Lectures and Public School vs. no lectures and cyberschool

Post Reply New Topic

There's a very slim chance that we might be moving from the US to the UK, and my son has just begun high school here. It's not going that well, and so he would probably prefer some kind of cyber school if we did actually move.

I have a question --

Much of what is difficult for my son is paying attention in class, and especially paying enough attention to a lecture to either a) write notes, or b) get verbal information that will end up being on a test.

If one is in cyber school, are there lectures?
Would said lectures be easier to pay attention to because they are on the computer, or one is at home with no distractions?

My gut feeling (meaning I have no real basis for comparison) is that maybe cyber school will be better, and easier to complete for an aspie, because it would seem to be as follows: READ the book, TAKE THE TEST. READ the book, TAKE THE TEST.

I'm sure that's an oversimplification -- but in our experience, if the test is related to stuff in a book, then my son can usually do a good job on the test. If the test is from info from a lecture, my son will not do well at all.

Any insight anyone might have would be great!

I don't know about high school but I've taken some online classes at the university level and they were WAY easier for me. No distractions of sitting in a fluorescent-lit room full of people shifting, shuffling, coughing, rattling papers, whispering to each other, moving, talking, moving, moving, moving. No stress about whether I'm going to get my familiar seat this class or not. No trying to jump into a class discussion so that I get my participation points yet not knowing where or when to jump in, or thinking of something to say and raising my hand only to have someone else say my point before it got to me.

And no bullying! Yay! Yes, I still get bullied sometimes even at the university level. My first online class was an economics class I took online because the economics class I had right before that was a nightmare with people bullying me, grabbing my papers away from me, pretending they were going to punch me in the face but stopping their fist an inch from my face and half the room applauding and cheering when the bullying got so bad that I started to cry. So I decided to take the next class online and I was SO glad I did because there was no more bullying!

Sparrowrose, I cannot believe that you STILL endure bullying at the college level. I noticed that you live in Idaho. Forgive me for making such a wide generalization, but is your bullying due to a "redneck" situation? I have this perception that Idaho is super conservative, which leads me to think redneck, and then I think that only rednecks would be so awful to bully somebody in college. Come out East -- this sort of thing doesn't go on so much out here at the college level!! !

Thank you for your input about why cyber classes would be such an improvement over all that one has to put up with in a regular ed classroom. I just cannot believe that it wouldn't be MUCH MUCH easier.

After your experience, I think I would take MOST of my classes online. I hope things improve. Maybe as you get into higher level classes, you'll be in class with higher level-type people who will be more understanding and not so immature.

I used to live back east. I got bullied at university there, too.

It's not as bad as it could be. In high school I had rocks thrown at me and lost part of my hearing due to being boxed in the ear. I also had bleach thrown on me and was hit with 2x4s in a science class.

University bulllying is all about words and intimidation but I'm not likely to end up with broken bones or hearing loss. I can live with that.

The bullying is actually less here in Idaho than it was back east. But that might also be because I'm older now.

And the bullying was the worst when I was in the 100-level and 200-level undergraduate classes. The specific bullying I described in my earlier post happened about five or six years ago. It's a lot easier now that I'm a graduate student. Bullying at this level is more of the subtle professional undermining that I imagine people deal with in their careers. It can get frustrating and it can make me look bad academically but, well, I'm still here.

I can't believe the thing about the rocks, damn! You could've sued the school and probably made out big for them not trying to quell something like that. Sounds very traumatizing. I've been a bit tramautized by similar but less serious incidents than this. Besides writing a good book that hopefully sells, I don't know what else to tell you unless you have money to see a counselor or if you can use a good one at your school to figure out how to deal with these situations. You can always change schools too, cause one school is not necessarily like another one.

It being high school, it was up to my parents. They went to meetings with the school but nothing was ever done. Pretty typical. My parents went to meetings all through my school years and nothing was ever done. Even when it was teachers who were bullying me, like my fourth grade teacher who made me sit in a box because she said it made her sick to look at me.

I have no idea why my parents didn't make a bigger deal of things or sue anyone. It was a different time (70s and 80s) and I didn't have an accurate diagnosis so everyone just thought I was a "bad" or "troubled" child. I think my parents may have been embarassed of me, thinking others thought they must be bad parents for me to have turned out so badly. I don't know -- perhaps others even openly accused my parents of being inept.

I know my school years were a great low point for my mother. I was reading her diary once and she had charted out times in her life as positive or negative according to how difficult they were for her and my difficulties in school went further into the negative than the death of my older brother at age nine. I think that might begin to explain why my parents didn't fight very hard for me -- they believed I brought everything on myself (I know this because they regularly told me that I brought everything on myself and that people wouldn't bully or harm me if I just wouldn't isnist on standing out all the time) and that had to have some influence on how much motivation they had to take arms in my defense.



Probably. I think I've blocked out a lot of the emotions surrounding events in my childhood.



oh! People don't throw rocks at me now! That was the mid-1980s!

The sorts of things I experience now are the normal things that happen everywhere. There is no escaping basic human nature. People everywhere step on each other to try to reach the top of the pecking order. I just happen to be one among many convenient steps to trod upon. I know better than to believe that there is some magical place where these sorts of clever yet subtle machinations don't occur. If I want to have a career (and I do, because I don't want to spend the rest of my life living below the poverty threshhold on SSI) these sorts of manipulations are just one of the annoyances I have to learn to accept.

Unless you happen to know a university whose grad departments are peopled only by canonized saints? LOL