minor learning and education problems

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I'm fairly high-functioning (although I do suffer from fairly dibilitating depression) but I'm not clear on whether my problems learning are due to Asperger's or an incorrect attitude or perspective.

I think it might be common for people with Asperger's, to be smart by default, but only up to a point, at which point we're stupid. For me it has set up a kind of laziness where I coast through things I already know and am bored, and then struggle when I come to the challenge which I'm not used to.

I find when I'm trying to learn something on my own that the basics come easily, as if they're common sense and I already know them. Then I read something that makes no sense. It frustrates me which makes it harder to think and stay focussed.

Asking for help online, people generally say this is normal. All learning is this struggling, memorizing things by rote which make no sense, and then later putting it together. I have trouble when I can't see any progression. I like to look back and forth between the overview and the details to keep track of where I am. A lot of the material I read doesn't seem to follow a wide view. It defines something in a linear fashion and all elaboration is external and disconnected. The overview doesn't connect things.
I vastly prefer being able to ask real people to clarify things rather than having to randomly read through documentation that may or may not answer my question. Of course for an NT, the answer is "RTFM". Read it, read a different one, read them all again over again until it makes sense. Stop asking us questions that have already been answered somewhere else.

So, should I be trying to learn like the NTs? Am I the type of person who functions perfectly well like an NT when it comes to learning? Are these my other psychological problems getting in the way? Or is there an Asperger's Syndrome solution to this?


I tried to learn about learning styles once, but I never found anything other than "visual" as one of the alternate styles to... whatever "normal" was. I do like diagrams, but I suspect I could learn if the words described the same thing the pictures illustrate. So what learning style is that? And what learning style ISN'T the kind I keep reading?
Sometimes I wish all the learning material was connected together. All the words and terms had links to elaborate and define. you know, like a wikipedia. maybe I should blame English for being so messy.

I swear to god ASpies have a wireles neural network going through thier mind - I betya we are all communicating subconscienly between us.....
For the last 7days, every concern I have though of have been posted the next day,,, It was just last night going to be I was thinking about -- I need to learn to learn.

I am the same as you - I pick up on things instantaneously if I like it,,, but soon get bored on subject matter, which I may like but haven't had much practise with... eg. Programming - the worst part is , I know I can do it - and do it better than anyone else, I just can't seem to be able to learn it.

I learnt Most of my computer skills while 'discussing' computers in real life.

I think you and I are the same - we are the aprentice types , we can absorb all and everything from environmental education (ie people, TV)

Reading fo some reason doesn't work,,, I mean it worked upto a piont for me,,, I did make it to University so I can't be that ret*d.- the thing is I feel ret*d... I look upon peers that seem to be able to read a phrase out of text book and instantly interprete it,, whereas I sit there reading it over and over again, reading the page, then going back to the top, reading the next two pages, then having to go back to remind myself what I have already read twice, and am about to read for a third time.

--Last night I did have a bit of an epiphany about why we have this problem.....

We keep imagining what we are reading and alot of the time wandering off and imagining/extrapolating on the packet of information we just UNDERSTOOD (I put it in capitals, because most of the time we actually did comprehend, that's why we have begun imagining) ---I think what is happening is that because we are extrapolating and yet still multitaskingly reading along, we don't actually take in what we read after we started extrapolating.... ie, we need to stop being Autistically inventive and start actually reading ---we learnt to read at such a young age that reading has become nothing more than a reflex action,,, we are just running through the information like an NT and not absorbing it.


From now on, I think I am going to read very very slowly like an NT,,,,,I have noticed that when I read things that interest me I don't imagine as much! -and therfore soak up the info... in my case futurinsitc technology (Popular Science magazines)

-So people that are rote learners and seem to be able to remmeber the most mundane facts without even trying -- actually have the most dullest of imaginations. (the Sale of the Century contestant)

I had some difficulties with math because it was too abstract for me. Arithmetic went poorly in the first grades of school and my mother often lost patience with me. Then, classic algebra was more or less fine, as it was based on simple mechanical rules which I could memorize, and which made sense. But when the binomials, probability theory, integrals and other such things started, I stopped understanding anything - they needed comprehension, as well as just following rules, and they made no sense to me.

I also had difficulties summarizing texts and singling out their main idea. I can remember myself being thirteen or fourteen and telling a story I'd memorized by rote to my mother, almost word-for-word, vividly imagining what was happening in it. She listened a bit, then asked, okay, but can you tell me what this story is actually about? I was at a loss, and I think I was upset too because al I wanted was to retell it to someone. Now I'm much better at this, but it still takes quite a bit of processing to be able to find the main theme or idea in a text - I have to consciously go through it several times, and analyze it sentence by sentence and make deductions. Whereas for most people, I think it'd just come naturally.

I still have this problem when describing something, like my writing or something that's happened to me. I may have a very clear idea of what I want to say, but when I start talking I get stuck on various details, since describing them seems important to me, and they get smaller and smaller and I drift further away from the main idea. I have trouble giving directions for the same reason - a new student will call and ask how to get to my house, and I'll start saying something that makes no sense at all, though I can see the road before me as I speak, as if I was there myself. I just don't know how to structure the visual information proprly.

My understanding of how aspies develop is that they have less social intelligence and that horsepower is routed elsewhere. That somehow slows down emotional development in some ways and they keep the interest, love of learning, ways of learning that babies generally have. ALSO, apparantly, IRONICALLY, they have more minicolumns that are more densely packed. That means that we are very different! Under the right circumstances we can seem like, and think we are idiots. In others, we can seem and feel VERY smart. I try to be in more of the smart circumstances. The NICE part is that if you want something else, you'll probably get better in THAT also!! !! I only feel like an idiot maybe once or twice every 3 years! I feel like a genius maybe 5-20% of the time! The rest I feel relatively normal. Of course, that excludes social where I feel like an idiot like 20% of the time.

As for getting the idea from a story, it usually DOES take some thought for ANYONE! An aspie can probably come up with more meanings.

Steve

I didn't bother to read all of what you said, until now. I had other things on my mind, and had to go somewhere. Anyway, manuals are OFTEN poorly written, etc... Sometimes you have to fill in the blanks, and that can take time. That is true of ANYONE though!

Steve

I'd have said that I learn far better from reading the manual than having a human explain it to me, but then... I remembered a math teacher I used to have who was dire. To give an example of how dire she was, for my mock I got an E, then my mother secretly sent me for private tuition from a different teacher and six months later I took the real exam with everyone else and got an A. An E grade to an A grade in six months. Looking back now, that teacher's method was basically RTFM: if you don't understand don't bother to ask ME, ask the person sitting next to you.

(Math geeks, you might find this amusing: she explained matrices by standing on a chair, waving her arms back and forth and saying "It's like windmills". That was it. Matrices. Turn the page, next chapter.)

The other teacher, by contrast, took time to explain things to me and make sure I "got" it. I've always felt that I came to understand things in a fundamentally different way to everyone else I went to school with: they all seemed to just pick things up by rote and were fine with that, but I had to learn HOW something worked before I could do it easily. One thing I never ever learned was long division, because nobody ever explained to me what the method MEANT, they just said "Do this and this and this and then there's the answer".

There's a sort of "eureka!" feeling I get when I've understood something, when I feel a sudden kind of one-ness with it - as if in that one instant of time I know everything there is to know about it. Looking back, the subjects in which I did best at school (humanities, overall) had teachers who were prepared to hear my awkward questions and at least make some attempt to answer. Perhaps I was a human-oriented learner after all.

I sometimes wonder if there just aren't enough people to make use of explaining things properly... then again, there don't need to be THAT MANY, if it saves time and allows a few of us to learn a lot, wouldn't that be really beneficial? Let's have another Einstein! Ok, probably not from making "Quantum Physics for Aspies" books, but I can dream.
Maybe this apparant explosion in the number of aspies is a GOOD thing! Maybe it will allow us to quickly pick up skills and ... pass it on to others or something. Too bad we're not so good with people most of the time, or we'd make great teachers. >_<; oh well, even that can be learned.

I used to be good at learning by rote from books, but as I got older, I found I learnt a whole lot more by WATCHING things...documentaries on tv or video sink in much better for me than book. Now I struggle trying to read through endless lines of text in books, and it really, really frustrates me and makes me feel grossly ignorant, even though I am supposedly very intelligent. I just start reading a book and none of it goes in at all. But sit me watching the information and hearing it and it is okay. So I have lots of books here on subjects I really wish to learn...but wasted because for some reason, I cannot get interested in that way.