I’m probably AuDHD. My opinion written before I knew:
The popular Prussian education system was originally designed to stub children to submissive, obedient underlings for the owning class and productive livestock for the economy.
Most schools have never questioned the default Prussian paradigm. Why would they have - it’s been a numbing success: stratifying homogenized people into a comfortable pyramid structure has stabilized society, made top-down control easier, wasted immense human potential, damaged humanity’s natural antifragility, impaired our capacity to solve unforeseen complex problems, risking the whole planet’s life. No pain living inside the pyramid, so no problem, no change.
Only if we cared for everyone’s future more than for our present comfort, should we design a different curriculum to create a better society; less like a breakable machine, more like a resilient organism, emerged from unstubbed people free to pursue what’s important to them.
I agree. Also we don’t want to fund education. Hell half the U.S. voters voted to dismantle the department of education which helps fund schools that I’m sure the majority of Americans believe already don’t pay teachers/faculty enough. Roughly 6% of public school funds came from the DOE. So inflation is up, funding down and people are going to complain when their states/counties try to implement taxes to offset the losses because they will need to cover the costs for schools.
Remember all the Republicans demanding higher taxes? I don’t .. there just was no foresight in anything that was voted for.
Anyways. My original point was supposed to be that if funds are minimal, streamlined cheapest churn out education is all schools will be able to afford. Having extra time, varied curriculums that work for various groups of students just isn’t going to happen without more faculty/staff/effort
I crave that feeling you get just after getting past the basic understanding of some new subject where it feels like you’re drinking from the firehose and you’re picking stuff up left and right.
It’s very difficult to achieve that feeling in a structured learning environment.
There used to be a weatherman on TV in my state back before the internet. I’d tune into the news just to watch the weather. Of course, it’s not at the top of the news, because then nobody would listen to the rest of the broadcast. So I sit through that, then the weatherguy comes up and he starts talking about historical weather patterns and all the possibilities. Before I know it, he’s saying, “And that’s the weather. Back to you, Bob” and I’ve missed the actual forecast.
I had very similar experiences in math class. Going through things I understood, understood, understood, and then I tune out only to find out the teacher had taught something I didn’t understand and the entire experience of driving out to class had been wasted.
Teachers need students, student’s don’t need teachers.
Infodumping is common Autistic Friendship Language. I’m pretty sure most people here have a subject they’re just itching to infodump about. Imo, schools failing to account for that are a failure of education as a system, not of people with autism.
Not only schools, normies can also very clearly show something akin to disgust to being infodumped. I recall getting excited and doing one such about how the Islamic conquest in the 7th century reached the Iberian peninsula, how that led to the Reconquista and stopped around there when I realized the folks listening to me really wanted me to stfu. Their faces were an… “educated” mix of confusion and “please stop”.
I love listening to flamenco because the North Africa is still in it. It’s so beautiful to hear the echoes of something that happened a thousand years ago.
I also think it’s cool that the Vikings left such an impact on English culture we’re still singing songs about them.
When a child does not want to learn, You just have to force them to learn. But when a child is curious and wants to learn? That makes things harder, because now you first have to root said curiosity out of them before you can start coercing them into learning.
A lot of schools and a lot of classes and a lot of educational systems as a whole aren’t designed or intended to teach anything other than obedience and cultural mythology, exactly the sort of stuff many autistic people instinctively hate and don’t believe in.
Good for us, frankly. Autodidacticism to the rescue. The problem for propaganda is that reality is always hiding underneath, no matter how much they try to paper their agenda-driven nonsense overtop of it, and once you know how to look for it and that you have to look for it, the whole system built on top of it gets called into question.
I was a mediocre student until 3rd and 4th year undergrad and the one semester of grad school I did. I responded so much better to the freedom to solve problems using the basic engineering principles instead of being tested on those principles without the context.
I know some people are going to read this as “it’s not important to learn them when you can just look them up” but that’s not what I mean. I agree it’s important to know the basics well without having to consult with references. Over time they become second nature. But I’m going to struggle with repeating the basics back to you when they are abstract and when grading depends on my ability to do arithmetic under test conditions or remember the unit circle/special triangles because we are not allowed to use calculators.
I will never not be salty about this unit circle thing. I thought I hated math because I could not memorize this:
Turns out my brain doesn’t hold numbers well and I’m actually a wizard at process modeling.
I’ve always loved math and sciences and could plug and chug numbers into formulae all day, but I would often feel frustrated because though I knew the formulae worked, rote calculations wasn’t rewarding if I didn’t know why they worked. The greatest feeling was when the connection between theory and practice would finally click. The dopamine dump would make my day, and made doing the math fun again.
Sometimes I wish I could go back and finish my degree, but I chose to drop out put it on hold because I couldn’t reconcile going >$120k in debt for a masters degree that could not guarantee me a career that paid well enough to take care of that debt without making the rest of life feel terrible.
Solitarily with the I-couldn’t-afford-grad-school lol. I knew I could not afford to go to grad school full time but I didn’t realize part time enrolment meant I had to pay back my undergrad loans and I couldn’t pay my loans with work that was flexible enough to let me attend class. Womp womp.
Super relatable. I have a total memory hole in my mind about what was “taught” of trigonometry back in my high school years. I know it was part of some of the math classes, but it was one of the many things I completely dismissed for being “useless” since it was 100% abstract.
Fast forward some 13 years and I see a video explaining how 3D graphics work. Lo and behold, it’s trigonometry from top to bottom! Plus, when computers were much weaker, the trick was to use lookup tables with the 360 values of sin and cosin instead of calculating in real time, which is what John Carmack did in Doom.
I won’t say I’d have remembered the classes better if the teachers had showed at least one fucking real life use (like measuring tall buildings based on their shadow or trying to guess a star’s distance), or if any of them knew how it could apply to programming polygons, but being aware of “real world use” helps me a lot in not completely dismissing certain things.
Because our interests don’t perfectly align with what they want us to learn. My main special interest when I was 20 or so what audio technology, I was lucky enough to get to go to an audio engineering trade school and for the first time ever, in my entire life I became a 4.0 GPA student. Meanwhile, the class of 12 that started with me dropped to a class of 6 within weeks and I saw multiple other students struggling and failing at the same exact classes. The same person who was barely passing most classes in high school was now helping formerly 4.0 GPA students with THEIR homework.
Fast forward to today and now I’m struggling to find work. The world is not designed for the smart to be successful, it’s designed to turn the hard working into servants and the rest of us into examples.
I think schools should give more control to the students about what and how they want to learn, I always hated it that they forced me to learn things I am not interested in and will probably never use in my life
Due to not doing my homework and not remembering many physics and geometry theorems, I ended up regularly reverse engineering them to fit given values to given answers. My scores were a random spread of numbers, depending on the test and my capabilities at the moment. I am a bit sad that I stay dull in that department when I read news about EVs, space, et cetera, because it always feels I could’ve mastered it but just never had enough attention (could I, in that system, me?!). I’m thankful to lemmings explaining things and correcting me in threads under posts, I’m not sure I would remeber these facts but I’m feeling pure joy digesting them.
As someone witn just adhd (and memory problems) that was my experience. I did well in engineering school once I got a bit in. Going into every exam figuring out formulas I forgot based on what I knew was shockingly effective. And when in doubt, the units were always a hint
I’m 40 and I still write out and cross out all the units that shit does not stop being useful.
Once and a while people will be like, you don’t need to do all that but when they want me to find the error in their spreadsheet that ends up being a conversion error they see the value lol.
Yep! My high school chemistry teacher taught me a trick for it and it’s such a useful tool. Add in my college physics class teaching us the format of “list what you know, then list what you need, then list the formulas to convert what you know into what you need and then keep looking for the values you’re missing”. Those two tricks are stuff I still use in my career
I managed to score more than 100% with extra credit for years, then I moved back to the US and failed high school entirely due to boredom. I didn’t learn a goddamned thing the entire four years. I ended up earning a GED through just taking the test and getting 100%. It was entirely busywork bullshit with no thought whatsoever put into actually teaching children not only knowledge, but how to thirst for knowledge.
I failed a high school class simply because the teacher gave us homework projects every week, which I failed to complete or turn in. Even when I did the projects, I knew the teacher would put them up on the classroom walls and I was too self-conscious to have my work be displayed like that, so I didn’t turn them in.
So I had to re-take the class in online summer school - it was ridiculously easy. I still learned everything from the original class and retained the knowledge. When I went to in-person testing for the final exam, I was the first person in the room to finish. Easy A.
It just bugged me that so much time could’ve been saved if the original class has been condensed the way the online course was - it was the same information, just without the performative art projects. It solidified my opinion that school isn’t for teaching knowledge, it’s for teaching kids to accept busy work (even on their own personal time.)
Schools were never meant to be places to learn. They were primarily for the working class to learn obedience and deference for their betters, so that they might make better factory workers. They were only meant to provide just enough education for the working class to understand instructions that they were given.
And if you’re not that good at it they get really hostile to you and start making threats of ruining your future. This is probably a distraction mechanism so you’re too busy trying to memorize some book to do anything useful
Having a learning disability and having an advanced academic ability in one or more subjects are not mutually exclusive. There are lots of different types of learning disabilities, and most don’t automatically make someone less capable, it just may mean you process information differently
Or as my girlfriend likes to describe it, we have “spiky skills.” That is, very high in some areas, and very low in other areas.
I work with a six year old who’s still learning the most basic skills (like following one-step directions, such as “put your backpack in your cubby"), but he can spell out the full Latin names of various obscure fruits and vegetables from memory in order to find pictures of them online. Although he still has a long way to go with communication skills (he doesn’t speak and only recently acquired an AAC device), it’s clear he knows a lot more than would be apparent from the outside. Classic “spiky skills.”
I have described “spiky”, as imagine a sound board, with those up and down sliding switches. Most people have all of their switches close to the middle of the scale, just some a bit higher, and some a bit lower. But autistic people tend to have many of those switches turned either fully up, or fully down, and of course completely randomly as well.
Interestingly, this can also describe our sensory experiences/sensory filters. Some of us have brains that filter out speech, to the point that we don’t hear our own names being called. Others (like myself) have so little filter for speech sounds that we can’t even hear our own thoughts if someone else is talking in the same room. Or we may not experience pain from something that would cause an NT pain, but things that NTs experience as pleasurable might be painful to us. (For me, that’s tickling. I can’t stand being tickled. Or ASMR, it makes me irrationally angry.)
Yes, it can apply to so many things! I too have some very random traits taken to the extreme as well, not only skills or sensory stuff. For example I severely lack in the basic ability to regulate myself just in general; I will either give 100% in everything I do (face-to-face interactions with others included), or I will do something only barely or not at all.
My problem was that everything seemed to be taught so abstract. Give me a math formula to memorize and don’t explain why it’s useful? It makes no sense to me. Explain how and why it’s used, ok! I have context, I can begin to understand this now.
I thought I was just bad at math for most of my life. Turns out, I’m actually quite good at it once I understand how it actually fits into the real world.
Yeah I was very good at SOME math. Turns out having you dad drag you out to the garage to explain angles and geometry to you using a racecar is very helpful if you’re into that sort of thing lol
If you don’t fit then it must be your fault. Never the flawed systems problem. Integration and to some extent inclusion as the successor is about micromanaging the ND people (or otherwise non norm) so they don’t disturb the old way too much and rarely about changing concepts to actually open the situations up to all people.
Of course that takes more energy, time, willingness and most of all competence from the people in charge but in the long run it is worth it from a purely energy spent aspect. Not to speak of the non traumatic (or less) experiences ND have in education and public life in general.
Speaking as a Perviously early childhood education kindergarten teacher and a slightly of norm ND person.
Edit: it is common knowledge and practice in less formalized educational settings to use the enthusiasm and feed that interest in that moments and give it all the attention and “brain food” that you can spare. (There isn’t always time to do that and you of course have to realize that the moment has arrived) but if you do… It is so worth it. And sneaky sneaky , you can use the enthusiasm for one topic that goes into depth to introduce other topics that might be hard for the person. Like cars turning in to a conversation about why they don’t swim in water. Going further into why boats swim at all and you are now at physics.
That tactic does work ESPECIALLY well with ND people. It baffles me why people don’t use it all the time.
OP and you lot in the comments are a very functional section within the spectrum. Unfortunately, you need severe autism or moderate with a comorbidity to attract funding.
As a person with ADHD I feel like the fun part of learning is curiosity and the joy of discovery. School isnt very good at delivering on that experience. It kinda just tries to cram as much into you as possible, which is a bummer cause otherwise learning is like one of the most fun things in the world
I see your gay cuddling while watching a science documentary, and raise with a: gay cuddling while they info dump about their special interest at you 😌
I hated math when I was a kid. I was terrible at it. Never could knock out math problems in my head like every math teacher ever assured me I should be able to.
I’m a drafter now. Math isn’t hard, self-important math teachers in my past made it much more complicated than it needed to be, and then told me I wouldn’t ever be able to do anything because I couldn’t do math.
Yeah. I had one teacher in an advanced math class say that you have to treat “gifted” students as a form of special education because traditional educational techniques don’t work on them. The reason why a lot of schools don’t do this is because a poorly performing “gifted” student will generally meet minimum education standards even if they are performing well below their potential.
Thanks to ADHD part. School was kinda useless, due to 2 quirks and how school is set up.
First, the sitting still and listening to the teacher. If i sit still too long i will doze off, there isn’t anything i can do about it. It’s completely out of my control, best i can say is be more stimulating. Yes it happens to this day.
Most lessons in school involve sitting still and listening to someone just talk, you can imagine how regularly i dozed off. It doesn’t matter how much i tried or wanted to pay attention and stay awake, it wasn’t under my control. Majority of people cant even comprehend it. intrusive sleep
Second, school was set up to just pass a test, way too many teachers just gave a long list to memorize for the test.
My memory and recall ability aren’t under my control. It’s ran by RNG(random number generator). Whatever i pass a test or not was completely up to chance, pretty much 50:50 every single time and 50% of correct answers was needed to pass. Most of the tests i passed and if i didn’t, i just did it again and oftentimes odds were in my favor.
There were few lessons i did much better in. Like PE or woodworking or cooking, mostly because it was hand on active approach with those and no actual tests.
Luckily ASD side and lack of social awareness protected me from the worst of the social effects.
Your first part is precisely why I sometimes let kids keep toys at their desks when doing work with them. I make it clear, “As long as you answer the questions/do your work, I don’t mind if you keep the toy.” Sometimes a stim toy makes the difference. As long as it’s not distracting them away from what we’ve got to do, it’s fine by me.
Besides, when I went to training for my current workplace, we were encouraged to bring our own stim toys. I used a spinner pretty much the entire time. Another coworker brought a bag of various squishies and pop-it toys to share as well. If it’s acknowledged as useful for us as adults, it should be acknowledged as useful for the kids.
Honestly that’s a good idea and i pretty much let my daughter do the same. Seems to be working, she gets the school work done and doesn’t disrupt the class either, of course there are some bad days, but we just brush those away. No point to make her feel even worse over those one offs.
Luckily nowadays most teachers acknowledge mental differences as well and actually allow kids some fidgeting toys or plushies or even listen to music when doing some independent exercise.
Omg I did not know bout intrusive sleep and it explains so much about my school experience. I didn’t mean to fall asleep in lectures and I didn’t mean it as an insult to the instructor. I felt a lot of shame for it.
There’s a tendency for people with autism to have fixate on aspects of education. It can also be hard for them to learn things that aren’t interesting to them.
This creates a problem for the education system that instead wants uniform education. It’s also just a problem in general as a lot of classes build on one another.
I had someone (well, multiple really) people in my EE classes who could do insane things in terms of physical build outs, but really struggled on pretty simple concepts that weren’t interesting to them.
This creates a problem for the education system that instead wants uniform education
That desire is immediately dumb for reasons that any sociologist, psychologist and pedagogue can explain in much greater detail than I can, but it boils down to “people are different and even if you force them to be uniform, they’ll remain different”.
Sure, it’s great for standardization and economics, but awful for humans.
Is this like how I got poor marks in Trigonometry because the teacher hated that I was not showing any work even though I am amazing at math and its always easy mode and why would I waste time writing 5 steps with 1 step will do?
It’s costing me so much extra in oat lattes at my favourite cafes. Too much distraction at home and not enough caffeine at the library. I also feel miles safer leaving my stuff on a cafe table while I use the bathroom then leaving it in a library… I wish libraries were drug infested sex dens, then I would feel safer in them. Oh well…
Right now I’m watching this video about the lac operon in E.coli. It’s the switch in their DNA that let’s them digest lactose.
I read this as “I need caffeine to function and libraries don’t have it”. If libraries are associated with school (I can follow that association!) then it makes sense as a reply to this meme.
Look, I love libraries but I don’t think it’s fair to assume everyone has had good experiences in them. Theft was a big problem in my university library (as was voyeurism). It doesn’t mean this person hates libraries as a concept.
if that is how it’s meant to be read than my apologies, I just couldn’t understand it and assumed he was saying libraries should be drug infested sex dens, which they really shouldn’t be
I mean I’m just assuming and sharing how I read it. You and I are both speculating!
I wanted to reply that it’s okay to not understand every comment. Human experience is wider than any individual can comprehend and autistic people reflect that diversity as well. I personally find it easier if I assume good intentions and approach things with curiosity if I really do need to understand what someone meant.
I fail at that standard a lot lol but the overall result is good, I think.
I also know if someone tries to tell me I’m wrong about something they have no way of knowing or they misunderstand what I’m saying and argue against a point I’m not making I go feral real quick! Thanks persistent demand for autonomy! Having that experience also helps me be a bit more open to understanding the way I read something might not be what they mean.
I’ve rarely met two autistic people who were entirely similar in their outbursts, if any. I’m rather doubtful your take applies to every person with autism and is more or less I feel, just cruel collective hate speech on your part.
Thats a highly specific reading of this post. There is no need to call people names cause they use words more freely.
I read “learning here” as “expressing natural curiosity towards niche topics” as opposed to a neurotypical peers who will just berate for talking about it.
No one is equivalenting this to an academic studying.
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I’m probably AuDHD. My opinion written before I knew:
The popular Prussian education system was originally designed to stub children to submissive, obedient underlings for the owning class and productive livestock for the economy.
Most schools have never questioned the default Prussian paradigm. Why would they have - it’s been a numbing success: stratifying homogenized people into a comfortable pyramid structure has stabilized society, made top-down control easier, wasted immense human potential, damaged humanity’s natural antifragility, impaired our capacity to solve unforeseen complex problems, risking the whole planet’s life. No pain living inside the pyramid, so no problem, no change.
Only if we cared for everyone’s future more than for our present comfort, should we design a different curriculum to create a better society; less like a breakable machine, more like a resilient organism, emerged from unstubbed people free to pursue what’s important to them.
https://www.quora.com/Do-you-think-public-schools-in-your-country-are-designed-to-make-kids-docile-obedient-workers-for-the-upper-class/answer/Harri-K-Hiltunen
It’s not that schools hate autistic people.
It’s that society hates everyone who doesn’t conform to the strict and narrow set of behaviours that define ’normal’.
I agree. Also we don’t want to fund education. Hell half the U.S. voters voted to dismantle the department of education which helps fund schools that I’m sure the majority of Americans believe already don’t pay teachers/faculty enough. Roughly 6% of public school funds came from the DOE. So inflation is up, funding down and people are going to complain when their states/counties try to implement taxes to offset the losses because they will need to cover the costs for schools.
Remember all the Republicans demanding higher taxes? I don’t .. there just was no foresight in anything that was voted for.
Anyways. My original point was supposed to be that if funds are minimal, streamlined cheapest churn out education is all schools will be able to afford. Having extra time, varied curriculums that work for various groups of students just isn’t going to happen without more faculty/staff/effort
I crave that feeling you get just after getting past the basic understanding of some new subject where it feels like you’re drinking from the firehose and you’re picking stuff up left and right.
It’s very difficult to achieve that feeling in a structured learning environment.
Chalk and talk is my hell.
There used to be a weatherman on TV in my state back before the internet. I’d tune into the news just to watch the weather. Of course, it’s not at the top of the news, because then nobody would listen to the rest of the broadcast. So I sit through that, then the weatherguy comes up and he starts talking about historical weather patterns and all the possibilities. Before I know it, he’s saying, “And that’s the weather. Back to you, Bob” and I’ve missed the actual forecast.
I had very similar experiences in math class. Going through things I understood, understood, understood, and then I tune out only to find out the teacher had taught something I didn’t understand and the entire experience of driving out to class had been wasted.
Teachers need students, student’s don’t need teachers.
Infodumping is common Autistic Friendship Language. I’m pretty sure most people here have a subject they’re just itching to infodump about. Imo, schools failing to account for that are a failure of education as a system, not of people with autism.
Not only schools, normies can also very clearly show something akin to disgust to being infodumped. I recall getting excited and doing one such about how the Islamic conquest in the 7th century reached the Iberian peninsula, how that led to the Reconquista and stopped around there when I realized the folks listening to me really wanted me to stfu. Their faces were an… “educated” mix of confusion and “please stop”.
I love listening to flamenco because the North Africa is still in it. It’s so beautiful to hear the echoes of something that happened a thousand years ago.
I also think it’s cool that the Vikings left such an impact on English culture we’re still singing songs about them.
We can from the land of the ice and snow…
Would anybody like a selection of Doctor Who facts by any chance
What is labelled as education today is functionally employment indoctrination. Creating subservient and compliant vassal automatons is the goal.
A healthy, broadly educated population, which feels safe and secure, is incompatible with, and toxic to, conservative and authoritarian ideologies.
They need you to be sick, stupid, and scared.
You be surprised how many adults have 0 curiosity about the world.
Pretty early on, I got told to stop asking ‘why/how?’.
I’m not sure why they thought I was questioning them specifically and not out of curiosity.
Stopped me from Questioning things during school which I think just made me mask heavily unfortunately.
I was and had been undiagnosed my whole life until recently.
I love learning, Tinkering and Data.
When a child does not want to learn, You just have to force them to learn. But when a child is curious and wants to learn? That makes things harder, because now you first have to root said curiosity out of them before you can start coercing them into learning.
A lot of schools and a lot of classes and a lot of educational systems as a whole aren’t designed or intended to teach anything other than obedience and cultural mythology, exactly the sort of stuff many autistic people instinctively hate and don’t believe in.
Good for us, frankly. Autodidacticism to the rescue. The problem for propaganda is that reality is always hiding underneath, no matter how much they try to paper their agenda-driven nonsense overtop of it, and once you know how to look for it and that you have to look for it, the whole system built on top of it gets called into question.
I was a mediocre student until 3rd and 4th year undergrad and the one semester of grad school I did. I responded so much better to the freedom to solve problems using the basic engineering principles instead of being tested on those principles without the context.
I know some people are going to read this as “it’s not important to learn them when you can just look them up” but that’s not what I mean. I agree it’s important to know the basics well without having to consult with references. Over time they become second nature. But I’m going to struggle with repeating the basics back to you when they are abstract and when grading depends on my ability to do arithmetic under test conditions or remember the unit circle/special triangles because we are not allowed to use calculators.
I will never not be salty about this unit circle thing. I thought I hated math because I could not memorize this:
Turns out my brain doesn’t hold numbers well and I’m actually a wizard at process modeling.
I’ve always loved math and sciences and could plug and chug numbers into formulae all day, but I would often feel frustrated because though I knew the formulae worked, rote calculations wasn’t rewarding if I didn’t know why they worked. The greatest feeling was when the connection between theory and practice would finally click. The dopamine dump would make my day, and made doing the math fun again.
Sometimes I wish I could go back and finish my degree, but I chose to
drop output it on hold because I couldn’t reconcile going >$120k in debt for a masters degree that could not guarantee me a career that paid well enough to take care of that debt without making the rest of life feel terrible.Solitarily with the I-couldn’t-afford-grad-school lol. I knew I could not afford to go to grad school full time but I didn’t realize part time enrolment meant I had to pay back my undergrad loans and I couldn’t pay my loans with work that was flexible enough to let me attend class. Womp womp.
Super relatable. I have a total memory hole in my mind about what was “taught” of trigonometry back in my high school years. I know it was part of some of the math classes, but it was one of the many things I completely dismissed for being “useless” since it was 100% abstract.
Fast forward some 13 years and I see a video explaining how 3D graphics work. Lo and behold, it’s trigonometry from top to bottom! Plus, when computers were much weaker, the trick was to use lookup tables with the 360 values of sin and cosin instead of calculating in real time, which is what John Carmack did in Doom.
I won’t say I’d have remembered the classes better if the teachers had showed at least one fucking real life use (like measuring tall buildings based on their shadow or trying to guess a star’s distance), or if any of them knew how it could apply to programming polygons, but being aware of “real world use” helps me a lot in not completely dismissing certain things.
Difference is that they move to a totally different subject every hour whennI’m still in the mood to learn about pan-slavic ideology
Because our interests don’t perfectly align with what they want us to learn. My main special interest when I was 20 or so what audio technology, I was lucky enough to get to go to an audio engineering trade school and for the first time ever, in my entire life I became a 4.0 GPA student. Meanwhile, the class of 12 that started with me dropped to a class of 6 within weeks and I saw multiple other students struggling and failing at the same exact classes. The same person who was barely passing most classes in high school was now helping formerly 4.0 GPA students with THEIR homework.
Fast forward to today and now I’m struggling to find work. The world is not designed for the smart to be successful, it’s designed to turn the hard working into servants and the rest of us into examples.
All of this resonates with me.
In addition, I had good professors overall who inspired and helped me wayyyyyyyy more than HS teachers.
Mixing that in with me knowing that I should study and actually doing it helped too lol
I think schools should give more control to the students about what and how they want to learn, I always hated it that they forced me to learn things I am not interested in and will probably never use in my life
More ADHD than Autism.
Due to not doing my homework and not remembering many physics and geometry theorems, I ended up regularly reverse engineering them to fit given values to given answers. My scores were a random spread of numbers, depending on the test and my capabilities at the moment. I am a bit sad that I stay dull in that department when I read news about EVs, space, et cetera, because it always feels I could’ve mastered it but just never had enough attention (could I, in that system, me?!). I’m thankful to lemmings explaining things and correcting me in threads under posts, I’m not sure I would remeber these facts but I’m feeling pure joy digesting them.
As someone witn just adhd (and memory problems) that was my experience. I did well in engineering school once I got a bit in. Going into every exam figuring out formulas I forgot based on what I knew was shockingly effective. And when in doubt, the units were always a hint
I’m 40 and I still write out and cross out all the units that shit does not stop being useful.
Once and a while people will be like, you don’t need to do all that but when they want me to find the error in their spreadsheet that ends up being a conversion error they see the value lol.
Yep! My high school chemistry teacher taught me a trick for it and it’s such a useful tool. Add in my college physics class teaching us the format of “list what you know, then list what you need, then list the formulas to convert what you know into what you need and then keep looking for the values you’re missing”. Those two tricks are stuff I still use in my career
Why are chemistry teachers so based?
(sorry to anyone one who had chemistry teachers that were not helpful)
I managed to score more than 100% with extra credit for years, then I moved back to the US and failed high school entirely due to boredom. I didn’t learn a goddamned thing the entire four years. I ended up earning a GED through just taking the test and getting 100%. It was entirely busywork bullshit with no thought whatsoever put into actually teaching children not only knowledge, but how to thirst for knowledge.
1/10 would not recommend.
I failed a high school class simply because the teacher gave us homework projects every week, which I failed to complete or turn in. Even when I did the projects, I knew the teacher would put them up on the classroom walls and I was too self-conscious to have my work be displayed like that, so I didn’t turn them in.
So I had to re-take the class in online summer school - it was ridiculously easy. I still learned everything from the original class and retained the knowledge. When I went to in-person testing for the final exam, I was the first person in the room to finish. Easy A.
It just bugged me that so much time could’ve been saved if the original class has been condensed the way the online course was - it was the same information, just without the performative art projects. It solidified my opinion that school isn’t for teaching knowledge, it’s for teaching kids to accept busy work (even on their own personal time.)
Schools were never meant to be places to learn. They were primarily for the working class to learn obedience and deference for their betters, so that they might make better factory workers. They were only meant to provide just enough education for the working class to understand instructions that they were given.
According to CGP Grey, schools are basically daycare with an intense obsession with a game of Trivia
And if you’re not that good at it they get really hostile to you and start making threats of ruining your future. This is probably a distraction mechanism so you’re too busy trying to memorize some book to do anything useful
"Autistic kids love learning, but they do it in a different way and that must be punished accordingly."
- The education system
I did quite well in school :p. Except for when online classes hit during covid
Anywho, learning about new stuff is fun :3
I was simultaneously in gifted and learning disability classes in middle school. Apparently this was… fine?
Having a learning disability and having an advanced academic ability in one or more subjects are not mutually exclusive. There are lots of different types of learning disabilities, and most don’t automatically make someone less capable, it just may mean you process information differently
Or as my girlfriend likes to describe it, we have “spiky skills.” That is, very high in some areas, and very low in other areas.
I work with a six year old who’s still learning the most basic skills (like following one-step directions, such as “put your backpack in your cubby"), but he can spell out the full Latin names of various obscure fruits and vegetables from memory in order to find pictures of them online. Although he still has a long way to go with communication skills (he doesn’t speak and only recently acquired an AAC device), it’s clear he knows a lot more than would be apparent from the outside. Classic “spiky skills.”
I have described “spiky”, as imagine a sound board, with those up and down sliding switches. Most people have all of their switches close to the middle of the scale, just some a bit higher, and some a bit lower. But autistic people tend to have many of those switches turned either fully up, or fully down, and of course completely randomly as well.
Interestingly, this can also describe our sensory experiences/sensory filters. Some of us have brains that filter out speech, to the point that we don’t hear our own names being called. Others (like myself) have so little filter for speech sounds that we can’t even hear our own thoughts if someone else is talking in the same room. Or we may not experience pain from something that would cause an NT pain, but things that NTs experience as pleasurable might be painful to us. (For me, that’s tickling. I can’t stand being tickled. Or ASMR, it makes me irrationally angry.)
Yes, it can apply to so many things! I too have some very random traits taken to the extreme as well, not only skills or sensory stuff. For example I severely lack in the basic ability to regulate myself just in general; I will either give 100% in everything I do (face-to-face interactions with others included), or I will do something only barely or not at all.
I always thought every question on a test was a trick question, then questioned myself into believing they weren’t.
they were
My problem was that everything seemed to be taught so abstract. Give me a math formula to memorize and don’t explain why it’s useful? It makes no sense to me. Explain how and why it’s used, ok! I have context, I can begin to understand this now.
I thought I was just bad at math for most of my life. Turns out, I’m actually quite good at it once I understand how it actually fits into the real world.
Yeah I was very good at SOME math. Turns out having you dad drag you out to the garage to explain angles and geometry to you using a racecar is very helpful if you’re into that sort of thing lol
“Ugh, just get in the same box as everyone else so I can push you through the system without resistance.” - abusers, not teachers.
If you don’t fit then it must be your fault. Never the flawed systems problem. Integration and to some extent inclusion as the successor is about micromanaging the ND people (or otherwise non norm) so they don’t disturb the old way too much and rarely about changing concepts to actually open the situations up to all people.
Of course that takes more energy, time, willingness and most of all competence from the people in charge but in the long run it is worth it from a purely energy spent aspect. Not to speak of the non traumatic (or less) experiences ND have in education and public life in general.
Speaking as a Perviously early childhood education kindergarten teacher and a slightly of norm ND person.
Edit: it is common knowledge and practice in less formalized educational settings to use the enthusiasm and feed that interest in that moments and give it all the attention and “brain food” that you can spare. (There isn’t always time to do that and you of course have to realize that the moment has arrived) but if you do… It is so worth it. And sneaky sneaky , you can use the enthusiasm for one topic that goes into depth to introduce other topics that might be hard for the person. Like cars turning in to a conversation about why they don’t swim in water. Going further into why boats swim at all and you are now at physics.
That tactic does work ESPECIALLY well with ND people. It baffles me why people don’t use it all the time.
has less to do with schools and more to do with a society that glorifies credentials and extracurriculars within a rigid framework of acceptability.
if these positions were gained by aptitude tests you’d see a completely different makeup of society– way less nepo-babies and more working class.
the intent is to exclude. why do you need a college degree to push paper in your local state office?
OP and you lot in the comments are a very functional section within the spectrum. Unfortunately, you need severe autism or moderate with a comorbidity to attract funding.
As a person with ADHD I feel like the fun part of learning is curiosity and the joy of discovery. School isnt very good at delivering on that experience. It kinda just tries to cram as much into you as possible, which is a bummer cause otherwise learning is like one of the most fun things in the world
Yeaah, i mean we are homo sapiens in the end
Yeah I guess its second best to being gay. Being gay is pretty great tho, so thats no discredit to learning 😌
Mmh i would place them on par, gay cuddles are great but learning is pretty dope too yk
Gay cuddles while watching a scientific documentary. Now that’s the dream.
I see your gay cuddling while watching a science documentary, and raise with a: gay cuddling while they info dump about their special interest at you 😌
I love learning!
I hated math when I was a kid. I was terrible at it. Never could knock out math problems in my head like every math teacher ever assured me I should be able to.
I’m a drafter now. Math isn’t hard, self-important math teachers in my past made it much more complicated than it needed to be, and then told me I wouldn’t ever be able to do anything because I couldn’t do math.
I design buildings now.
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Yeah. I had one teacher in an advanced math class say that you have to treat “gifted” students as a form of special education because traditional educational techniques don’t work on them. The reason why a lot of schools don’t do this is because a poorly performing “gifted” student will generally meet minimum education standards even if they are performing well below their potential.
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Thanks to ADHD part. School was kinda useless, due to 2 quirks and how school is set up.
First, the sitting still and listening to the teacher. If i sit still too long i will doze off, there isn’t anything i can do about it. It’s completely out of my control, best i can say is be more stimulating. Yes it happens to this day. Most lessons in school involve sitting still and listening to someone just talk, you can imagine how regularly i dozed off. It doesn’t matter how much i tried or wanted to pay attention and stay awake, it wasn’t under my control. Majority of people cant even comprehend it. intrusive sleep
Second, school was set up to just pass a test, way too many teachers just gave a long list to memorize for the test. My memory and recall ability aren’t under my control. It’s ran by RNG(random number generator). Whatever i pass a test or not was completely up to chance, pretty much 50:50 every single time and 50% of correct answers was needed to pass. Most of the tests i passed and if i didn’t, i just did it again and oftentimes odds were in my favor.
There were few lessons i did much better in. Like PE or woodworking or cooking, mostly because it was hand on active approach with those and no actual tests.
Luckily ASD side and lack of social awareness protected me from the worst of the social effects.
Your first part is precisely why I sometimes let kids keep toys at their desks when doing work with them. I make it clear, “As long as you answer the questions/do your work, I don’t mind if you keep the toy.” Sometimes a stim toy makes the difference. As long as it’s not distracting them away from what we’ve got to do, it’s fine by me.
Besides, when I went to training for my current workplace, we were encouraged to bring our own stim toys. I used a spinner pretty much the entire time. Another coworker brought a bag of various squishies and pop-it toys to share as well. If it’s acknowledged as useful for us as adults, it should be acknowledged as useful for the kids.
Honestly that’s a good idea and i pretty much let my daughter do the same. Seems to be working, she gets the school work done and doesn’t disrupt the class either, of course there are some bad days, but we just brush those away. No point to make her feel even worse over those one offs. Luckily nowadays most teachers acknowledge mental differences as well and actually allow kids some fidgeting toys or plushies or even listen to music when doing some independent exercise.
Omg I did not know bout intrusive sleep and it explains so much about my school experience. I didn’t mean to fall asleep in lectures and I didn’t mean it as an insult to the instructor. I felt a lot of shame for it.
Yeah i remember the shame due to it, eventually i just gave up and accepted my faith as a public fleshlight in prison or suicide through drugs.
There’s a tendency for people with autism to have fixate on aspects of education. It can also be hard for them to learn things that aren’t interesting to them.
This creates a problem for the education system that instead wants uniform education. It’s also just a problem in general as a lot of classes build on one another.
I had someone (well, multiple really) people in my EE classes who could do insane things in terms of physical build outs, but really struggled on pretty simple concepts that weren’t interesting to them.
That desire is immediately dumb for reasons that any sociologist, psychologist and pedagogue can explain in much greater detail than I can, but it boils down to “people are different and even if you force them to be uniform, they’ll remain different”.
Sure, it’s great for standardization and economics, but awful for humans.
How do I feel? I love it, always have. Reading encyclopedias is what I did for fun as a kid. Still did it even after discovering video games.
We have the scholar brain
fuck my entire childhood to death. school was absolute hell.
i went to the Marines… and MCRD chewed me up and spit out a fully masked adult, who still quotes my general orders to this fucking day.
Thank you Corps. Semper Fi.
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University AAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH 😭😭😭
Was this post deleted while I was typing?
Nope it’s still here.
Yes. You’re imagining this thread now.
GASP… is this a dream?
More than once I was reprimanded in school for reading a book. You’re learning wrong thing at the wrong time, you bad child!
Is this like how I got poor marks in Trigonometry because the teacher hated that I was not showing any work even though I am amazing at math and its always easy mode and why would I waste time writing 5 steps with 1 step will do?
It’s costing me so much extra in oat lattes at my favourite cafes. Too much distraction at home and not enough caffeine at the library. I also feel miles safer leaving my stuff on a cafe table while I use the bathroom then leaving it in a library… I wish libraries were drug infested sex dens, then I would feel safer in them. Oh well…
Right now I’m watching this video about the lac operon in E.coli. It’s the switch in their DNA that let’s them digest lactose.
I get the feeling you’re in the wrong community, this is the autism one.
I read this as “I need caffeine to function and libraries don’t have it”. If libraries are associated with school (I can follow that association!) then it makes sense as a reply to this meme.
Look, I love libraries but I don’t think it’s fair to assume everyone has had good experiences in them. Theft was a big problem in my university library (as was voyeurism). It doesn’t mean this person hates libraries as a concept.
if that is how it’s meant to be read than my apologies, I just couldn’t understand it and assumed he was saying libraries should be drug infested sex dens, which they really shouldn’t be
I mean I’m just assuming and sharing how I read it. You and I are both speculating!
I wanted to reply that it’s okay to not understand every comment. Human experience is wider than any individual can comprehend and autistic people reflect that diversity as well. I personally find it easier if I assume good intentions and approach things with curiosity if I really do need to understand what someone meant.
I fail at that standard a lot lol but the overall result is good, I think.
I also know if someone tries to tell me I’m wrong about something they have no way of knowing or they misunderstand what I’m saying and argue against a point I’m not making I go feral real quick! Thanks persistent demand for autonomy! Having that experience also helps me be a bit more open to understanding the way I read something might not be what they mean.
lol please expand on your exclusionary comment
You are literally in the wrong thread. This isn’t the “maga hates libraries again” thread.
Oh, well I don’t hate libraries? I literally would be more comfortable in them if they were what those fox news hosts said they were.
That’s great! You should definitely go say that in the thread about it!
Nahh, you should probably just block me so more misunderstandings don’t ruffle your puritan values.
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I’ve rarely met two autistic people who were entirely similar in their outbursts, if any. I’m rather doubtful your take applies to every person with autism and is more or less I feel, just cruel collective hate speech on your part.
Even if it was true, we are talking about a condition!
He has no right whatsoever!
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Thats a highly specific reading of this post. There is no need to call people names cause they use words more freely.
I read “learning here” as “expressing natural curiosity towards niche topics” as opposed to a neurotypical peers who will just berate for talking about it.
No one is equivalenting this to an academic studying.