Teacher: When you said that something that happened earlier in the day bothered you throughout the day, if something, let’s say happened in Period 2, and it affected you in Period 5, and the teacher said “Is there a problem? What’s happened with you?”, would you be able to explain to them what happened?
Andrew: Possibly not.
Rose: Probably not.
Andrew: And that was why I had a card with me that I was given at school, which would excuse me from any class at any time and I didn’t have to give a reason.
Teacher: Are there any people who when you look at them, immediately get irritated?
Andrew: Well, people who constantly fiddle with things or be very very loud, or have an intrusive voice, something like that. I would find that distressing.
Rose: Funny story, I had 2 managers at where I work, a casual job while I was studying, one of my managers had a bald head, and I apparently had a very strange fascination with bald heads that I’ve now discovered! He was very accepting of me doing “Hee hee hee!”, rubbing his head in the morning. But I have another manager, who plucks her eyebrows very very finely then draws them on, and I find it kinda disturbing actually. I wanted to rub them off and scream “Let them grow!!!” I just can’t look at her face because it’s that distressing. And I mean a lot of women have very finely plucked eyebrows. And she recently got eyelash extensions. And I just can’t look at her anymore. It’s not as though -
Teacher: Does it hurt to look at her?
Rose: I actually find it physically painful to look at her! It obsesses me if I look at her and then I want to take her eyelashes off! And I’m scared that they might fall into her eye, they’re huge!
Teachers: Are you sensitive to certain colours?
Ken/Andrew/Rose: Yes.
Rose: Pink!
Ken: Purple!
Rose: When I was working at a certain section and everything there was pink, and I can’t stand being in that department to clean that area, and it’s an endless battle to with my manager, coz there’s the manager I can’t look at, I say to her “I can’t do this properly, I have Autism”. And she says “But you’re not good at Math.”
Andrew: Again, stereotypes.
Rose: Yes.
Ken: I have problems with things that are high contrast. So let’s say on a winter cloudy day, I’m walking in the street and I see a woman that’s wearing a purple coat and a purple skirt, the colours are like completely different to the surroundings, it’s too stinging to my eyes, and I just have to look away. And I don’t like fluorescent colours and colours or places that are too bright.
Teacher: Well, we have run out of time, so the final question I asked for all of you to answer is, very quickly, “One thing that would improve a Secondary School”. Ken?
Ken: I think teachers, they have to learn to distinguish between Functional social skills, and social skills for the purpose of emotionally connecting to others. And that’s two very different things. I’m perfectly fine with functional social skills, I have to talk to patients and I follow a scripted conversation, but for the emotional thing, I’m still terrible at that. And I think that teachers have to focus more on the Functional social skills because the students, they often have time management issues, and so if you ask them to…if you expect them to be social (Social skills for emotionally connecting), the more time they spend trying to fit in with other people, the less time they have to study on subjects in which they could excel at. And they have the rest of their life to focus on the emotional things. For now, they’re being tested on the VCE subjects, so they (teachers and ASD students) should focus more on that. And also, it’s totally important for the student to choose subjects that they’re interested in, coz if they’re not interested in a subject, it’s so boring, it feels like an absolute chore, and it just slows things down and you have less time to do other subjects and it basically screws you up.
Andrew: For me, apart from VCAA of course, I’d love to change the whole of VCAA if I could, I think it would be the level of understanding amongst educators. You know the awareness, yes that everyone with an ASD is different, and the need to provide that social and emotional support. And the awareness amongst busy teachers, that it may not actually take a great deal of effort to make small adjustments that make a big difference to us. Teachers are sometimes like “Oh but I’m too busy and I gotta think about this, this and this and it’s too hard.” It’s not too hard. Small things can be done, you know like providing some assessment questions in advance, or emailing the student beforehand to check, or making them aware of something, or putting them in a quiet spot. You know all those kinds of things, small things that take one or two seconds that can make a world of difference. And I think that’s really really important for teachers to be aware of. It’s not hard to understand, there are small things that can be done to make a really big difference.
Rose: Also, um, story from high school, start of Year 12, we had an assembly, and I had been using the laptop for a year, and our VCE coordinator said “If you think you have a learning difficulty or some other sort of special need, and you might require something for example a laptop”, 200 eyes from my fellow Year 12s stared at me, the only person who was related to that. I was like “Yep!” Something like that, she was just doing an announcement, but it made me feel socially isolated. And things like that is that when you have an ASD, you might have an issue interacting with people, but the point is that you’re really quite smart, and you can identify to a degree that you have an issue interacting with people, but please don’t bring it to our attention that we can’t interact with people. We’re well aware of that. Generally speaking, I was a happy person coz I made some friends who are probably on the ASD spectrum, actually in all honesty. Don’t make it more obvious, we’re quite smart, and sometimes they do it in the best interests, but there’s a degree of paternalism and we feel as though we’re being talked down to. One thing we hate more than anything else is being talked down to, it just makes us -
Ken/Andrew/Rose: Really angry.
Rose: We have very short tempers in all honesty.
Ken: Very bad tempers.
Rose: Oh yeah, very bad tempers.
Teacher: Rose, Andrew, Ken, it’s been a real privilege to have you here and speak to us about your high school experiences as students with ASDs. We’ve learnt a lot from this session and found it interesting. Thank you very much for your time.
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