Infodumping is common Autistic Friendship Language. I’m pretty sure most people here have a subject they’re just itching to infodump about. Imo, schools failing to account for that are a failure of education as a system, not of people with autism.
You be surprised how many adults have 0 curiosity about the world.
If you don’t fit then it must be your fault. Never the flawed systems problem. Integration and to some extent inclusion as the successor is about micromanaging the ND people (or otherwise non norm) so they don’t disturb the old way too much and rarely about changing concepts to actually open the situations up to all people.
Of course that takes more energy, time, willingness and most of all competence from the people in charge but in the long run it is worth it from a purely energy spent aspect. Not to speak of the non traumatic (or less) experiences ND have in education and public life in general.
Speaking as a Perviously early childhood education kindergarten teacher and a slightly of norm ND person.
Edit: it is common knowledge and practice in less formalized educational settings to use the enthusiasm and feed that interest in that moments and give it all the attention and “brain food” that you can spare. (There isn’t always time to do that and you of course have to realize that the moment has arrived) but if you do… It is so worth it. And sneaky sneaky , you can use the enthusiasm for one topic that goes into depth to introduce other topics that might be hard for the person. Like cars turning in to a conversation about why they don’t swim in water. Going further into why boats swim at all and you are now at physics.
That tactic does work ESPECIALLY well with ND people. It baffles me why people don’t use it all the time.
Difference is that they move to a totally different subject every hour whennI’m still in the mood to learn about pan-slavic ideology
I did quite well in school :p. Except for when online classes hit during covid
Anywho, learning about new stuff is fun :3
I was simultaneously in gifted and learning disability classes in middle school. Apparently this was… fine?
Having a learning disability and having an advanced academic ability in one or more subjects are not mutually exclusive. There are lots of different types of learning disabilities, and most don’t automatically make someone less capable, it just may mean you process information differently
Or as my girlfriend likes to describe it, we have “spiky skills.” That is, very high in some areas, and very low in other areas.
I work with a six year old who’s still learning the most basic skills (like following one-step directions, such as “put your backpack in your cubby”), but he can spell out the full Latin names of various obscure fruits and vegetables from memory in order to find pictures of them online. Although he still has a long way to go with communication skills (he doesn’t speak and only recently acquired an AAC device), it’s clear he knows a lot more than would be apparent from the outside. Classic “spiky skills.”
I have described “spiky”, as imagine a sound board, with those up and down sliding switches. Most people have all of their switches close to the middle of the scale, just some a bit higher, and some a bit lower. But autistic people tend to have many of those switches turned either fully up, or fully down, and of course completely randomly as well.
I always thought every question on a test was a trick question, then questioned myself into believing they weren’t.
they were
Pretty early on, I got told to stop asking ‘why/how?’.
I’m not sure why they thought I was questioning them specifically and not out of curiosity.
Stopped me from Questioning things during school which I think just made me mask heavily unfortunately.
I was and had been undiagnosed my whole life until recently.
I love learning, Tinkering and Data.
“Ugh, just get in the same box as everyone else so I can push you through the system without resistance.” - abusers, not teachers.
I managed to score more than 100% with extra credit for years, then I moved back to the US and failed high school entirely due to boredom. I didn’t learn a goddamned thing the entire four years. I ended up earning a GED through just taking the test and getting 100%. It was entirely busywork bullshit with no thought whatsoever put into actually teaching children not only knowledge, but how to thirst for knowledge.
1/10 would not recommend.
I failed a high school class simply because the teacher gave us homework projects every week, which I failed to complete or turn in. Even when I did the projects, I knew the teacher would put them up on the classroom walls and I was too self-conscious to have my work be displayed like that, so I didn’t turn them in.
So I had to re-take the class in online summer school - it was ridiculously easy. I still learned everything from the original class and retained the knowledge. When I went to in-person testing for the final exam, I was the first person in the room to finish. Easy A.
It just bugged me that so much time could’ve been saved if the original class has been condensed the way the online course was - it was the same information, just without the performative art projects. It solidified my opinion that school isn’t for teaching knowledge, it’s for teaching kids to accept busy work (even on their own personal time.)
I’m probably AuDHD. My opinion written before I knew:
The popular Prussian education system was originally designed to stub children to submissive, obedient underlings for the owning class and productive livestock for the economy.
Most schools have never questioned the default Prussian paradigm. Why would they have - it’s been a numbing success: stratifying homogenized people into a comfortable pyramid structure has stabilized society, made top-down control easier, wasted immense human potential, damaged humanity’s natural antifragility, impaired our capacity to solve unforeseen complex problems, risking the whole planet’s life. No pain living inside the pyramid, so no problem, no change.
Only if we cared for everyone’s future more than for our present comfort, should we design a different curriculum to create a better society; less like a breakable machine, more like a resilient organism, emerged from unstubbed people free to pursue what’s important to them.
University AAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH 😭😭😭
As a person with ADHD I feel like the fun part of learning is curiosity and the joy of discovery. School isnt very good at delivering on that experience. It kinda just tries to cram as much into you as possible, which is a bummer cause otherwise learning is like one of the most fun things in the world
learning is like one of the most fun things in the world
Yeaah, i mean we are homo sapiens in the end
Yeah I guess its second best to being gay. Being gay is pretty great tho, so thats no discredit to learning 😌
Mmh i would place them on par, gay cuddles are great but learning is pretty dope too yk
Gay cuddles while watching a scientific documentary. Now that’s the dream.
A lot of schools and a lot of classes and a lot of educational systems as a whole aren’t designed or intended to teach anything other than obedience and cultural mythology, exactly the sort of stuff many autistic people instinctively hate and don’t believe in.
Good for us, frankly. Autodidacticism to the rescue. The problem for propaganda is that reality is always hiding underneath, no matter how much they try to paper their agenda-driven nonsense overtop of it, and once you know how to look for it and that you have to look for it, the whole system built on top of it gets called into question.
fuck my entire childhood to death. school was absolute hell.
i went to the Marines… and MCRD chewed me up and spit out a fully masked adult, who still quotes my general orders to this fucking day.
Thank you Corps. Semper Fi.
It’s costing me so much extra in oat lattes at my favourite cafes. Too much distraction at home and not enough caffeine at the library. I also feel miles safer leaving my stuff on a cafe table while I use the bathroom then leaving it in a library… I wish libraries were drug infested sex dens, then I would feel safer in them. Oh well…
Right now I’m watching this video about the lac operon in E.coli. It’s the switch in their DNA that let’s them digest lactose.
I get the feeling you’re in the wrong community, this is the autism one.
I read this as “I need caffeine to function and libraries don’t have it”. If libraries are associated with school (I can follow that association!) then it makes sense as a reply to this meme.
Look, I love libraries but I don’t think it’s fair to assume everyone has had good experiences in them. Theft was a big problem in my university library (as was voyeurism). It doesn’t mean this person hates libraries as a concept.
lol please expand on your exclusionary comment
You are literally in the wrong thread. This isn’t the “maga hates libraries again” thread.
Oh, well I don’t hate libraries? I literally would be more comfortable in them if they were what those fox news hosts said they were.
That’s great! You should definitely go say that in the thread about it!
Nahh, you should probably just block me so more misunderstandings don’t ruffle your puritan values.
