with visual sensitivity, you will be seriously undermining my trust in you -- if I have low self-confidence or feel shame about being different, you will be playing a part in undermining my trust in myself as well.

3) Do not ever make assumptions about the amount of effort I put into something. Messages about the quality of my work that begin with "You're not trying," "I know you could do better" and "If you only tried harder/put in the effort" can be incredibly damaging to a person who has put herculean effort (i.e. all their free time, much of the time they might otherwise have spent sleeping) into an assigment and could not possibly have tried any harder; Such messages, when they are based on erroneous assumptions, effectively communicate "Your work/effort is not good enough and never will be."

If you doubt my effort, please ask me honest, direct, and matter-of-fact (i.e. non-judgemental) questions about the time I spent on an assignment or the effort I put into a task. Do your best to give me the benefit of the doubt unless you have exceptionaly strong evidence to the contrary (a paper/project/presentation that you think is of poor quality based on a non-clinical, non-standardized, purely-observational evaluation of my skills is your opinion -- it does not count as evidence that I have not tried my best). If necessary, work with me (and/or others who support me, as appropriate) to set up some sort of log to keep track of what I do and for how long while working on assignments.

4) If, when I am attempting to answer a question or say something during a class discussion, what I say seems to be "off-topic" please do not assume that it actually is off-topic. I often have difficulty "getting to the point" or summarizing because my brain organizes information in an atypical manner, my thoughts are not directly connected to my language, and I really have no idea how you will understand what I say; I may be describing concrete things that conceptually relate-to or are a part of some valid, topically-relevent point/question in a desperate attempt to communicate said point/question despite appearances to the contrary.

When you think I have strayed off-topic, please ask me if what I'm saying relates to whatever was asked or to the topic of discussion -- if I say "yes", please ask me to explain how. Even if I fail at explaining the relationship, at least I've been encouraged to try instead of being silenced by someone who has not understood me at all.

How a meltdown/sensory overload feels and just how terrible it really is.

Because many NTs act as if you're just being hysterical.