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 1st or 2nd 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.
