Asperger/Gifted School. Would you have wanted to be in one?

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I wasn't diagnosed when I was at school so I didn't have the opportunity to go to such classes or schools. My intelligence was never questioned by teachers. At primary school I was often given extra work but struggled socially and so my academic needs were often ignored. At middle school I was lumped in classes with the kids who had learning disabilities and/or emotional problems, I became depressed and just stopped trying to do my best. By the time I went to high school I didn't care about my education anymore. Although I was in one of the three classes for the "highly intelligent" students of my year I didn't even try to do the work and most of the time just day dreamed through the lessons. I was even more depressed because I was still undiagnosed, getting bullied every single day by the students and teachers and finding the school work pointless and repetitive.

After all of that I can say YES, if I was diagnosed I would have really liked to go to a Asperger/gifted school, or even just a class for those students within a regular school. Maybe then I wouldn't have thrown away my educational opportunities at the age of 14.

No,the only thing I've wanted is for my parents to have taken me out to homeschool me faster and with an unschooling approach from the beginning. I was labled a bothersome brat by the school staff and treated like a terrioist. If anything went wrong, something broken, someone hurt or the appocolypse, Jesse did it. The same things would eventualy happen at a new school so I think the homeschooling was the best thing ever. I had to stop for a while due to illness and am just getting back into the cycle but if I was in public school or even a private school, I might never have gotten back on my feet.


Homeschooling was the only thing that could have worked for me. Even with a private school with the best knowledge of AS who has saints for teachers, you are still a slave to someone else's schedule. I needed to be allowed to make my own desicions before I could really truely focus on school work.

YES

I would have loved a gifted school. The "honors" classes at my school were a joke. When I was a teenager, I had the chance to attend a gifted camp, which I loved, and I ended up attending a very rigorous, selective college, which I also loved. Being among your peers is wonderful, because you are no longer "the smart one"- everyone is smart, and you can talk about things which would get you weird looks in other company. School life is a lot less stressful, because you don't have to hide how much easier certain things are for you and pretend like you thought the test was much harder than it was. Plus, I had an easier time finding people of the same temperament as me, who liked doing the same types of things (like obsessing about certain TV shows). I have not had the same experience before or since.