lower expectations for hfa kids?

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What is the opinion regarding expectations and kids with high functioning autism --pdd-nos/aspergers. Do you find or have you found that teachers/staff lower expectations for children on the spectrum?

It seemed when my son was diagnosed, suddenly, the expectations were lowered for him. What is the overriding opinion of autism? I wonder if there is still some residual discrimination stemming from misinformation.

If my son is labeled "autism" will the school expect that he is college bound or not? I just assume, of course, he will go to college. He is so smart. Am I dreaming?

thanks all.

equinn the tufted titmouse strikes again.

My 16 year old with AS is in a the honors program in high school with some extra help. He is going to university and that has never been questioned. His IQ is very high and school is not hard for him (the academic part anyway).
My 13 year old has a learning disability but even with that he is still being taught in a manner that will help him to be successful in college should he decide to go.
If you talk to most AS adults, they did well in university or college, it is the school years and the job market after college that is the problem.

Please don't lower your expectations of what your child can do. I know that my younger son's modifications make it so his workload and the way he is taught seems a little easier than his peers but he is still learning the same material and will be just as ready for post-secondary as other kids. He will just have to work a little harder to prove what he and I already know.

Certain expectations should be lowered, like speaking ability in front of class, neatness of handwriting for those Aspies who have issues with that, and social interaction. I would say that academically, they should not be lowered at all for a child of normal intelligence. My 9 y/o is in G.A.T.E.(Gifted and Talented Education), she is way above grade level in most areas(not Math though). We expect much from her and so do her teachers. Autism or not, she still has to get a good education and learn to get along in this world.

right now, i have communication problems with my supervisor (i am doing PhD) and a friend of mine suggested to tell him about AS. i refuse to do that because i am afraid his expectations would lower. i don't want any special treatment. i am capable doing the things he expects me to do. i just didn't completely understand the task he asked me to perform. i don't think the expectations should be lowered. the children do not need that. certainly not in the academic part.

the expectations for my son were changed once he got a dx....not exactly lowered, just changed. the school finally realized that there was something different about son~ that he wasn't just some defiant troublemaker.

You're lucky that your kids weren't in Elemetary School in the 1980s.

The Education System had low expectations of what students with HFA could achieve. I was segregated and put into a Sped class for at least half of the day in grades 1-3 and again in grades 4-7. The stuff that they taught in those classes was very simple. I was bored to death.

In a way, I feel fortunate that I went to school before AS was a recognized diagnosis. My parents expected the best from me.

From what I'm hearing, then, it sounds like there could very well be some misunderstandings associated with autism even if it's high functioning.

If they go to college, this is the exception according to the lay person not caught up in scholarly research on a daily basis the way I am.

Maybe it is better to fly under the radar--be quirky and undiagnosed-- unless you're homeschooled.

The school psych kept telling me my son was too "with it" maybe she wanted to dissuade me from getting him labeled "autism" for a reason.

I feel like I'm missing something crucial, something that is staring at me right in the face and I'm blind to it.

I've fought for the "autism" diagnosis and now what? Maybe I was a fool, caught up in my own research and obsessive need to label what he has. Maybe I've set him up for a worse failure at the hands of the school system.

Any other skeptics? Positive feedback would be helpful at this moment.

I guess I was lucky. Even though I was not diagnosed, the school pushed for me to be put into a gifted program. My mother declined it, but the school still realized something more was going on. They hovered a lot and had a lot of meetings with my mother concerning schools I might wind up in and whether or not I could handle the known bullying that went on there and all.

In areas that I was strong in, the teachers gave me extra time to work on it, or would give me extra assignments just to keep me enthusiastic.

Of course this faded in middle school when I moved, but I still remember some of the things I did in elementary school and still get giddy over it at times

I'm in college as well, if that gives any hope, lol. I absolutely love an essay question that has to do with my perspective of something, and teachers allow me to turn in my 3-4 page paper as opposed to forcing me to stay within the one paragraph limit. I still have difficulties with classes where I cannot do much hands on stuff, and I have trouble with classes like history and math, but overall I'm doing well.

We just pushed to get our son diagnosed, so this topic really interests me. At this point, I can't see him functioning in a mainstream classroom because his behavior is just too disruptive. But I do think that once we get that more under control, he could do fine and he's only 4, so who knows how much he will just naturally calm down? We'll just wait and see how he does. If he is doing fine without much accommodations, we won't push the diagnosis. If it seems like he could use more support, we'll work with the teachers and an IEP.

I am a high school teacher, and I think knowing that a kid has a diagnosis can be helpful in terms of just helping me understand him/her. Of course, once I know the issues of one child, I realize that there are usually several others with similar issues that are undiagnosed. I don't lower my standards of what these kids should learn, but I'll give more time and allow alternative assignments (I'll do these things with NT kids too depending on the circumstances). I have never taught a student who had the Asperger diagnosis declared to the school, but now that I know more about it, I have definitely taught some AS kids, some of my favorites in fact.

Mo

My son was diagnosed long before school so I wouldn't know if expectations were lowered artificially. There certainly have been miscommunications with what his needs are in school. Academically, he's at or above his grade level in all subjects. But he definitely needs accomodations for his sensory issues, receptive language delays and issues with transitions. He needs coaching for his social interactions too.
I know one team in Indiana thought "success" for him would be to work collecting shopping carts at the big box store, or working in Taco Bell. But that was a long time ago and Indiana isn't famous for being too progressive.
We've pioneered our way through programs for Pop and so he's considered an anomaly.

I worry that once a child is labeled, subconsciously, teachers will look at them differently and lower their expectations. It sounds like you are a knowledgeable and caring parent and will be on the look out for AS/Autism related problems. Personally, I think that it is best for the AS person to understand the nature of their personality and find ways to cope with the world we live in. In a perfect world teachers and schools would be accommodating, but my experience is that it is better for one to wend their way through life, with self knowledge, rather than expect the world to change for them.

I think it depends on the teacher and how comfortable or familiar with autism they are, last year my son's teacher had really high expectations and he couldn't meet them. This year his teacher is more leniant, but I hope not so that she isn't challenging him (too early in the year to tell yet).

I'm diagnosed with asperger's. I'm undergardaute college valedictorian, and one semester away from getting my master's with a 4.0 GPA/QPA.

I think the main problem would be teachers having too high expectations. Its kind of difficult to belive that a kid whose a "walking encyclopedia in science and history, would struggle with second grade math.

If your child is diagnosed you can get an IEP, and part of the IEP can be tailored so that the child is taught according to his interests. Say like once a week the teacher can include math problems involving X number of trucks, if he likes trucks, which will get his attention on the lesson (that's actually something teachers are taught to do for every student not jsut "special" ones). Futhermore make sure he shows his advanced work to the teacher. THe boy in my student teaching placement who had an undiagnosed problem once spent the day working at the back of the room by himself (I had it in all my lesson plans that he could wander about the room so long as he did all the required work by the next day.) At the end of the day he came up and showed me what he had been working on. He had made a ten page book about Christopher Columbus with 7 sentences on each page. The next day we designated some class time where he read the book to the students - he love it. And his book was part of the evidence given for why was intelligent enough to do the work. Previously there had been some speculation that his mom might have been telling him what to write on his homework.

Another adaptation I worked out for him was that when he was participating in my lessons, I'd call him every third time. This wasn't fair to the other students but it kept an active participatant who didn't wander about the room.

thank you! you give excellent advice. Involving their special interests is something I wish teachers would do more often. We have a really hard time to get my son to write. He knows how but hates to do it, but if what he has to write is about dinosaurs then he is all for it and gets really really excited about it.

keep the advice coming!

This is a very interesting topic to me right now.

In our case, I think that the diagnosis often (not always) leads to lower expectations, and we have to be fighting that (quietly, in subtle ways) on a regular basis. Our son is relatively quiet, does relatively well socially, doesn't have the super high IQ that many of you parents experience with your children (I'm guessing -- we've never had it tested), but he is MORE than capable of doing grade-level classwork, and receiving A's. The school would have been more than happy to leave him in Learning Support (only for Reading), but they also provide an aide for the first few weeks of middle school (even though he probably didn't need one past the first day or so). We have shifted him to Reading Lab (one step up the evolutionary reading scale) because, frankly, we don't think he needs to be in Learning Support and we feel that it is expecting too little of him. I'll be interested to see how he does on the standardized tests with Reading Comprehension after this.

We have experienced this shift in outlook as our son went from elementary to middle schools. In Elementary school, we were grateful that the school personnel had even an idea of what HFA/Asperger's is about, and we were grateful that they had many programs in place to take care of our son (and others). But now, we are realizing more and more how little the staff knows about this particular diagnosis, because it is so new, and because the population who has it is relatively small (but growing all the time). We've come to the conclusion that it's our job, NOT theirs, to handle our son's education. We can't rely on the school staff as experts, because they just can't be -- there are too many "diagnoses" to keep up with, and they can't possibly be schooled in all of them.

So, long story short, we are asking for LESS support, LESS special help. How will he ever learn if he is constantly leaning on adults to help him with everything? School does NOT teach him to think for himself. At home, we ARE teaching him to think for himself, because we are the ones that will be dealing with him, one way or another, if he is given too much support.

And yes, we definitely think he will go on to college, marry, have a family and get a job.

Kris