Panel Interview– Asperger Students’ High School Experiences and Successful Transition to University (PART 3)

Part 3 of the Panel Interview involving the Aspie students Ken, Andrew and Rose.

Teacher: Ken, I’m sure you’ve got something to add to that.

Ken: What do you mean?

Teacher: About the information by teachers being unclear.

Ken: I think in Medicine…um…I had several issues with that. I have to talk to patients, and they give you a marking scheme of things which you have to ask the patient, like about their sickness. But when I get my feedback, they say “You need to improve your communication skills”, and that was very vague as well. And I’m thinking “What could I improve on? I asked everything and I maintained eye contact even though I didn’t like it.” So yeah, I wish they could be more specific about that.

And also I think the Medical course isn’t very friendly to people on the spectrum, especially even the entrance scheme – the UMAT, it’s very unfriendly to Aspies. Actually, I was very lucky to get into Medicine because of my ENTER score. I actually transferred from Biomed, if I was to apply for Medicine straight from high school, even with my ENTER score, I wouldn’t have gotten in. Because in the UMAT, there’s 3 sections. Section A which is like logic, and Aspies are known for being very logical and practical, and then there’s Section B which is reading conversations and answering questions about how other people are feeling and thinking, and Section C which is like puzzles and patterns. I did very well in Sections A and C, but I was like in the 10^th Percentile (bottom 10%) for Section B. I mean, I read the conversations in the UMAT, and I see things differently. And um, let’s say that a woman was having a random argument with her boyfriend and the question was “When he said this, how was she feeling?” and the answers were A: Angry, B: Sad, C: Frustrated, D: Annoyed, and I thought like “All of them could apply!” I felt that it was extremely vague, and I didn’t like it how they expect you to be specific but they’re not.

Rose: And on the GMAT, in the English section, sometimes they have cartoons, and you have to say what’s going on in the cartoon, there’s like “The Far Side” cartoons. I like “The Far Side” cartoons, but the answers that they say they are and what I think they are, there’s a big disconnect there. What would be, you know how they have clarifiers (assistant in exams who briefly explains a question) for VCE exams, if there would be an emotional clarifier. Like “Explain the emotional content.” I had a benefit because my clarifier in the most bizarre circumstances, the one which I had due to Special Consideration so I could use the laptop, bizarrely played tennis with my great Aunt. So she was a friend of the family, and she was a bit more willing to explain these things for me. Not give me the answers but saying what do they mean when it’s asking for this type of emotional understanding. For English I found that it was a bit rough to ask that sort of stuff, so that’s why I really don’t like the GMAT, or the UMAT. Take a look at those questions.

Ken: UMAT is horrible.

Rose: Ay, god if you’re on the spectrum, you could never complete that thing.

Ken: It’s like they’re trying to exclude Aspies from entering Medicine. They wanna exclude as many people as possible in general, there’s actually so many students applying for Medicine, and they need to have a legitimate “excuse” to reject the students so they use the UMAT as a “criteria”. So if someone doesn’t do well enough in the UMAT, then they can say “You’re not accepted in the course because your UMAT score isn’t high enough.”

Rose: You can understand the legitimacies to test the emotional intelligence of it, coz you have some people who aren’t on the spectrum and they’re just not terribly good people, so you probably don’t want them doing something in this emotional field. But for those of us (Aspies) who essentially know the difference between right and wrong, and understand the needs of people, we just kinda don’t understand the needs of people at the same time.

Teacher: Can I ask, in the past generations, when you wanted to have a doctor, but they found it really difficult to have any communication with their patient, in the appearance of “Well I’m here and you’re over there”, and I guess about 15 years ago they decided to start assessing Medical applicants to see if they had more empathy with the people that they were talking to. Ken, have you been able to verbalize those concerns of yours to anybody at the University?

Ken: Um, I only got diagnosed this year so I haven’t actually addressed the issue. But I felt that, um, well I liked the ICM (Introduction to Clinical Medicine) component because they tell you exactly what questions to ask, so the interview with the patient is very structured, I know what to say. And they actually tell you what sort of sentences to say when the patient gives you certain information. But beyond that, I don’t know how to joke, I don’t understand sarcasm and irony. And the curriculum, they don’t really address that coz they expect you to already know these things.

Teacher: I’m wondering if it’s more that they never made the connection that they do need to consider that issue.

Ken: I think the problem with empathy is, um, it’s very touchy feely. I can’t see it, so whenever I talk to patients, I feel very robotic. Even when I’m not talking to patients, I feel that everything I say is very forced, coz I have to follow rules of communication, I have to appear “polite”, and I have to avoid saying certain things to avoid offending people. And I just feel like I’m an actor, faking myself every day. And yeah –

Teacher: Ken can I ask you a question, when you said you have to follow rules –

Ken: I don’t want to follow these rules but I have to follow certain rules to avoid getting in trouble.

Teacher: Did you become aware of those rules or did someone teach you those rules?

Ken: I was never aware of those rules when I was in high school. I actually did many things in high school and the first 2 years of Uni which were apparently socially inappropriate or “weird”. But it was nothing totally offensive like I never attacked anyone, I know that. But I remember when I was younger and a family friend come over, and she was big. And I commented on her appearance, and then my mum took me into another room and she said “That was very rude of you, you do not comment on other people’s appearances!” And I said “But I was just being honest!” and then she said “Yes you’re being honest, but you hurt her feelings, she would’ve been offended, next time do not comment on anyone being fat.” I don’t know anything intuitively, so I have to learn by making mistakes. But whenever I make mistakes, I feel hurt, which is why besides the Medical course, I have to spend extra time reading things about etiquette and also communicating with Neurotypicals like what do they see as polite. So yeah, I tried to follow a protocol when talking to people, but still, it’s so tiring. I get burnt out talking to people every day and I just need somewhere to chill out when I go home, I just can’t be bothered going out on Friday nights etc.

Teacher: Andrew, I think you’d probably like to comment on that, but also, we’re running out of time believe it or not, but also, could you talk a little about that sensory processing?

Andrew: Sure, just firstly on what Ken was saying. You know, and people wonder why people with Autism Spectrum Disorders are more prone to Anxiety and Depression.

Ken: It’s because they expect people with ASDs to do this, this and this, they try to fit you into a mould of normality when they actually naturally see, think and talk very differently. And they get bullied if they appear to be different.

Teacher: And you see it at schools too where sometimes they’re (teachers) like “Oh we just want them to socialize at school”, and they throw these children into the field and –

Andrew: They’ll learn –

Ken: They’ll learn but very slowly and it’s very traumatic.

Teacher: Is it like learning a language?

Andrew: Absolutely.

Teacher: Like “I speak English well but now I have to speak Japanese.”

Rose: I tried to learn Japanese but I failed.

Andrew: Now what’s interesting is that I say to people now that I’m doing a double degree. One degree – my Music degree: I have textbooks, I have lectures, I have assessments, I have outcomes, I know what to do, there’s a course plan. For my other degree, which is my Social degree, I don’t have a textbook, I don’t have lectures, I don’t have people helping me and telling me what to do and guiding me through it, my assessment is every day. Just, you know, existing. And yeah, it’s absolutely like learning a new language and certainly being on the point of VCAA and that sort of thing.

The VCE is designed for Neurotypicals. You take a look at the GAT (General Achievement Test), that horrible test that is used for statistical moderation, which I did a grand total of 4 times because of my 3/4 subjects, um, it’s totally incomprehensible to me. It’s so Neurotypically designed, you know the stuff about reading the emotions in it. They have those little pictures and excerpts from books and things and “How did this person feel”, it’s absolute rubbish and I just used to sit there and go “What on earth are they talking about?” And I admit I’m a bit of a VCAA hater as a lot of us might be for different reasons –

Teacher: Sorry, did you have English Language?

Rose: No it didn’t exist as a subject when I did VCE.

Ken: I did English Language, I loved it!

Andrew: I wish I had been able to do it.

Teacher: Would you recommend it?

Ken: Yes I would strongly recommend English Language!

Andrew: At my school, it was introduced the year after I left, which was a bit of a shame.

Rose: It’s been quite a few years, and I discovered all these absolutely awesome subjects that existed after I graduated.

Andrew: Yes, but I have to say on that issue of Special Consideration, I was very lucky coz I had teacher aides and support staff who were willing to push it for me with VCAA, you know. I have a handwriting problem, I need use of a computer, I need extra time, I need rest breaks. Some of those things I didn’t get, but in the end I got computer, I got rest breaks, I didn’t get extra writing time which was a big problem. And I think I did worse than I could’ve done had I had the extra time. But the whole rigmarole of having to go through all of that, it’s very stressful for everybody involved, um, you know there’s this issue of Equal Opportunities and making it a fair playing field. That’s fine, but in order to make it a fair playing field, you really need to have an understanding of ASDs and trust the school and the person with the ASD to know what’s best for them, not VCAA.

Teacher: So when you needed those extra, um, extra rest breaks, that extra time, did you yourself know that?

Andrew: Absolutely, well at the time I didn’t know much about what Special Considerations were involved and what was allowed to be done, but in my SACs, and in my school based assessments, I was given all those things. And it was proven that that was helpful, I did assessments where I didn’t have any of those things and I did very badly in them. Obviously VCAA didn’t pay much attention to that. But you know, it’s not fair for some external body with a psychologist who may not know anything about Autism who doesn’t know the individual at all, to look at a piece of paper and say “They can have these adjustments and not have these adjustments” which can decide a person’s ENTER score.

Panel Interview– Asperger Students’ High School Experiences and Successful Transition to University (PART 2)

Part 2 of the Panel Interview involving the Aspie students Ken, Andrew and Rose.

Teacher: Um, Ken can we get back to you. Can you talk to us a little about time management for a student with Aspergers? Is there any one time keeping system that works for you?

Ken: Time management is something that’s extremely important to address for people with ASDs. I know for me, I simply can’t multitask, I can’t do 2 things at the same time. So this is an issue during high school, especially VCE. For example I did two 3/4 subjects in Year 11 and five ¾ subjects in Year 12. So for time management, I worked on only two subjects a night. When I went home, I’d work on one subject for 3 hours, then I’d do another subject for 3 hours. So I was hyperfocusing, and when I hyperfocus on what I needed to do, I won’t notice anything around me. I think that was an effective strategy for me.

Also I had to learn to prioritize assignments. For example I did Methods in Year 11, and we had SACs. You know SACs? For example we had multiple assignments to do for our SACs. So when I had an assignment that would eventually contribute to my final study score, when I went home, I’d make Methods the first subject that I’d work on for the night. And if I didn’t finish it in 3 hours’ time, I’d work on it for another 3 hours. So basically I spent the whole night working on the SAC assignment. So the things which are like due sooner, you have to do it ASAP, yeah.

Teacher: Alright then. Andrew, what is your answer to that comment on time management?

Andrew: Yeah I totally agree, and something else I want to talk about, because I know it’s going to be discussed in the next few questions, talking about what was helpful for me in secondary school. One of the issues, and you touched on this Rose, is that if you’re gifted and you have an ASD, you have a double whammy. It’s very hard, because, and I mean it’s obviously different for everybody, but the giftedness can tend to mask some of the difficulties. And throughout school, people would often say to me and my parents “There can’t be anything wrong, because he can do this, this and this.” I taught myself to read when I was 2, so I was reading chapter novels by my first day of school, so therefore there “couldn’t be anything wrong”. Having said that, I wasn’t most pleased when my Prep teacher took away from me because she thought I should be reading at a lower kid’s level, but that’s another story.

But yes, it can be an issue, and when I went to my wonderful secondary with a great amount of support staff, they put in place an accelerated program with a modified timetable. So we had 2 aspects to it. One was that I had less subjects, so I had many more free periods than everyone else did. There were at least 2 or 3 times a week where I could go home in the afternoon and work at home which was really important for down time. But yeah I had an accelerated program so I did my first Year 11 subject which was Biology, when I was in Year 8, which was lots of fun. Took a little while for the other students to get used to a Year 8 student in a Year 11 class, but it was really good.

And the year after, I thought it was interesting what you touched on about tutoring (Rose), it made me recall that when I did 3/4 Biology in Year 9, our teacher was a fill-in at the time, and to be bluntly honest, she was a pretty bad teacher. She didn’t know what she was talking out, she was sending the wrong information, and I was getting pretty frustrated. So what they did was they took me out of the class and I taught myself the Year 12 Biology course, with some help from a tutor who was really nice. And yeah, as a result of that, I ended up actually skipping Year 11 because I’ve done all my 1/2s beforehand, so I finished Year 12 a year earlier than planned.

But it was great to have VCE spread out like that because VCE is very, very stressful. And people say “But you’re so gifted, you must find this really easy.” It’s not easy at all, and that has nothing to do with the actual coursework or how difficult it is, or the course requirements, it’s to do with all the other stuff that goes in VCE: the admin, or VCAA, like you have to fill in this form, you’ve got to have SACs on certain dates, you have to fulfil this outcome by a certain date, you have an exam at the end of the year that goes for this long with these types of questions. You know, the harder thing for me was, doing these exams and writing down exactly what they wanted me to write. I had to learn to answer questions in a specific way. I knew the answer, but I might lose marks because I wasn’t writing the particular type of response that they wanted. And that was really important to know because those VCAA exams, there’s a lot of things that they assume you’re going to write a certain way, and I didn’t, and that was really difficult.

But one of the important things that I realize was that everyone with an ASD is different. I was the first student in my school to have a program designed for students with Autism. There was nobody else at the school at that stage who was diagnosed. By the time I left school, there were about 30 people who were diagnosed, that’s a huge number. But some of the staff, because of the intensive education that was going on, you know PD programs, there was a profile sent to teachers about me, saying “What you can do to help Andrew”, “What problems might there be” etc, just bullet points, nothing too complex, but things that really got to the heart of the matter for teachers. And some teachers were more receptive to that than others, but what I found interesting was that when other Asperger students came along, then teachers would say “But they’re not like Andrew”. So you know, you gotta reset your minds to each individual student and not have a stereotype as to what each student may or may not be like.

And the other thing I was going to mention was, as I said before, mentoring program. The special education department at my school, when I was in Year 8, started a mentoring program with a student in Year 1, who was very gifted as well. He had Aspergers as well, and needed a lot of social and emotional support, and his interest was biology. And so, every week, I went down to the Junior School and had a talk to him about Biology, and he brought his favourite books in and we’d talk about animals and things, and it ended up to the point where I had him for the rest of my school “career” if you’d like. He’s in Year 6 now, I ended up writing out 4-year long units of work which were modified from the VCE course. And so I taught him most of the VCE biology course. It was great to hear, but it was also fantastic for me because of having that connection with someone, and being able to share information that way. His life was made a lot better by what we did, I truly believe that. And I remember when the school magazine came out, and he was in Year 2 I think, and they had to write out what their favourite thing to do was, and he said “Going to see Andrew to talk about animals”. And so that made it all really worthwhile.

Teacher: Rose, I think we’d like to hear your views too. Would you like to add anything to that?

Rose: Yeah, actually, words it is. Coz I’m doing Education, so I’m learning all my words, um, you know in Bloom’s taxonomy (classification of learning objectives within education) and the Revised taxonomy, you have words like “analyse”, “evaluate”, yeah, you aren’t going to know what those are if you have an ASD. When I finally discovered Bloom’s taxonomy this year, the pyramid with all of the different describing verbs, it makes so much more sense. If you can give that to one of your students and actually go through it, I think it would actually benefit all VCE students really. And explain what are required for all of it, so much more sense. And you know Matrices, Aerobics (???) I’m not sure that’s commonly used, again I’ve discovered that these things exist, they work really quite well because they implicitly state what is required for this task, because I was a history, humanities person. And those are somewhat non-precise questions to create, and they would ask these things and I would be like “Analyze it, do you want me to do it in a Clinical sense because I was also doing 2 Science subjects. In a Clinical sense or am I meant to do it in another sense, and understanding what they mean by “analyse”, “synthesize” or “evaluate”.

It makes a lot more sense, and particularly, coming through my high school, a teacher would write “It’s interesting” on something and I would take it at its face value saying “Oh she thought it was interesting” when she meant it was “interesting” (possible sarcasm by teacher?!). In that regard, sometimes I underline it too and I just thought “Oh she really thought it was interesting!”. If I had something that could explain the process behind developing this system, it would’ve been quite good because being higher functioning and also incredibly smart, gifted, intelligent, you can understand this sort of stuff quite easily. Once we get to VCE, we’re basically working at 1^st or 2^nd year University level, sometimes even up to a postgrad level. That was more or less the level I was working at when I was in VCE.

So, you can understand that, so educational theorists and things like that, being able to access information like that to succinctly explain what’s required in the tasks is really quite useful. It can a little bit strange for me because I take humanities, not sciences, not a huge fan of sciences in all honesty. No, I don’t like Maths, down here doing my history, my classical societies, those sorts of things. I think it’s partially because I’m female so we have a different understanding of social interactions and things like that. I think it’s because being female, we can’t get away with the same amount of stuff that a male ASD person can, because we’re meant to be female and social. But in humanities and things like that, understanding really exactly what they want, succinct stuff, you can really start to introduce Bloom’s taxonomy at a younger age from Year 7 onwards, or any other theorist that you’re using.

And group work…don’t assess us on our ability to do group work!!! No, don’t, just don’t, it’s horrible, don’t make us do group work. And if we do do group work, at least let us choose who we want to be in the group, then don’t assess us on our ability to do group work as well, it’s a very nasty thing they throw at you in University level.

Teacher: But Rose, group work is now a very high feature in the VCE curriculum. Now I’m too old here and I did Matriculation which morphed into HSC, and there was only a 2 hour examination on all of the subjects we had. So probably that system would’ve breached itself with 14 million people (Australia’s population in the 70’s???). But this is obviously a challenge to you, how did you cope with oral presentations?

Rose: Oral presentations I don’t have much of a problem with. Younger years, I did because I didn’t really know what I was meant to be talking about. But when I got up to VCE, and for oral presentations, particularly for my school where they film them, they very concisely said what they wanted to know, like if the presentation wasn’t “anything”. I found that a lot easier, and I have never really had much of a problem talking in a group, but individually, that’s when you start to see that I’m a little bit strange in a group.

Andrew: Yeah I was going to say, on the topic of oral presentations, yeah, I never really had a great problem with them. But that was perhaps because I treated them more like a lecture than a conversation. And I had a wonderful history teacher in Year 7 who was very understanding, and would allow me to take over the class for a whole hour and give my oral presentation in expanded form with powerpoint, with music to go with the opening titles and closing titles, with television, video, multimedia examples etc etc. So you can see why I want to be a music lecturer.

But yeah, it’s more about the sort of, impersonal thing I guess. I didn’t regard it as personal and like with Rose, having clear outcomes, being told exactly what you need to do and what you’re going to be assessed on, and how the assessment works is so important. None of that vague, you know, “ability to concisely discuss concepts.”

Rose: You have to say what the concepts are.

Andrew: Exactly! I mean what does that mean? And how is it graded, and how is the teacher going to mark it? And are they going to measure you on level of eye contact? I have a trick about eye contact, as eye contact is something I find very difficult. Um, I’m doing this right now. There are 2 possibilities for me. One is I can look at the wall behind you, so it looks like I’m generally looking at you. Or I can look at people’s mouths, or their chests. Actually maybe not chests.

Ken: Look at their foreheads!

Andrew: Yes that. But I think that thing of knowing what assessments they want is really important. I have a bit of a funny story here, or at least my mother thinks it’s a funny story. When I was in Year 9, now it’s being replaced by NAPLAN, but in the past they had AIMS tests. And it was the most ridiculous benchmark test. And of course, they have one for maths, and they have a reading one and writing one. And the writing one, I remember you had to write a creative story using a crutch. And they didn’t tell you how they were going to mark it, you just had to write. So the prompt that I got given, I remember this clearly in Year 9, was “An Incredible Journey”.

What am I going to write about for an incredible journey? Ahh, something they will find interesting… And this wasn’t me sort of being strange, it was me genuinely thinking they would find this interesting. So at the time I was doing 3/4 Biology, and we just learnt about Photosynthesis and Cellular Respiration. So I wrote a story about the incredible journey of a Glucose molecule as it goes through the stages of cellular respiration, here it’s passing through the nucleus, here is a molecule of Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide Phosphate to come and –

Ken: ATP?

Andrew: Yes, yes, here’s the ATP and ADP, ATP/ADP conversion cycle, how many molecules of Pyruvate are produced at this particular moment, isn’t this an exciting journey etc etc. I have to say, when the results came back, I was marked off the scale for my writing. I don’t know whether it was because they liked my writing, or they just didn’t understand it, I used so many big words they just gave me full marks, I don’t know. They just have many of these incidents where they’re being really really unclear, and when I go on to VCAA and stuff a bit later I’ll talk about it. But yeah it’s very important to have clear outcomes and assessments because it makes life so much easier and so much less stressful.

Panel Interview– Asperger Students’ High School Experiences and Successful Transition to University (PART 1)

Long time no post!

I (Ken) and 2 other university students Andrew and Rose (who both also have Asperger Syndrome) formed a panel that was being asked a variety of questions by teachers at a professional development conference regarding our high school experiences, our AS, bullying, and how we managed to successfully make the transition to university/college.

I recorded the entire interview and have typed out the whole transcript below as best as I can.

Many of the terms used in the interview are related to VCE (Victorian Certificate of Education), the credential that is given to students in the state of Victoria who successfully complete Year 11 and 12 of high school.

Don’t worry if you’re not Australian or if you don’t understand these terms, there’s plenty of other content (especially from Andrew and Rose) that are very insightful and interesting to both ASD students and high school teachers.

I’ll break this interview into several parts coz the whole interview is just over 1 hour long, so when typed up there’s gonna be a lot of text.

Here goes…

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Teacher: Ken, could you give us a little information about yourself and your background, and what you’re doing now?

Ken: I’m Ken, I’m 21 and I’m studying Medicine at Melbourne Uni. I was born in Australia but I lived overseas for my primary school years then I came back to Australia in the late 90’s. I was in a public school for lower secondary, and then I got a scholarship to a private school for upper secondary where I did my VCE. I did Biomed for a short while before I entered Medicine, so that’s where I am, yeah.

Teacher: Ken, could you tell us a bit about what was helpful for you in secondary school and what you found unhelpful?

Ken: Ok I went to 2 secondary schools. The public school I went to was relatively unhelpful, but the private school I went to afterwards was very helpful. And I was actually diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome this year, so at the time I was in high school, I didn’t even know I had it though I knew I had a lot of social difficulties.

So the things that didn’t help was, um, my favourite subject is Maths, and I like Science subjects. I didn’t feel challenged in my public school coz the teacher, he gave me the same homework as other people and I felt very bored, and I couldn’t be bothered doing it coz I didn’t feel stimulated. I asked him to give me harder stuff, but he just didn’t give it to me. Maybe they were really busy, I dunno, but I just wasn’t challenged.

But at my private school, they had an accelerated learning class. I did Methods 3/4 when I was in Year 11 so we got taught stuff a lot quicker. The teachers there were very good. Also there was a strict anti-bullying policy, where anybody who got caught bullying other students multiple times got suspended, and if they get suspended too many times, they actually get expelled. Also I think being a private school played a factor into that because if they kept on having bullies at the private school, it would actually give the school a bad name, affecting the school’s reputation.

Also when I was in high school, I know that even though the diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome existed since 1994, they didn’t really talk about it 10 years ago. The teachers in my state school thought I was “anal”, “selfish”, a “square”. Like they didn’t know I had an ASD, they were like “Oh, why doesn’t he fit in like everyone else?” “Why doesn’t he talk like everyone else?” “There must be something wrong with him, he must be a bad person”. Like “Oh it’s your fault for getting bullied coz you’re different”, and I don’t think people should be bullied for things that they didn’t choose.

And of course for people with Aspergers, they lack social intuition. And they have trouble knowing how other people think and feel automatically, so they have to manually think about it. And I was, like 10 years ago, I was caring more about school, like I didn’t really care about talking to people. I was actually zoning out when I wasn’t thinking about school, I was hyperfocusing on other things. I was also hyperfocusing on my subjects and I didn’t care about the social situations, and they didn’t cater to my abilities.

Teacher: Well I’ll have to stop you there as I can see a lot of nodding from your other 2 colleagues. Um Rose, Andrew, would you like to give any more comments about that?

Andrew: Absolutely, I can definitely relate to the bullying stuff.

Teacher: Well would you like to tell us a bit about your background first Andrew and then move on to the bullying?

Andrew: Well I was diagnosed in 2003, seems like ages ago now, but yeah that was when I was 12. I started off in a public state school but then moved to a private school. The private school, while it had some great things about it, it was a Christian school, and I have to say there was a perception amongst a lot of the staff there that because we’re all Christian and we love and care for each other in the name of Jesus, it means that bullying doesn’t exist, and we don’t have to deal with bullying.

And you know that it’s something to be very wary of because I was bullied for 7 years in primary school, and in Year 6 I ended up in hospital for 6 months with a nervous breakdown, anxiety and depression. I had tests for everything from epilepsy to brain tumours, which wasn’t fun. Um, it took all that time just to reveal that I had Autism, so having to go through all of that just to be told you have Autism isn’t something I wish upon anyone.

In Year 7, I moved to a different school where I had a fantastic support team who helped me very, very closely, including the wonderful Special Education. I was also involved in a mentoring program that I’ll talk about later, but I can definitely relate to what you say about people saying it’s your fault for being bullied you know. I can definitely remember speaking to teachers about it in primary school, and then them telling me that it was my job to do something about it, and that I had to be proactive. Of course I had no idea how to be proactive, and that just made it worse. So I think that’s a really important thing to take note of.

But yeah I’m now studying at the Australian Catholic University, I’m studying a Bachelor of Music, majoring in Musicology and Piano Performance, and I’m training to be a concert pianist and a music lecturer, so that’s really exciting.

Teacher: Rose, your turn to go.

Rose: Well um, I’m probably one of the rarest of the rare, a female on the Autism Spectrum. Like him, I was at a Catholic primary school, and they didn’t really have a bullying policy. I’m a bit older than the rest of them, so when he was diagnosed at 12 in 2003, I was 17 and diagnosed in 2004.

So, um the primary school I was at, this was in the early 90’s, the diagnosis was only just being invented and I hadn’t been diagnosed yet, the school didn’t have a terribly effective bullying policy at all. And we truly had some slightly insane children at that school, some who ended up in a juvenile hall. So in regards to that, so I’m not going to blame them terribly for not being able to manage the bullying, they just didn’t have an effective policy, and this was before the time in which effective bullying policies came in.

But some other things that they used to say to me was that I should smile more, and I’m like “Well I’m not going to smile just to smile because I look strange when I do that”, and also naturally my face goes in this expression, I can’t really my face in that regard. “Smile more…”, stupid, stupid reason for that.

And also I had a fair bit of problem with doing religious studies. When the father came, the father at the school was a really nice man, unfortunately he passed away recently, but after the class, I’d always be asking really literal questions like “How does God exist if he came first? What made God?” and things like that. Very literal and I wouldn’t be able take in any answer other than that (literal). And the father would leave, and the teachers would be quite upset that I was asking these types of questions, and I’m like “Well, I want to know.” And so in Year 6, they gave me a book on Basic Physics.

I had the double whammy of having an ASD and being of supremely high intelligence because I got tested in Year 4, Year 5 and they found I had a very, very high IQ, so I had been incredibly smart and was unable to communicate how smart I was. So yeah, it’s probably the reason why you know I’m a little bit older (higher year level for age) than these guys are. I’m onto my second Masters at Melbourne, and on that grounds I also did my Undergraduate and my first Masters. I’m now doing my Masters of Education and I’m 23.

I got diagnosed when I was 16 in Year 11, my mistake. And, yeah they wanted to test me for Dyslexia coz I had very horribly bad spelling and I had quite a lot of issues with Mathematics, and I had a form of Dyslexia when it came to audio processing. So when I received verbal information, I had trouble taking in which is quite tied to the ASD. I also had a couple of issues which was also tied to numbers, I would reverse them, traditional Dyslexic style, but it only affected numbers.

And one of the programs they introduced there was that they’d give me my coursework for the week at the start of the week. They would email it to me because it was start of ICTs in schools. They would email me the set questions for the week and I could do them and I knew what they were gonna be doing. And some of the subjects, the teachers were willing to tutor me after school during my free periods, which I was quite happy over that. And some subjects, I got a private tutor. And also, my mother was my advocate in Year 11 onwards as well, as I got the further Asperger diagnosis. I got this extra diagnosis because 2 other members of my family were diagnosed with an ASD: one with High Functioning Autism and one with Aspergers. So they got me tested as well. And a bit of controversy in my diagnosis, fluctuating between High Functioning Autism and Aspergers, they’re both in the spectrum, that’s how I see it. And from there, my parents, particularly my mother, advocated for me.

I got a laptop to use in class to help me, I also got Special Consideration for all of my exams. School was very good in regards to that. The teacher gave me a lesson plan with a lesson plan planner, they started to give me that as well so I knew what to expect later on in the Semester. Things like that. They always made sure that for assessment tasks, I had a good month’s notice on them because I normally found them, um, stressful.

My school didn’t really have a good bullying policy because this was before the proper bullying policies were being introduced. Particularly, being female, female bullying is different from male bullying, it’s snarky remarks and comments about people in the toilets. And also I’m quite tall, so I stood out like a sore thumb. So somewhat endemic is that when it comes to dealing with bullying, there’s an issue on tackling girl on girl bullying for things of that nature. And I found that when I was able to get a circle of friends that understood me, I didn’t have as much an issue of bullying.

There’s a funny story, when I was in Year 9, I had a boyfriend. And he was another tall boy in the class, and we were apparently put together because we were both tall. And then after about 3 months we broke up, and he came up to me in class and said “We’ve broken up”. And I said “Oh ok, do you want your pen back?” Apparently, that was the inappropriate response, I was meant to be quite devastated. So everyone was like “Oh, ok then!”

Another funny story, when I was in Year 12, we had a French exchange student. And we became very good friends, we’re still good friends today. And everyone was under the assumption that he was strange like me, but when I went to France, I realized they were all like that. So I was like “I’m gonna move here, particularly in Paris!” The self censoring on inappropriate comments on appearance, they don’t do that in Paris terribly much.

But yes again, there was a bullying issue. But recently about a week ago, I had a person who wasn’t terribly nice to me throughout school apologize to me for not being terribly nice to me. It was on Facebook, so, awesome in that regard.

Teacher: That’s interesting because the bully has made some transition from the adolescent stage to the adult stage (maturing).