Insensitive NTs and nice NTs.

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It's very common actually. I'd go so far as to say that at least half of the people I've known who worked in special ed were ignorant and bigoted or worse. (And I was a student in special ed for awhile.) There were the blatant kind and the veiled-behind-sweet-condescension kind, but there were very few people who seemed able to do the job. Same goes for really much of anything in human services. People have all kinds of motives for getting into that line of work, and many of them are not at all about accepting the people they supposedly serve. Many of them fit pretty much into the category of pseudo-allies as described in this essay called "On the Question of Allies.

It is funny- I was just reading the newspaper and saw tons of job ads for learning support/special education...

and then I saw one for a teachers aid for an autistic support classroom that was just started in a school district that I am familiar with; my friend is taking them to court ( actually this will be the first year of the classroom)- the teachers are new, and unexperienced...

well, anyway the ad- which was for a part time teacher;s aid in the autistic support class- the only experiences needed.....
a high school diploma. It also states; Experience in a school environment and special education a plus.

Now how will this aid get proper training if they are hired a week before school starts???

another ad for a teacher's aid; stated that the salary was $7.50 an hour...
what kind of pay is that??? ( but then again if they only have a high school diploma...well, you get the point)

Michele

it is a shame

You'd think special ed teachers would need higher credentials than "regular" teachers.

I don't think the ad my own staff person (the cool one) answered to get her job even required the diploma. (Which is good, because I don't think she has one.)

Basically most of the "front-line staff" jobs don't require any experience, and only sometimes require a background check. I used to have staff at my house who had just moved to this country, this was their first job, they received no training in how to do it, they didn't speak English (and in a couple cases didn't speak any language I could even recognize -- which would've been fine if the job hadn't required communication), and they didn't know why I was hiding under a blanket or table and not talking to them. Some autistic people I've known got jobs in that kind of field because it was the only job that would accept someone in their position. The pay is crappy, there's a high turnover rate, and they hire nearly anyone.

Of course the flipside of all that is that the training is sometimes worse than no training at all. When my current staff person started working for me, she knew *nothing* about autism. And knew she knew nothing. While it was a pretty steep learning curve, it was actually way better than if she'd had to unlearn some garbage that a special ed teacher had stuffed into her. The trouble is there aren't very many good sources of information out there on autism. (In training my staff, I tend to give them articles written by autistic people, and keep three large binders full of them in order to be able to pick the right ones for the right occasions.)

When I was in grade school, the district I attended was woefully ill-equiped to handle special ed children. As I mentioned in previous posts here, my district sent all the special ed children to Riverview Elementary, which during the 1980's was independently run. My school district had a very vauge definition of special ed, and this was everyone who didn't fit in at the other school for a variety of reason. These were autisic children, Downs syndrome children, and children with other behavioral and developmental problems, and anyone who fit into one of these categories was often sent there.

I almost ended up there myself, but my parents refused to send me there, Some time later I asked my parents why and they told me when they were there, the place was in a state of near chaos. They mixed all the children together by grade and were assigned aids to keep an eye on them. Desitpe all this attention given, the aids were having a hard time dealing with the children and someone was always screaming or crying. At recess, many of the kids there were constantly fighting with each other and were pretty much incapable of getting along with each other. Others were sitting in corners with their heads buried in laps either moaning or crying. It was a disheartening situation, but at the time, the only practical one. Fortunately, Riverview elementary shut down in 1992 after 22 years of operation, and in 1994 it re-opened as the Riverview kindergarden center.

I've been trying to explain AS to NT friends and I generally get a good reaction. On the flip side, my bf's friends were making fun of him recently for the fact that he caters to my needs (the fact that I can't handle crowds, that I sometimes need help to do simple tasks when I'm headed towards an overload). I didn't want them to, so I took them aside and tried to explain to them why I'm so "needy". Well, P already knew and he has bipolar psychosis, so he was cool with it and wandered off. M and W were another story. they spent twenty minutes sitting there calling each other "stupid Aspergers." Also they wanted to know who would eat an "Ass-burger." I left in tears. I'd had great respect for them, especially M, until that moment.

The day I explained AS to P, however, he was so nice. He just said "cool. Does that mean there's anything you can't do or anything you want me to remind you not to do?" Like I said, he's psychotic, so he's used to stuff like me. I really like P and my bf, but now I hate M and W. I can't understand how others can be so mean.

{{{{{Taineyah}}}}} I'm so sorry you had to endure that.

This is such a nice thread, sorry to bump it back up but I prefer Wrong Planet from 2004 so here goes..
Nt's are not my enemy. Auties are not either. Anyone can be bad or good or a mixture. Be a good person but do bad things feeling bad about it later. Be a bad person and occasionally do good things and feel bad about it later.

I've met people in general that were just awful. Those people didn't strike me as "normal".

It's old, but it's a positive topic and we need these today too.

My friends have always been all 'NT'/non-autistic, no other disorder and they've all been sweet despite that I can hardly stay in contact with them because I can't manage, forget, find it hard and so on. But when I meet them again even after months without contact, they're still very sweet to me.

I think more NT people will become more understanding when they discover that we walk among them without their knowing, that we are just as human, that we are people, too. When you truly can humanize a condition, you gain compassion and acceptance.