I'm allergic to school

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Greetings. I haven't been on this website in a while. I'm not sure why, but a lot of stuff has happened this year. I finally got approved for SSI, which meant I could move out of the group home. I went to live with the sister of the lady whose kids I used to tutor, she actually remembers being a staff working at the children's home I stayed at when I was 11-12 although she thought I was younger and maybe I acted younger, but I know that when I was 8 for example I was living in another state. I get my own room and it's pretty big and it's separate from everybody else which is good because there are noisy little kids living here. And my cat gets to roam free which is great because the meanies at the group home forced me to keep him in a cage all the time.

Oh and I decided to go back to school. The closest school to where I live now is the same school that kicked me out three years ago. My record was put on a hold which meant I had to give them paperwork from a doctor or somebody to show them that I am 'stable' enough to go back. See, I did something that they mistook for me attempting suicide, and they even embellished the report, and had me sent to the nuthouse. You know, the emergency room nuthouse for suicidal people where they hold you for three days but I got out after two. I really hated that school anyway, they had nothing but easy physics and math classes and yet I got bad grades because of being intolerant of sitting in a classroom for hour long stretches. I don't act out or disrupt the class, but the experience of listening to people in that close contact can, on a bad day, make me far too anxious to study when I get home or get anything worthwhile out of the class. Plus I learn better out of books anyway, given the right kind of pills.

Anyway the disability services lady (I actually never got disability services at that school, they needed all this paperwork I didn't have) remembered me. She is this falsely sweet lady who can't stand for people to say things that aren't nice or speak their mind and all I did was tell her that I hate scibrats, that my hatred of scibrats is a political view (anti-classism) and they have no right to discriminate against that, and I guess I got loud since I cannot control my vocal volume and on an impulse I put my hand over my assistant's mouth while she was talking and they made it out like I had assaulted her. And because of that they won't let me back at that school. Good riddance. But instead of telling me right away they made me wait a week to talk to the dean and I even took my medicine to show that I behave better on it and they wouldn't let my assistants talk they just insisted that I am too violent or not ready for school and because of their wasting my time they were almost all out of classes when I applied to my second option.

This other school has a better atmosphere I guess, but it's nearly two hours away by bus. Not that I mind long bus rides, I even write fanfiction on my laptop while on the bus. There were no computer programming classes worth taking left, let alone online ones (and I should probably stick to online ones because in-person computer classes are ESPECIALLY annoying) but I registered for a Chinese class and a Japanese class since foreign languages are subjects that I don't know so those would be more worth taking than say an art class or a writing class since I'm already masters at those subjects (I'm not touching their math or physics classes since I've already studied differential equations on my own which is the highest math they offer here and now I am teaching myself stuff like general relativity and complex integrals and Green functions for quantum field theory) and later I was able to crash a piano class which I was looking forward to taking since music is also a subject I don't know much about and my cat wants me to take a piano class because he thinks pianos are "fancy". And that was all I was able to get this semester... next semester I will get first pick of everything since I'm in disabled student services.

Well guess what? After the first week I found myself uncomfortable in the Japanese class. It has nothing to do with the teacher, who is really nice, and I don't feel so great in Chinese class either. Nor was the subject material too hard; in fact, I was ahead of both classes, having studied some Japanese on my own and also remembering a bit from the Chinese class I took before being thrown out of the other school halfway through the semester. Part of it may be that I was late to get the textbooks which meant catching up would be a pain, but mostly I think it was just an idiopathic social anxiety reaction to certain classes. I feel fine in piano however, maybe because I am doing something with my hands for the entire period. So I decided to drop the Chinese and Japanese classes and just study the subjects on my own instead. I know, that makes absolutely no sense, how am I ever going to get a stupid paper that says I am qualified to get a high paying job in physics or math or whatever if I feel tortured to sit through a lecture under even the nicest conditions (nice teacher, seat in the back, food in belly, medicated although I prefer to save my meds to study at home) Why can't they accommodate my need not to sit in class every day? Or to make homework optional and just grade me all on the test instead? My disorder makes worrying about turning in assignments and getting them done detract from the educational process, which I think is why I did better in the physics class where I didn't get graded on the homework... as a matter of fact I didn't even do the homework since that physics teacher was so easy I remembered everything in the class from high school. I am sick of this repeating high school BS...

Oh and this school has a math club, and I mean a legit math club that trains for math competitions not a math club that just does pizza parties and plays bingo and can't even use math to calculate how many jellybeans are in the jellybean jar (radius in jellybean units squared times pi times height of jar in jellybean units, got closest if not exact number every time, come on people it's middle school geometry) This is good but I think I pissed the coordinator off, he threatened to make me leave at some point after apologizing for being blunt rather than quiet about my opinions. I wonder how the other students feel when they're taking the most advanced classes the school offers and somebody that dropped out of the second semester of the calculus sequence claims to have studied all of that on their own.

You sound gifted to me. It's a pity you can't work with other gifted students in a less structured learning environment. Also, the teachers and social workers you are in contact with, don't seem qualified dealing with people like you who have special needs. I wouldn't worry about that. All it does is increase the frustration in you. Hope you find the assistance you need to build on a successful academic career and productive career in the workforce.

Thanks.
You know what, if there is homeschooling for K-12 why can't there be homeschooling for college? Why can't people take a class from a private tutor and get college credit for it? I understand some things need to be done in person, for example science labs and playing instruments and anything that is hands-on and not listening to a lecture but why can't the lectures be bypassed if the student can take a test and pass out of it? They allow that for SOME classes but for example they usually don't let you test out of any math higher than Calc 1 which is why they made me take that again even though I had it in high school and you know it's incredibly boring not to mention HUMILIATING for a gifted student to be forced to repeat a math class like the kind of loser who flunks math year after year.

Blind people get books in Braille. Deaf people get interpreters. If all an autistic person needs is to not sit in the class and maybe more lax deadlines on the homework, or better yet just not grading the homework, which costs the school nothing, is that asking too much? Maybe not for a four year university where the teachers are more likely to only care if you pass the test, but in community college they hold your hand like a baby and treat you like a child that needs to be punished to know better. They drop you from the class after three absences, and you can't get an A unless you do the homework even if you get close to 100 percent on the tests and quizzes. I might even surmise that I have a different learning curve from everybody else - whereas everybody else's is stable, mine is flat for a while and then it suddenly shoots up way higher than everybody elses once I've absorbed enough in my long-term memory for everything to click, and that point may take longer to happen due to the stress. Unfortunately the teachers here practice integral calculus when it comes to grading; they grade you for the area UNDER the curve rather than the height reached at the end.

You sound brilliant to me. I hope that you can work through these frustrations and don't get too discouraged.

I'm in Queens Village--where in Brooklyn do you live?

I know a friend's kid with almost the same characteristics. He later enrolled into a school in New York (Rebecca School) and seems to be the happiest ever in his life.