Auties, Aspies, and other CloudCuckooLanders!

I guess I accidentally wrote a rant on public education right before I'm supposed to go to school. RIP :^P

From my experience, the gifted and talented program caters to the Courtenay La Grange-Vanderbilts of the nation in that it's basically a club for well-adjusted kids who are in a minimum of five extracurriculars and hope to become lawyers/politicians someday.

IE Ps at my school are not set up for twice-exceptional students. They are basically for kids with severe literacy difficulties who would not be able to graduate without a lot of accommodations.

There was a group for "troubled" kids that I was asked to join— people there ranged from having abusive parents to depression. Naturally being surrounded by sad people talking about their problems... did not lessen my own problems, to say the least! This is going to sound really cynical and terrible but I believe the primary function of this group is to locate the potential school shooters and try to make them feel a part of something before they go off the handle. None of those kids would have shot anyone, I am absolutely certain, but The System doesn't understand people as anything but a list of traits.

Unless your character goes to a really good school, chances are she would not be well-served by the programs in place. I've seen a lot of my friends get shafted because they're smart but not Clever and Ambitious, or they're struggling but not in a way that affects their grades. To be frank, GT and IEP and intervention groups are ploys put in place to keep people graduating. At my school, at least, they care more about the overall numbers than the needs of an individual student.

I'm twice exceptional myself, and I've written a novel manuscript with a 2E protagonist. I have a ton to say and I promise I'll provide you with a huge rant after I'm done with school today and have the time...

Ah, sorry for forgetting to reply. And sorry about the rant :/

SO anyway, the hardest things about being a 2e (twice exceptional) kid, is actually getting identified as gifted in the first place. It's not even just 2e kids with this problem, kids who are just plain gifted struggle with the same thing. The problem is that a lot of teachers and educators subscribe to the stereotypes of giftedness, instead of taking time to learn how giftedness actually presents itself. Of course all gifted kids are different and there are no completely universal traits, but the some of the most common traits found in gifted kids are the exact opposite of what people believe. For example, the gifted tend to be highly sensitive and highly emotional, much more than the average person. So much for The Spock. There's also a tendency for misbehaving in class and at home, due to increases energy and the fact that you're bored out of your skull. So not really the teacher's pet. One of the most worrying traits is the tendency for academic underachievement. School literally bores you to tears. Every minute you're there you feel about to explode. The teacher spends weeks and weeks on the same damn thing and you're about to have a meltdown if they spend one more second on this stupid thing. If school is this physical painful, you're not going to be very motivated to succeed in it. So you stop paying attention in class, stop doing your homework, start acting out. This just hammers the last nail in the coffin. There's no way your teacher is going to think you, a hyperactive, overemotional, failing student, is gifted. They don't think you're gifted. They think the exact opposite. They think you're slower than your peers. It's possible you'll go though your entire school career this way.

This cute little video explains it pretty well

From my experience, the only way you will get tested is if you misbehave so badly that they have to start testing you for disorders. This is where you'll finally get your IED, and your aptitude tests (They're not testing you for giftedness, though. They're trying to gauge how impaired you are.)

Unfortunately, this does not guarantee you much of anything. You will have you disability catered to somewhat. Extra time on tests, maybe an aide in your classroom, that sort of thing. But your giftedness, the other half of you, may not be brought up again. It's the stupid assumption in US public schools that the gifted can "fend for themselves" in education and don't need any special help. Gifted classes, people think, are just a luxury. People even protest the idea of gifted education, because it makes some students feel superior and get ahead of their peers. These people don't understand how necessary programs like these are. Being gifted in school sucks, if I haven't made that clear enough already. You are bored to literal tears, you completely lose your motivation and drive to learn (which may very well last for life!), you become filled with constant anxiety over how painful school is. Gifted classes give you the same rights every other student has: To learn new things on a regular basis and to have your emotional needs taken care of.

Once you get to high school you are not a happy camper. You could go in a few directions. For me, I finally realized that I even though I hated school, I had to get my shit together. So I started getting mostly A's and some B's and actually appearing smart to teachers for the first time in my life, despite still having a terrible record with things like homework. For others, their grades get even worse and they drop out. Still more just float by in the middle somewhere, getting B's and C's and appearing unremarkable to their teachers.

Most of your learning is done at home. School is a chore, outside of school is where you do your real learning. I walked to the public library after school every day and poured through encyclopedia articles. I got lost on Wikipedia for hours and took free online courses on college level subjects. This was at the expense of not having time to do my actual schoolwork, which despite being several grade levels below what I was learning on my own time, I still had to dedicate some time to actually completing. I was a marvel to teachers. I got A's on all my tests, yet didn't do any of my homework. Since homework counted for a huge part of my grades in high school, I would end up getting low grades despite performing the highest on tests. This perplexed my teachers, because homework was just graded on completion so all I had to do was just write something down and I got credit and straight A's.

School continued to perplex me. I couldn't understand how we had to learn things more than once. For example, in eight grade we learned about the 60's and Vietnam War. But then my junior year, we learned about the 60's and Vietnam War again. Learning the same facts two times. I was even more confused to see that the other kids in my class had actually forgotten everything, and really needed to be taught again. I ended up having a high level of knowledge about a lot of subjects, both due to my independent studying and my inability to forget what I learned in school. I refer to them as my "knowledge pockets." I could be discussing anything, and suddenly one will show up. The conversation will switch to Cold War history, or Greek cuisine, or molecular biology, or turn-of-the-century Vaudeville, or whatever random thing, and I'll suddenly go into Infodump mode without even realizing beforehand that I knew anything about the subject.

Of course, this whole learning things on my own method came back to bite me in the ass when I ended up having to retake everything in college because I didn't have any academic credit to show for the things I learned.

Thanks for the info, Cail. I appreciate it. And... holy. Man. School must be an intellectual hell for most gifted students, at least in the US.

I remember being like that in pretty much most of grade school, lel.

edited 13th Jan '17 11:43:31 PM by fdiaperhead

I mean for all the fetishizing "geniuses" get in US society (there's a reason The Big Bang Theory is one of the most popular shows here, and why intelligence is always the first thing parents brag about when talking about their kids), they are absolute shit at cultivating them

Ugh, I've made the decision to contact my scholar program adviser, whom I absolutely abhor. She acts like she's my savoir, supporting the poor autistic girl through school. She's even told me things like, "If you didn't have me, you might have been thrown out of school for the outburst" (Actually, no. It wasn't even an "outburst" until you made a huge deal out of it. And no they were never going to expel me over it.) She also acts like I'm this amazing inspiration, just for showing up to school. And every time I tried to argue with her she'd argue back, "But you are an inspiration! Don't put yourself down like that!" and lecture me about self esteem. Ugh....

Why am I contacting her? Because I know, for a fact, that I am going to get the most glowing, lauding recommendation letter in the history of recommendation letters from her. She goes on about how "great" I am every time she opens her mouth. She even tells other people about how "great" I am when I'm not even there. So I am sacrificing my dignity in order to get a good recommendation for the position I want. I feel dirty.

That's just... ableist. Looks like she feels that helping a person she percieves to be less able than her makes her some kind of hero. Ableist people with hero complexes are just pathetic, even if they're authority figures.

Especially when they're authority figures.

I really think she views me in a Sheldon Cooper-like light. She's always telling me that I'm "one of the smartest people she's ever met." But I think she assumes that my social skills are much more impaired than they actually are, and I need to guidance to "come out of my shell" and "survive the social aspects of school." But I already am... I have friends, I'm in clubs, I go to parties sometimes. I'm not a helpless little puppy and/or robot that can't understand human interaction

Nuance. It's something many people have a hard time with.

The stereotype of course is that autistics are the ones who have problems with nuance.

But allistics certainly do, a hell of a lot.

Anyway, I do think it's at least an improvement that people recognize intelligence and disability can coexist in the same person. Before, they used to not recognize that at all. I saw a review of Rain Man that said "One moment he can't even tie his own shoes, and the next he says something profound. Sorry, but I don't buy it." It pissed me off that this person couldn't recognize that these two things were not even related. They don't use the brain the same way.

People do tend to have a linear view of ability, based on the neurotypical way people learn. You have to complete one tier before you can move on to the other. Neurotypicals learn to tie their shoes before they learn to say profound things, therefore you have to learn to tie your shoes first. If you can't, you can't move on past that tier and do anything more advanced.

The school system is built around this linearity. And yet, allistics themselves do not learn in this fashion perfectly. There's ability variance in just about anyone. It's just that with "twice exceptional" people, it's more extreme.

Speaking of nuance, I'd say that sometimes this is reversed. I am frequently being told to not to complicate things. I am exactly hard wired to do that because I often get accused to not think before act, yet when I do exactly that I was accused of thinking too much. It's really confusing and frustrating.

When I was in third grade, during reading class, I'd put the textbook up so it couldn't be seen by the teacher, and open to a random page and just start reading. I was upset by how sloooowwww everyone was going. Once, two kids behind me said, "He's on the wrong page!" "He knows!"

In sixth grade, we had current events. Find an event in the news, present it to the class, and talk about it. Sounded like too much work to me, so I came up with a perfect lazy solution: only do sports articles. I have no interest in sports, and actively hated them as a kid (I don't hate them now, but I still dislike certain aspects of sports culture). But reporting on sports meant not having to use my brain. It meant avoiding having to do extra work. Instead, "this happened, then this happened," and there's no discussion or attempt to analyze what the events in the news article mean - which to be honest, I was terrible at back then. I have far better understanding about what things mean now, but that was a skill that developed more slowly for me than for most people.

My dad, a man whose created algorithms to analyze baseball statistics would disagree with you on that "not having to use your brain" part. I actually know a lot of autistic people into baseball and other statistic-heavy sports, like football

True, though I meant I didn't need to describe anything in detail. I just half-assed it to get by. Whereas in a news article about major events, we'd have to analyze them. It was something I was more interested in later in life, but didn't care about at all when I was a kid.

Britain's criminal justice system doesn't know what to do about autism

Or the US's, I assume.

I can totally see that. I had my "tics" misinterpreted all the time as a kid. Fuck it.

Somehow I don't see the public or politicians in the US caring about this issue.

I believe I mentioned before that there was a study done on the human brain that looked at the brains of many men and women and found that certain traits are more common in men and certain ones are more common in women. But they looked at the brains and found that only 10% of them were "all masculine" or "all feminine". The rest had a mixture of masculine and feminine traits, and a small percentage contained more opposite-sex than same-sex traits!

They even asked other researchers to look at the brain scans and guess what sex each brain belonged to. And these other researchers, despite knowing the general differences between the sexes when it comes to their brains, guessed wrong a lot of the time!

The researchers moved on to asking men and women stereotypical questions like "Do you like fashion?" (some men do!) "Do you like a clean house?" (a lot of men do) and things like that. Then they took the answers and handed them to other researchers without telling them which sex gave what answers - and even those researchers guessed wrongly a lot of the time! When it comes to personality traits, both sexes have some elements of the other sex!

And yet much of society is based around the idea of "boys do this, girls do this". Even a simple change to "boys are *more likely* to do this, but not all; girls are *more likely* to do this, but not all" would be both more realistic, and rather radical.

One question that study raises is: in heterosexual relations, who is compatible with whom? Does that mean that a man with a small percentage of feminine traits and a woman with a small percentage of masculine traits, would be perfect for each other? Or a man who's mostly feminine and a woman who's mostly masculine?

How about a man who's 100% masculine and a woman who's 100% feminine?

But let's say this. Let's say the man who's 100% masculine loves to explore the great outdoors and go hiking and do "manly" stuff in the woods, and is looking for a woman who shares those traits. If that's the case, he's looking for a woman with some "masculine" traits. Because he needs that hobby compatibility. Thus he's not actually looking for a 100% feminine woman, because that could actually be the sort of person he can't share his enjoyment of the outdoors with.

I saw on a forum an autistic woman saying that people who know her and her (also autistic) husband joke that she's the husband and he's the wife. But it's an example of compatibility working like it should - they're compatible, and it works. They fit.

I just hate how disability discrimination is never allowed into the discussion alongside other forms of discrimination. Like according to the types of discrimination that do get discussed, a white, heterosexual, Christian male does not face any discrimination. But what if this white, heterosexual, Christian man is autistic, or has a learning disability, or an intellectual disability, or any other thing? Then sure as hell he'll be discriminated against. But society won't address it or even see it, because he fits the four qualifications for being privileged and therefore should have it easy.

Yeah that's annoying.

What you said reminds me of the "CHECK YER PRIVILEGE" thing that SJWs always screech and urge people to do.

Also, the 2017 Chicago torture incident that happened recently, where a mentally disabled white man was kidnapped and verbally and physically abused by four black people.

edited 23rd Jan '17 6:15:10 PM by fdiaperhead

Yeah, I heard about that. Almost all the reports I read treated race as the main, or only, issue though, instead of disability. It's about time people realized just how damn high the rate of being the victim of assault or other crimes is for the disabled.

edited 23rd Jan '17 6:23:04 PM by Cailleach

I'm going to train two disciples of mine next month regarding Wangan Midnight Maximum Tune. After playing for 10 years I think I should start impart my knowledge and skills to future players. For context, it is an arcade racing sim and we are using AT instead of MT most players are using.

Any advice on how to effectively train them would be welcomed.

I'm gonna be honest, I've never heard that outside of joking stereotypes.

Ehh, I've seen it, though admittedly only in the really crazy parts of the internet.

I too am told about these extremists that are said to exist everywhere, yet never meet them anywhere online.