Organising Awarness at my College

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I've been given a slot to do a speech in a few staff meetings to help teachers to understand the problems people with high functioning ASD face in a school environment. I have been at the school for 5 and a half years since I was 11 and have had fairly minor problems in a way but which have caused some disress such as being forced to answer in class and work with people who I don't know. The school is a catholic school where I do not believe in God and the schools religious education programme is one of the hardest things I have had to deal with becuase I find a lot of the way the school presents their views illogical but I wondered if anyone had any general problems with teachers and school that I could address so my own experiences don't cloud the speech too much and it will be more useful for other people.

It's quite a while away (2 months or so) but its good to be prepared aye

And any tips on speech making would be useful too

I have a story or two to relate, but they might just be horror stories and not all that helpful for your purposes.

This was in third grade so maybe too early for you. Once in a social studies class we were making maps which included labelling them, however my writing has never been very neat. After trying very hard to write neatly I showed the teacher and asked "is this good enough", and I probably sounded annoyed when I said it. I don't remember what she said to me but she soon announced to the class that someone (didn't mention my name, but I knew who she was talking about) asked if their work was "good enough", making me an example of laziness, or something to the class. Now what I meant by is this good enough was that I was having trouble and it was the best I was likely to do, but I guess what she heard was "this is all I'm willing to do, so suck it". I now know that AS sometimes comes with impairments in fine motor control, which explains why my penmanship has never been good. She couldn't have known that and it was just between us who the "bad person" in her story was but even so it was very uncool.
She misinterpreted my words and singled me out in a negative way. Uncool.

Again in third grade. (I think) in math class there was a similar situation. We were divided into "study groups". The groups would take a math quiz and the average score for each group would be the score that everyone in that group would have to meet on a later quiz or (I think this was how it worked) the whole group would fail. Guess what happened? Everyone in my group got a 6 and I got a 5 making me the only one below the average. It was likely a fluke and not me having trouble with something specific (I'm usually good at math), and even if I did what help were a group of third graders going to give?
Again, singled out.

I have one other story I can remember at the moment but it's just another "singled out" story. Those might not be helpful due to them not being in highschool. I might be able to think of something better.

One very different problem than your having to work with people who you don't know example is if you have to work in a group but can pick your own groups, but don't have any friends in the class. While everyone else was hoping to pick there own groups when a group assignment was announced I was hoping we couldn't so I didn't have to approach people and ask to work with them. There's not really a solution to that other than asking every person with Asperger's if they have friends beforehand and set of groups accordingly. Not an ideal solution. Only idea I can think of is like in sports where there's a team captain who picks their players, and have the person who would have been picked last be captain. Works best in sports but not in academics. P.S. I was usually picked third to last because of a real fat guy (it wasn't muscle) and the skinny goth kid.

Hey thanks for your stories, the group idea in particular has made me think about one root thing causing multiple problems. I was going to talk for a little while about how ASD kids feel coming into a new school and how confident they would feel in a new environment, especially if they had negative experiences in primary school - so I was thinking about using a few stories from younger years as well so thanks for those. I think being singled out is important to address because it's used as a punishment by teachers too quickly in my opinion for example I was once shouted at and sent out of a lesson becuse I couldn't say what characteristics people in photographs had . I only know one other person with ASD and I don't know them very well at all so I'd be grateful for any contribution
I might put this in the activism bit to get some help with presentation . . .