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).