Was your education a non-traditional delivery method?

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I'm sry to hear that your needs were mostly NOT met, 6-8 being a happy exception.
School can be brutal for ppl with ASD even without a LD let alone with one.

Excellent points!
Thanks for sharing your knowledge of the up and down-sides of these schools.

I'm pleased to hear of your contentment.
Many ppl NT or ASD hate their jobs, I'm glad it is a good fit for you.

It is only a clerical job, not a professional one. This irritates
me no end.

While not Montessori et al., I attended a Utah public "experimental" elementary school in the late 1960s which used "pod" classrooms, computer-based facility management (intercoms, automated bells, light, etc.), television-based teaching and VCRs, and even filmstrip projects named the "X-Readers" aimed at improving the school's "Look-and-Say" reading method instead of the classic "Phonics" method. Some of these new-teaching styles were proved horrible, but, after completing my X-Reader assignment in minutes (my teacher doubted that I had actually completed the assignment, and told me to do it again), my brief experience with it taught me to speed read, read upside-down and even read backwards simply by playing the filmstrip in different ways. The school was a very well-intentioned place, but within a few years, it reverted to tried-and-true curricula.

Oic, I misunderstood...sry.

Very interesting, thank you!

That's quite all right, Slave.

The job isn't too bad....it just hasn't encouraged me to grow in other ways.

Then again, it might not be the job at all. Maybe I'm the one who has to grow, despite alleged hindrances.

I went to a public school, but it was a hippie alternative charter school. The type of place where your teachers don't really care if you wear your shoes to class. It had its plusses and minuses, but I'm very glad I went. After going to a very traditional middle school, I was burnt out and miserable, and I think by the end of the 8th grade I didn't know how I'd make it through high school if it was like that.

My high school offered a great alternative to the traditional school set up. The school was small, most of the classes were conversation-based instead of lecture-based, and among the students everyone there was sort of a weird, alternative kid, so there was no real social hierarchy. That's a really important point because I was such a sensitive kid, and being on the spectrum I was very socially awkward, so I think in a more conventional school, the normal social hierarchy would've taken a real toll on me.

Academically it really encouraged me to be creative with writing, which is important. My middle school's methods of just having us regurgitate and memorize information was extremely stifling and imagination-killing, but my high school encouraged our creativity. Drawbacks included a very weak math program. The school avoided textbooks, which is a huge problem for math. There was nothing but my own weak notes to refer back to at home. In childhood math was easily my strongest subject. In high school it quickly became my worst, and I've never made the effort to make up for that. Another drawback was that the school was very poorly funded, which impacted extracurriculars. In short, there were none. I imagine if I'd been at a school with more programs I would've learned music, but at my high school it wasn't an option. Finally, the school was really into making posters and giving presentations. The posters seemed ridiculous to me, so I remember one time just pasting my long essay to a poster board in protest. Naturally, a girl who'd done far less work than me got a grade that was the same or better because she'd put colored paper behind the pages she'd typed, which pissed me off.

Overall, I'm very glad I went. But in terms of student success, the school struggled, so I don't know if I'd send my kids there. The school had a 70% graduation rate, compared to the other two nearby high schools that had graduation rates of about 85% to 90%. Only 50% of graduates got any type of formal education after high school. Some classmates used the school's emphasis on personal responsibility to do really interesting things, and they wound up with really amazing careers, or at top schools like MIT and Kenyon. Others I've seen have struggled with homelessness and drug addiction.

I wound up going to a very large, very traditional state school. When I was there I really wanted to go to a small liberal arts college where I would have fit in better, and was only at the large state school because it was the most prestigious affordable in-state college. The first two years were a real struggle socially, but by my junior year I'd adjusted and was really happy there. I don't think I would have had the self-confidence necessary to go to such a large, cold institution if I hadn't gone to my weird hippie high school. I'm now at another large, rather unfriendly institution for grad school, but this time I didn't even look at small liberal arts schools because I knew I needed to choose my grad program for the program quality and name power/prestige.

The advantage of alternative schools is that they nurture unconventional students and give those students self-confidence. The drawback, though, is that I think they don't teach you to deal with mainstream society. Of course, the value of dealing with mainstream society is also questionable, but when I compare myself to some people who went to liberal arts schools, some of them have had real trouble adjusting to the working world. I think I have more success because I was forced to navigate a more conventional school setting. At the same time, one thing I resent about being surrounded by so many conventional people is that it did not really nurture my creative side at all. When I'm surrounded by eccentric artists, musicians, writers, etc. it wakes me up and gets me going. It inspires me. Being around people who don't understand or have any interest in those things can be tedious and soul-crushing. Still, I'm rather happy I went to an affordable in-state school for undergrad, because it means I'm not buried in school debt, and I have some money for grad school. I've met a number of people who blew through too much money going to expensive private schools for undergrad, and are now left without many options, forced to take some pretty low-level jobs that I don't think they thought they'd ever have to resort to.

Hmmm..

food for thought

Great post!! !

May I ask what you're taking in Grad school?

most of my elementary and high school education was with the "correspondence school" while i was in institutions.

they mailed out the work, and i completed it and gave it to the "prop" teachers we had at these institutions and they mailed it back and it went back and forth that way.

other kids did the same, and when they got things wrong, it was the "prop" teachers who were supposed to steward their thinking toward being able to complete the work again.

whatever.

i was not taught in a traditional way when i was at proper normal schools either, because every normal school i went to became aware that i was a problem on day one, and i was usually sat out in the corridor or away from other students. i never lasted long in traditional schools because i found it so much fun to give the teachers the s**ts in a bad way.

Thanks! It's a dual master in foreign policy and journalism. I love writing, but I didn't want to risk trying to make it on just a journalism degree. I've worked a few years in development, so I figured I'd get a foreign policy degree so I can work in international relations as well.

Congrats! I wish you well.

I went to a charter school in Middle School. It was in the same district as the other public schools, but it didn't have to endure the bureaucracy they had to endure. This means we had great teachers, but many of them weren't very accommodating to my "unique" learning style. I wanted to drop out due to personal reasons, but I learned to cope with it and later gained the respect of my classmates.

I attended mainstream school from the age of 4 until I was 12 (primary from age 4 until 11). High school at 11 (normal in England, I should add) and only survived one and a bit years.

Primary school didn't meet my emotional or behavioural needs - I tend to think this was down to doing well with homework and exams (usually in the top three in my year; only person in my school to get level 6 in KS2 maths SATs at the end of year 6), despite the fact every single school report I had from year 1 onwards mentioned that I needed to "daydream less" and "generally behave" (I wasn't a terror, but I did have a tendency to overreact and storm out - which is still a recurring theme).

High school didn't meet my needs in any way, shape or form. I was bullied right from day one and then made to feel like I was the bad one for reporting it - sent to learner support (who were very unsympathetic and didn't provide the support their name suggested they offered), put me in classes with trouble-makers, didn't care that I was having my possessions stolen on an almost weekly basis, didn't seem to understand that as a young carer to an old grandmother, I probably had needed more emotional support than most, and then they threatened to permanently exclude me if I didn't start attending school more (by that point, I'd had enough and was attending classes two days a week at the most). I had a social worker when I did eventually stop going to the school, she got me to a clinical psychologist, but the focus was all on getting over the bullying, not on the depression and social phobia I so obviously had (that didn't get diagnosed until I was 19).

I was home schooled for about three years - by proper teachers, I might add, provided to us by the local education authority. I got five GCSEs, but certainly not at the grades I probably would have gotten if I'd been sent to a decent school in the first place, and not to a school that was good in the 1970s - for perspective, I was sent there in 2003, even though my cousin (three years older) had received a less than adequate eduction there and didn't even finish his GCSEs.

Now I'm 24 and attending a "conventional" further education college, doing something I enjoy - which is a major step forward. I've not been in formal education since I was 18 (at least not successfully).

Most of what I've learned up until now has been off my own back, so to speak. I mean, I retain facts quite well but only when it's something I'm interested in. I'm interested in society and how people interact, so I'm studying social sciences. I hated school education (the National Curriculum in particular) because it didn't stimulate me whatsoever. I learned the English language (how to spell, use punctuation and form sentences, etc.) pretty early on in life, I didn't really need to take classes in it, they were of little value to me. I only really enjoyed maths because it was all about numbers - which I love.

My educational journey has been an odd one, not to mention a long one, and not entirely conventional.