Anyone else feel cheated by the school system?

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I remember when my mother taught me how to multiply and divide in kindergarten. I was also taught some basic pre-algebra problems, such as 4+x=9, 9-y=2, or 3x=9. I learned of squares and square roots and how to do problems involving them at age 7 1/2. Many times the school system said I was intelligent enough to skip ahead but said I was far too emotionally immature. I loathe having such an uneven intellect. I couldn't even have access to honors courses until I was in high school.

It's not about having an uneven intellect, it's about them backwards rationalizing "what's best for you". The truth is you should have been able to skip, or if you were motivated enough should have done it on your own. MIT and others now offer university courses online for free. The truth is school is not geared to teach people how to be self-motivated and 'do it themselves', which is a real failing.

I agree. Being held back for social factors is assuming that you'll catch up if you're held back--which just isn't true for an Aspie. Oh, you may catch up to the second graders; but you may be fifteen when you do it--does that mean you stay in second grade until then? You may be in twelfth grade rather than tenth when you have the emotional maturity of an eight-year-old, but does that really make much of a difference? It's developmental. You can't hurry it; you can only support it; and there's absolutely no support in having a kid stay back and begin to hate school.

They should let you use your strengths; and if they are academic, then they should provide you with actual education, rather than six hours of sitting in class listening to what you already know. Forcing "emotionally immature" children to do that, rather than letting them do what they're good at is ridiculous.

The only drawback I can see is that in a higher grade, the bullies will be meaner.

I'd home-school a kid like the OP, actually. I got lucky and was home-schooled sometimes.

I learned more in the library than at school. Traditional lecture-style teaching does NOTHING for me and my iffy auditory processing.

Last edited by Callista on 30 Nov 2008, 2:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I suspect that many primary or lower schools can not cope with the child which has a talent in one area. The biggest problem I see is that a child might have a maths or science ability which in their early teens might match a typical undergrad in that subject but at the same time the child might be "average" or even below average in other subjects.

I think that education needs to be balenced, while a person might have a special interest they need to know things other than just the special interest. Even if they are going to get a job doing their special interest.

Yeah. I would find motivation in things outside school.

I wasn't left behind, although I wasn't allowed to skip ahead like they would have let me had I been emotionally mature. It made me loathe every single minute of school. I actually perform much worse when I'm not challenged because I neglect to even try if the material is too simple. I strongly prefer fast paced math and science courses to slow painfully drawn out classes in which the teacher constantly reiterates to the point of annoyance.

I'm talking about self-learning - i.e. being able to know how to go about teaching yourself something, most people have stuff spoonfed them and don't have any idea how to go about teaching themselves things.

Unfortunately, I don't know how to learn things that are spoon-fed to me. This can be rather a drawback when people expect you to do exactly that.

Obviously so; you need to learn in all areas. The problem with the usual school system setup is that a child who is 10th-grade in math, 5th-grade in English, and 2nd-grade in physical education can't properly fit in at any of those levels. They assume that everybody learns the same subjects at the same rates, and that just isn't true, especially when you're dealing with Spectrum type kids.

Me in 5th grade: 10th grade reading; 4th grade math; kindergarten social skills, a toddler's self-regulation. Needless to say, I fit in nowhere. I caught up in math around the time we started algebra, in the 6th grade, when arithmetic and speed weren't so important and logic started to be a lot more useful. Currently my social skills may have progressed to a 12 year old's level, my self-regulation is maybe as good as a six year old's, and I can read and understand anything written in my languages.

Point being: I'll never have even skills, and if they'd held me back for math, I'd have been in big trouble because I'd never have discovered that I was good at what people think is harder than math. I still got stuck into business math in the 9th grade, unfortunately; I suspect they put me in that rather than algebra because I'm female and they were fundamentalist Christians who think females can't do math--by then I'd racked up an A and a B in math to prove I'd caught up so my early records really shouldn't have deterred them...

One reason I passed high school with good grades: Untimed tests, thanks to my individualized type high school program. Slow processing speed wasn't that much of a problem when you already knew what they were teaching you (except for math, obviously); but by high school I was starting to learn some new things and I'm pretty sure I'd have flunked out if not allowed to take two hours on a test when I needed to.

I performed fantastically in all academic subjects but was socially below average, hence the tremendous problem. At age 12, my reading comprehension was that of a college freshmen and my writing samples were that of the average college junior (I was tested by a school psychologist). I solved trigonometry and statistics problems and read college textbooks for fun. I was always experimenting with my own chemistry set and reading Hawking and Asimov yet couldn't comprehend the simplest social cues nor could I ever hope to form normal interactions with my peers(interestingly enough, I had better social skills from age 5-11 than age 12-14, but then again I was physically ill at the time).

> Being held back for social factors is assuming that you'll catch up if you're held back--which just isn't true for an Aspie. Oh, you may catch up to the second graders; but you may be fifteen when you do it--does that mean you stay in second grade until then? You may be in twelfth grade rather than tenth when you have the emotional maturity of an eight-year-old, but does that really make much of a difference? It's developmental. You can't hurry it; you can only support it; and there's absolutely no support in having a kid stay back and begin to hate school.

You said it.

I totally lived through this -- college level reading in Grade 7 and kindergarten social skills, if that. (My social skills were inadeqate in kindergarten, as I still painfully recall.) And then bored out of my mind, yet not encouraged to do anything extra, and not knowing how to direct my interests to make something of myself in the world, just getting swamped in a sea of social inadequacy. I still pay the price for that pretty much daily.

Yes, that's sort of what I meant; when I find the motivation (something really difficult to come by these days) I latch on to subject like a leech. They become almost perfect puzzles, part of an enormous puzzle that is my world (in the sense of my upbringing, culture and database).

Actually, there is research that suggests that keeping students at a "traditional" level do not cause any fewer social-related issues.

I know of a boy with Autism who is 16-years old and in the sixth grade with 11-year olds...and it really creates more "social"
problems for him.

Double negative confusion

Palpatine: do you mean, "It cannot be proven that children kept at a "traditional level" have fewer social-related issues than those not kept with their peers"?

Or something along those lines... (I know a double-negative is not actually logically equivalent to a positive where statistics is concerned...)

They don't let NTs skip ahead either. I could have finished high school in 2 years, but public school is not set up to handle that. I should have been homeschooled.

Too bad. I was stuck with my less-intelligent peers too. Just because they were the same age as me, didn't make them any nicer to me! And I don't think I benefited socially, either.
My husband lucked out. He was in some kind of school where they had three grades together in the same classroom, and within that the kids were taught according to skill level. So the better-at-math fourth graders would be in the same math class as the not-quite-as-good-at-math sixth graders, for instance. (He also got to do some independent study type of classes.) That sounds like a better system to me than "Riverotter has to sit there bored while the other kids try to understand this concept...yet again."