How welcoming is the educational profession?

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People have different brain architectures. People on the spectrum tend to have visual-spatial right brain dominance and local connectivity dominance. A recent set of studies indicate the population as a whole has 60% visual-spatial right brain dominance, but only 14% of high school teachers have visual-spatial right brain dominance.

How welcoming is the educational profession to people on the spectrum?

"They" say that I'm a great engineer, but a lousy teacher. It seems simple enough: teachers teach, students learn, and everyone else is happy.

But no two teachers use the exact same methods, no two student have the exact same learning styles, and no one else is happy because (more often than not) there is no one best way to get every child to graduate except to give a "pass" to all of them.

Never mind the fact that every political, religious, and philosophical community wants only their subjects to be taught; never mind the fact that most schools are underfunded for teaching (but not for administrating); never mind the fact that an ideal class size is in the single-digit range and teachers are often saddled with the burden of teaching thirty or more students at a time; and never mind the fact that children who want to learn are bullied into mediocrity by others students.

Designing and maintaining a traffic-control system for a major metropolitan area is easy for me - Teaching is just too damned difficult.

In short:

Those who can't, teach.
Those who can't teach, teach physical education.
Those who can't teach physical education, end up in school administration.
Those that can't run a school, end up as politicians.

Those who can, do.

I don't think it's welcoming at all. If the education system was run by a predominant number of people on the spectrum it would be totally different.
Well, I went to school in the seventies, so I really have no idea of what it's like now. But I would have liked it to be a more subdued environment with lots of quiet nooks to hide in.
With the number of students per class these days, though, it must be more just maintaining control rather than learning.

I have to agree. It's not welcoming at all, at least not in Ontario where I am from. Not just for people with AS, but for just about anyone who's not already a teacher. The market for teachers has been super-saturated since 2003 (I got my B. Ed. in 2004 - terrible timing .) Personally, having taught for the past seven years (I had to leave Ontario in order to do so), I have to say that I don't think it's a good fit for people with AS, unless you have a real passion for it. Still, if I hadn't have gone into teaching, I probably would never have found out that I have AS and would still be wondering what the heck was wrong with me.

Here in New York/New Jersey region the education field has not welcoming for anybody on the spectrum or not. The teachers or more specifically their unions were blamed for tanking the economy and there was a price to be paid. They don't really teach they teach to the tests. They don't create their curriculum their curriculum is laid out for them down to what is to taught each day. And the technicalities and legalities have exploded as has the corresponding paperwork. Add to that you have the helicopter parents, the success of the "dropouts" Steve Jobs/Bill Gates leading some to believe the whole formal education idea might be overrated, and oh yeah and outside possibly that your school might be the next Sandy Hook.

There was an educator/Journalist that published in creative computing many years ago by the name of Thornburg who said early on that in order fo education to change, the profession must break the stranglehold that the Prussians imposed on education (Teacher's lecture, student's keep silent and do the work assigned to them without question) over the past 200 years. Unfortunately, I haven't heard of a better system of teaching children. Some of the Computer Based Education systems I've seen in the past 30 years are nothing more than a variation on the Prussian System.

Do you believe there is not a good fit for the activity of teaching or the fit issue has more to do with the Education Organization?

Teaching is awesome.
The school system sucks balls and makes it hard to actually teach the kids.

Wrong.

The school system sucks UNION balls and makes it hard to actually teach the kids.

The teachers' unions will not allow any effective means of measuring teacher performance. This results in crappy teachers getting tenure. Then those teachers do all that they can to keep the really good teachers from getting tenure.

I know that my oppinion is outdated and against all the supercool trends: But I absolutely hated that "Oh so modern"-project teaching style with disturbances all the time, by students asking in between, and knows hell what kind of s**t.

Yes, I DO LIKE THAT PREUSSIAN STYLE. You actually receive informations, because of the teacher being able to present it to you fluid, without getting disturbed all the time. You are taught something. You dont get distracted all the time. Teachers DO have a concept and dont tangle around from explaing an example, writing something down to get disturbed by a student asking something, leading again to the teacher completely loosing the topic and all that s**t. First he explained, then he wrote it down, and AFTER you finished that, THEN you were given time to ask questions.

Preussian system isnt an outdated one, that should be exchanged by another form, that will again suit only some part of the students, while it will terrorize the others ones. There simply is no ultimative schoolform fitting all. If you want to please as much students as possible, you simply have to offer different schools, that offer different teaching concepts, so that you can choose the one with the teaching concepts that fits to you. That is the only modern concept, that can exist. Exchanging an schoolform, that is outdated because of it only suiting a certain amount of student, with another schoolform that will be outdated as well, because of it only suiting a certain amount of students, is simply senseless.

While I agree with you, Fnord, about teacher unions, it's not the only reason.

We have teacher unions because of all the corrupt practices school boards have shoved on teachers over the past few centuries. For example, let's look at tenure. The only reason, at least here in PA, tenure exists is because of religious intolerance. For example, northeastern PA (Scranton/Wilkes-Barre/Hazleton) the population is primarily Slavic. A good many of that ethnicity are Roman Catholic. The teachers are also primarily Roman Catholic, as well as the administration and the school board. Election time comes around, and the current school board is voted out and replaced by new members that are Protestant. What's the first order of business of the new board? FIRE ALL THE CATHOLIC TEACHERS AND ADMINISTRATORS AND REPLACE THEM WITH PROTESTANT TEACHERS AND ADMINISTRATORS!! !! !! It didn't matter how effective a teacher was, you were fired, if the incoming school board was of a different religious practice.

Second, I saw a sign on the marquee of a martial arts studio here in Red Lion that really sums it up: "Stop blaming teachers and start parenting." The United States is the only country I know of where teachers don't get any respect, compared to Japan, where teachers are held in higher esteem than parents.

When I was still running a private music studio back in the 1980's, I fought with not only other music teachers, but with parents. My methods were unorthodox, to say the least, a lot of kids got what I was attempting to teach by my methods. Unfortunately, I got so damned disillusioned by the parents, who ranged from those that had their children so overbooked that the kid had little time to practice, let alone do homework or sleep, to those parents that wanted their kid to be the next Benny Goodman, even though the kid had no interest in playing an instrument, to the real heartbreakers: the kid who had parents that were only interested in getting drunk, watching TV, and ignoring the kid. It got so damn depressing, I finally closed my studio, and went to grad school to become a librarian, at the recommendation of the head of the music department at the university where I tried and failed to get my teacher certification.

The Prussian style of education would be fine if the United States were still a mainly an industrial society. The United States, for all intents and purposes, is no longer an industrial economy, since most industry has been moved offshore. Teachers no longer have the luxury of telling a student "You vill learn this subject UND YOU VILL LIKE IT!! !! !!"

They dont need to tell that students. Learn it or leave it. Its idiotic to force people into class, to learn something they are not interested in. In my school, the rule was simple: You are not forced to do anything...because the school was intersted in having the students, that WANTED to learn something. The others simply dropped themselves out, by their bad marks.

Yes, the formal education system has complex ills.

Given the very high percentage of left brainers formal K-12 education system, as compared to the general population. (This is strongly reversed in higher education.) What I was looking for was confirmation or not, that people on the spectrum have a desire to teach and can be good at teaching, but are less welcomed by the formal education system. This thread has confirmed it. Thanks.

The next question would be how would people on the spectrum do it differently to meet the needs of children with different brain architectures, learning styles, and needs.