Your chance to tell teachers how to help kids with AS

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Hey, I normally post over on the parents' board, but I am doing a Master's level ASD certificate for teachers, and for my final project I have the opportunity to teach a bunch of regular ed. teachers how best to modify their classrooms and instruction to fit the needs of kids with AS.

For part of my presentation, I would like to share quotes from people in the ASD community who were schooled in regular ed. classrooms. If you would be willing to be one of those people, could you share:

1. Your age at diagnosis and specific diagnosis
2. One thing a teacher or teachers did that was helpful to you.
3. One thing a teacher or teachers did that created problems for you.

Thanks in advance for anyone willing to share! I will just be copying and pasting right onto a word document. I won't share names or even gender unless you specifically include it with your quote.

***edited to add: Please feel free to share MORE THAN ONE things that were helpful or not helpful. And please don't apologize for being "verbose". You are willing to share your thoughts and you may share as many as you wish.

Last edited by jonahsmom on 06 May 2010, 10:54 am, edited 1 time in total.

1. Your age at diagnosis and specific diagnosis
2. One thing a teacher or teachers did that was helpful to you.
3. One thing a teacher or teachers did that created problems for you.

1. 7
2. Encourage the other kids to be nice and not make fun of me. Encourage my strengenths and incorperate my special intrests into the lesson.
3. Encourange the other kids to bully me. Not let me engage in special intrests.

DX: AS @ 49yo


What a Teacher Did That Helped Me:

Unlike a lot of folks with AS, I am not a natural math whiz. Did fine with the basics, but struggled with fractions and decimals and sank like a stone the first time a teacher wrote a problem on the board that included Alphabetic characters in place of unknown numbers. I read and write exceptionally well, written language is as natural as breathing and my brain simply rejects the idea that a character that represents a vocal sound, can also represent a numerical value. Therefore, the entire operation is gibberish, and gibberish is of no practical value. I only managed to graduate High School by squeaking through a 'How to Balance Your Checkbook' course in Business Math, because even though all my other grades were fine, I couldn't get the credits I needed in Mathematics, having failed every Higher Mathematics course I took - except one.

One grandmotherly old math teacher took a small group of us into a late afternoon algebra class and supplemented the course work with conceptual visual aids like the Disney film Donald Duck in Mathemagic Land ( which among other things, applied Pythagorean principles to more tangible purposes, like music and the trajectories of billiard balls). She also read aloud to us (this was a High School Sophomore class) from Edwin A Abbott's Flatland, which introduced me to the concept of extradimensional spacetime, a subject that fascinates me to this day. Unfortunately, we moved that summer and I never again had a math teacher willing to go so far out of their way to make higher math seem practical and comprehensible.

In fact, it often seemed to me that math teachers in general tend to be of that type of personality who finds the language of numbers so natural that they absolutely cannot fathom how anyone could find it otherwise, thus they have great difficulty in either simplifying the process, or more importantly, making it analogous to real-world things that the less gifted can understand. Trains and schedules may have made that practical leap a hundred years ago, but that just doesn't translate into an accessible picture today.

The point being, that I believe the Autistic brain needs a reason. All children may go through a phase of asking why with maddening frequency, but we never outgrow that phase - so we desperately need to see a practical need for expending the effort to focus an already ADD prone brain on something that takes concentration to absorb. That holds true no matter what the academic subject involved.

What Several Teachers Did That Did Not Help:

Drawing is a stim for me. It helps me focus and keeps my visual and touch senses occupied and more or less on autopilot, freeing my auditory sense to absorb easily and rapidly. Most of my teachers saw me looking down at my desk instead of at them, and my hands in motion, and assumed that I was distracted and not listening. In fact, the opposite was true. As long as I was focused on the lines and shadows spilling freely out of my own subconscious, I heard and absorbed virtually every word that was said, almost to the point of qualifying as Eidetic. When they insisted I put my pencils away, or simply take notes, my mind wandered, and I stared at various things around the room or out the window, which took me off on tangential flights of fancy during which I did not hear a single word they said. While my eyes and hand were focused, my hearing was also focused. When I gave up the focus on the drawing, everything came unfocused. Just as many Autistic people say about eye contact, if I had to sit still and look at the teacher, I would become fixated on watching their mouth move, or their hairstyle, or their clothing, or the sound of the chalk hitting the board and completely forget to listen to the words they were saying. It may be true for the non-Autistic brain that watching the speaker helps comprehension and retention of the subject matter of the lecture, but for me it was precisely the opposite.

1. 28 (hope that isn't too late to still be able to help out)

2. Teachers who accepted that it may take me longer to do some things (like math) while encouraging those subjects I couldn't get enough of (English, History).

3. Trying to force me to learn something ONE way- especially multiplication tables. They focused on flashcards for memorization and put way too much importance on how FAST I could do them. In fact, they put way too much importance on memorization at all. They should have been more concerned with whether I understood the math in the first place. OK, so I can't memorize them by visual repeatition. I could if I WROTE them over and over probably, but honestly just give me a calc and call it a day. Then I can move on to the harder stuff that actually matters- not whether I can memorize and do it fast w/o a calc.

Also forcing me to play with others. I would have had a lot less meltdowns and troubles with other kids and such if they would have let me read inside by myself like I wanted to instead of forcing me to go play during recess.

Lastly, It is important to understand an individual child's learning style as much as possible (AS or not) and to adjust your teaching style accordingly. Of course, you can't be a mind reader, but I think it's fairly obviously that if you spend a great deal of time trying to teach someone something visually (or any other medium), even during free time for many weeks, and they make no progress, that teaching style is NOT working at that time for them. Take the time to try something else out (auditory, kinesthetic, tactile). I bet it will not only help the child out, but it will save enormous amounts of time in the long run.

I hope this helps

1. Your age at diagnosis and specific diagnosis.

I was 32. I'm not sure if someone who was diagnosed as an adult is helpful to you or not. I think "autism" was estabilshed as a viable diagnosis the year I graduated from high school. I have high-functioning ASD.

2. One thing a teacher or teachers did that was helpful to you.

Let me choose my own topic for projects, so that I could work on something of interest to me. If I was not interested in something, my work tended to be half-hearted at best. Often, if nothing on a list of "suggested topics" appealed to me, my teachers would let me develop my own ideas for a subject, and I'd tirn in A-level work with no trouble. (In fact, my teachers did many wonderful things, but this stands out.)

3. One thing a teacher or teachers did that created problems for you.

This is harder. I had a second-grade teacher who tormented me and slammed my left hand in a desk when she caught me using it. (I'm ambidextrous.) But I guess the real teacher who stood in my way was my 7th grade English teacher. This woman sabotagued me at every turn -- she once threw away (or lost, or somehow destroyed) the last page of an important paper and gave me a "C" because the paper was incomplete. She tried to kill any creative spark I had -- when she hung student poems in the classroom, she refused to hang mine because it didn't rhyme. She often tried to scapegoat me, assigning homework and saying it was my fault. She treated me generally badly, telling me to shut up, refusing to call on me (in one memorable event, I had my hand up for 30 minutes while she called on everyone else, and then said, "Doesn't anyone have any idea what this poem is about?" I said, "I do," and she said, "I mean, anyone besides Rose." When she finally did call on me, I was right about the poem and she screamed at the whole class for being stupid). Even other students remarked on how mean she was to me.

None of this was condusive to learning. Up to that year, my favorite classes had been the ones the involved reading and writing. I was sure English would be my favorite subject and instead I loathed it; I thought I would do well in it and was instead barely average. (My parents were no help; they simply did not believe a teacher would behave so childishly.) My theory as an adult is that she realized early on that I was smarter than she, and she resented it in a 12-year-old. I didn't know enough to hide it, or turn it down, or whatever she wanted from me. By the time she was done with me, I still loved reading and writing, but thought I was terrible at it. Luckily, in 8th grade I had the best teacher of my life, who turned everything around -- she was hard on me, but that was because she saw I was smart and talented and was determined to make me the best English student I could be. I'm still friends with her today!

Well, there's a much longer answer than you probably wanted, but I'm also highly verbose. Comes with the territory in my case.

I'm going to answer these from 2 perspectives.... what I dealt with with teachers, and what I'm finding to be the hardest to deal with for my son and his teachers.

Myself:

1. Your age at diagnosis and specific diagnosis: umm.... not until 27... in school I was just "gifted"

2. One thing a teacher or teachers did that was helpful to you.

They watched out for me a lot... which was really nice. They paid attention to me if I told them someone was picking on me and made sure not to call me a tattle tale or any of that, because they knew I put up with a lot before I said anything, and actually listened when I came to them. They also didn't cut me a ton of slack, and worked WITH me.

3. One thing a teacher or teachers did that created problems for you.

Once I hit middle school, then it started to get bad. They knew that because I was smart, I knew all of the information, and didn't really nag me a lot to be doing homework or anything. They let me fail, essentially, or barely slid me by, just because I was smart. When my mom would call to talk to them, they would be more concerned with how I was doing socially than anything else... so I wound up graduating with extremely low scores-like barely passing.


Now for my son:

His age at diagnosis: 6

Things the teachers have done that helped him:

Some have really listened to me and worked out things WITH me, and always included him in the decisions on what to do, which is very important, as he doesn't respond to a lot of things if he has no part in it. They have also paid a lot of attention to things that may be overwhelming to him. Rather than to be saying "oh, I know he knows the information so I'm not worried" and let him fail the test, they remove the time limit, etc. They've also allowed him to involve Star Wars in just about everything he does, lol.

Things they have done that have made things worse:

Not listening to us from the START. Look, I know for a lot of them, especially if it's a kiddo in a mainstream class, it's hard to look at those differences as any form of disorder, and easier to look at them as behavioral issues. It's taken over half a year for this teacher we have now to come around and finally realize he IS different. But... I'm giving it all to them, right there, in black and white, on the first day of school, or even BEFORE it, to get them prepared.

The other problem seems to be that his teachers don't listen to him.

Now, I realize you guys have every snot nosed kid in the school coming to you and saying "Tommy just ate mayo and I think it's gross".... but when my child finally has enough and tells you "Tommy just smacked me", someone needs to step in rather than dismissing it. When he comes the next time telling you the same kid is calling him names, then it REALLY needs attention... and when my kid finally punches the one who has been bugging him and being mean to him all year long, don't call me with a suspension notice for MY SON.

...and last, when something DOES happen at school. When he acts up for no real reason, or hits someone "just because", it needs to be addressed right then and there. Don't send a note home with him... call me right away. For him it has to be in the here and now, or else it isn't gonna matter 5 hours later when it reaches me.... and then he's gonna wonder "if it's such a big stinkin deal, why didn't anyone say anything about it at the time, or do anything about it."

Last edited by anxiety25 on 04 May 2010, 5:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Isn't it uncanny the way a bully can pick an Aspie out of a crowd? You could be the only Autistic in a Peace & Love rally in Shea Stadium* minding your own business and reading your program and one security guy with an attitude would find you in the middle of 60,000 other people, beat you with a night stick and scream at you loud enough to be heard from the stage.
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*For those of you already reaching for the mouse to post a correction, Yes, I know Shea Stadium doesn't exist anymore, it's just an icon for visualization reference.

Last edited by Willard on 04 May 2010, 5:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Ummm... why is everything so WIDE now? lol.

THANK YOU all! (And keep the answers coming if you haven't posted yet.) While we are required to cite as many sources as possible who can back what we are saying with research results...well, I consider you all to be the experts in a much more intimate way and I can not wait to share your feedback with teachers so that it makes a difference for other kids.

And, to address several of you who were concerned that your dx came too late in life to be helpful to this project...no worries. It's actually good. Part of my premise for the project is that most general ed. teachers will be working with kids on the spectrum who are high functioning to the point that they haven't yet received a dx, but they still need extra support.

Willard's post. That horizontal line needs to be broken up.

1) At age 5 I was diagnosed with AD/HD and was in speech therapy from first to fith grade at school. But I have trouble socially and show a lot of Aspergers symptoms

2) I had a teacher that was very determined to get me to understand multiplecation tables better so she had me write my multiplecation tables 200 x each. I never forgot them again lol . She also took the time to work on my hand writing making it more legitable. She also managed to teach me better writing skills making me a better writer. I have very fond memories of her classes and retained a lot of what she taught me. She also told me how to fake eye contact with the other students by looking at their mouths or foreheads.

3) One of my teachers would get right on top of me to teach me something. We had chairs that were conected to the desk and she always blocked my way out of the chair. All I could think of the whole time is she is in my face forcing me to make eye contact with her and is blocking my way out. I was always verbally abusive towards her and disruptive in her class so I could go to the hallway to be alone. I saw her at the supermarket when I was in my 30's and I told her I think I have Aspergers and her getting in my face made me fearfull of her class to the point I could not consetrate on what I was doing.. She told me that she and the other special education teachers suspected I had some form of autism. I told her if she suspected why did she get in my face or made so much contact with me. I also told her I did not learn a damned thing in her class and she should not be teaching the learning disabled. All I remember of her class was discomfort and aggrevation.

she tried that with another kid in class who was a diagnosed with some form of autism, she got in his face blocking his escape out of the chair so he spit in her mouth. I never laughed so hard. My mother now works at the school as a part of the cleaning staff and she asked around about her for me and she left the school to further her education my only hope is not to be special education teacher.

Last edited by Todesking on 06 May 2010, 12:17 am, edited 1 time in total.

Ha ha, see I thought anxiety25 was inferring that the topic was becoming wide ranging, but she was being literal!

lol, I hadn't even thought about it being interpreted that way until you said it! haha, that is great!

22, Asperger's



For me to answer this question, I would need to view an alternate universe where I actually had a teacher that did at least one thing that was helpful to me.



I have to limit this question to just one thing? I had bad experiences with teachers in school. They graded my work unfairly, and they had one standard for me and a different standard for everybody else.

Since you're studying to be a teacher, you're probably thinking that teachers never grade work unfairly, so let me give you a few examples. When I was in elementary school, we had a geography project, and we had to choose our own project. I chose to draw a map of South Dakota, and another student also chose to draw a map of South Dakota. My map showed all the cities and towns in South Dakota, as well as county boundaries. My map showed all of the lakes and rivers in the state. I also showed all of the highways, with a different line for interstates, four lane divided highways, and two lane highways, as well as the shields for the highway markers. The other student's map showed only cities and towns, and she put Sioux Falls in the wrong part of the state! I got a "C-" on my map, and the girl who didn't know where Sioux Falls was got an "A" on her project.

Then there was our civics lesson in elementary school. The teacher gave us information on a fictional country, and we had to write up a constitution and system of laws for it. I thought I came up with all of the important stuff, like an executive, legislative, and judicial branch. My plan had standards for electricity, I decided my country would use 100hz / 10 volt power. (No country does, but I like even numbers.) I came up with standards for highway building and a numbering plan for my highway system, for example, two lane roads would have a lane width of 3.5 m, shoulder width of 1.5 m, and a design speed of 100 km/h, and I came up with weight and size limits for different types of vehicles. Not only that, but I drew up all of the road signs for the fictional country. I also designed license plates and driver licenses for different classes of vehicles. I also included frequency allocation for TV and radio broadcasting, as well as a format for TV, which was 945 lines of resolution and 50 frames per second. When I was done, my constitution was twenty pages long. Everyone else had a one page long constitution and somehow I got the lowest grade in the class on that project. The teacher told me I think of things nobody else in the world thinks of. I don't even remember what the point of that exercise was. I HATED civics class. I didn't understand the political spectrum until last month when someone I chat with on-line explained it to me in a language I could understand.

So, teachers graded my work unfairly. In my school, we had a rule that tattling wasn't allowed. There was an exception to the rule, however. If it was someone else tattling on me, that was OK. I just wasn't allowed to tattle on anyone else.

I grew up in a parochial school. That's part of the reason why I dumped Christianity as a religion. My teachers ripped on me in class every chance they got. One day in religion class the teacher was discussing the passage that says something like "I would rather be a gatekeeper in heaven than a big shot in hell" (That's my paraphrase.) Then the teacher told the class that when I died and went to heaven, I'd be cleaning toilets for eternity. I have no plans to go to heaven. I'm not interested in cleaning toilets. All of my friends are going to hell, so that's where I'm planning on going.

I once asked the teacher why he was unfair to me, and he told me he was trying to teach me that life isn't fair. However, he saw no reason to teach anyone else the same lesson.

If you're interested in dealing with Aspie students, just look at the teachers I had and DON'T be like them.

Actually I was just reviewing my post and I noticed I wrote "in a language I could understand." at the end of the third paragraph. sometimes, our "language" is as foreign to you as your "language" is to us.

23, Asperger's syndrome.

My librarian once gave me a free library bag. That's about it really.

Singled me out if it looked like I wasn't paying attention.

Once was doing poorly with my work so the teacher constantly hovered over me because of it, until I actually picked up my game a bit.

I once got pulled out of sick bay by my P.E teacher, who also made me run laps for being inactive.

There was this one teacher who ripped pages out of my exercise book because I wrote messy, or sometimes didn't draw up the margin straight enough.

One teacher gave snide comments like 'you have no sense of humor' - imagine being literal thinking and being told that.

Being called slow.

Being told I dressed sloppy.

Oh sorry, didn't realise you meant write one thing. Well you can choose one from the list.

1. Your age at diagnosis and specific diagnosis
44 - self diagnosed - Asperger's - mainstream education.

2. One thing a teacher or teachers did that was helpful to you.
Did not ask me to speak out in class [such as reading aloud an essay written about my special interest].

3. One thing a teacher or teachers did that created problems for you.
Moving the seating plan weekly relative to your score in a weekly exam at age 8.
This meant you could end up with the sunlight in your eyes one week and seated next to the boiling hot heating system the next.