Panel Interview– Asperger Students’ High School Experiences and Successful Transition to University (PART 4)

Part 4 of the Panel Interview involving the Aspie students Ken, Andrew and Rose.

Rose: My mum was my advocate, the school was quite receptive to what she did but she was somewhat known to roll (???) into the school, seeing that my sister and I had a problem. So yeah in regards to that she was known. I did my Special Consideration way back before these guys did. To start with, it was just for Dyslexia so I got a laptop and then for Autism I got a supervisor/clarifier, extra time and things of that nature. But I had to sit my exams separate to everyone else, I have to admit if I could see everyone else I would’ve felt better, but I was on a different level of the school to everyone else, and I found that, it made me feel a bit freaky in all honesty. I can understand it coz me clicking away on the computer would’ve distracted everyone but if I was just in another room with windows and could see everyone else, it would’ve made me feel better or so for my VCE exams.

For every hour, I had an extra half hour and the Economics exam when I sat was about 3 hours long so on the day I thought I was going to start at 3 PM but they wanted me to start at 1 PM, and I had an exam that morning, so I would finish with everyone else. He was warning us in the last exam that I couldn’t say “no I want to start with everyone else”, and it made me very very anxious when I did that exam because my timetable had changed. Please, don’t change someone’s timetable if they have an ASD, don’t do that, at all. This was back in the day we were using floppy disks, and the floppy disk couldn’t work properly, and we couldn’t find my VCE coordinator so my Dad came to pick me up at the end of the morning exam and luckily he had a USB stick when they were first introduced. Freaked me out, really put me off because a week later I had my history exam which was what I was hoping to do very very well in, and in the end I didn’t do well on my Economics exam at all because my timetable had been changed. I was a straight A student for Economics and I ended up only getting about a 33 (50 is maximum Subject Study Score) for the it because I didn’t answer the last few questions, coz if I had to have my timetable changed in the last moment, I would’ve needed a good hour to reset myself, readjust myself, rework what I was going to do. Coz I had my “answer this question by 2:30”, “answer this question by 3:30”, and then I had to recalculate the math in my head.

Teacher: Mmm. Can I ask question to the panel, when we were talking about time management and writing to time, how did you learn that and deal with it?

Andrew: I’ll get back to that sensory question later.

Rose: My mum got me an alarm, coz I prefer to use a face watch, not a digital one, and she got me an actual alarm that I could carry with me so it would make a vibrating sound coz I don’t like beeping electronics. It made vibrating sounds and I practiced during the school holidays to time myself and I worked out how long it took. In VCE, it took me about 45 minutes to do about 1000 good words. Good words is the key point there, so I could time myself on that. And because it was a computer, a laptop, I could go even faster and I learnt to teach myself there, I programmed the laptop to spring up with a reminder that I was meant to be moving on to the next question, that I should be timing myself for things like that. Don’t just get an alarm clock because some people with ASDs don’t like the sound of that, so ask them what sound they prefer to wake them up. Even nowadays, I can’t have my phone on ring, I have it permanently on vibrate.

Andrew: Same.

Rose: So something like that is quite good. During the Summer holidays, in particular for VCE you’re meant to give them VCE stuff to prepare them for, just generally speaking if you ask them to time themselves, for all of the kids in the class, it’ll really be good coz you can work out which kids are going to have time management issues. If you get them to do a couple of practice questions and exams and see how long it takes for them to do it, at 45 minutes, ask them to mark where they are, change pen colour, and you can work out how long someone’s taking. So from there, it basically helps everyone, even just normal people.

Andrew: Do you want to go next Ken, then I’ll go next to the sensory.

Ken: For the time management, um, I did English Language, so it wasn’t as bad as English but, basically there were 2 sections. The first section was, basically they ask the grammatical rules and stuff in sentences and the second part was where we had to write an essay. And like Grace, I allocated a specific amount of time to answer each bunch of questions. And I didn’t have an alarm clock, I just this watch that I used, and I always looked periodically, and I made my own rule, that whenever I answer a question, I quickly look at my watch to see how much time is remaining and when I should move on.

Andrew: Yeah, um I will admit I’m very, very, very bad at time management. One of the things I find difficult is knowing what to put in and what to leave out when I’m writing. Because it’s all very exciting to me, you know. And I’m a detail person, I like lots of detail -

Ken: In the exams, when they ask a question, in the bracket they tell you how many marks that thing is worth. So the more expensive the question, the more time I spend on it. So let’s say there was 120 marks, and the exam was 120 minutes long, I would say “Ok, if this question is worth 5 marks, I must finish it within 5 minutes or else.”

Andrew: Absolutely, and getting back to that detail point, last year I did a subject at Uni called “History of Music : Renaissance” which was fascinating, and I got given that essay topic. I think it was on techniques of Cantus Firmus Treatment in Renaissance Mass Settings, fantastic. It was very interesting! But the word limit was 2500 words, I won’t tell you what my final word count was, but if you times that figure by 4, you might get in the ballpark figure.

To be fair, there are books, there are thousand page books on sections of that topic, as I said to my lecturer at the time. But yeah, time management is a real issue, and for something like English, which is 3 hours, Year 12 English, um A: it’s a lot of writing for anybody, and B: it’s a long time to be in a room under pressure for exams getting worked up, getting anxious about things, and C: also English texts um, I have to mention this because this is a topic very close to my heart, analysis of English texts for ASD students in Year 11 and 12 -

Ken: I hated Year 9 and 10 English. We had to do Romeo & Juliet and Macbeth, and I didn’t understand the emotions -

Andrew: I skipped Romeo & Juliet!

Ken: Seriously, I did so bad in English coz I couldn’t understand what’s going through their heads about love. I don’t understand how people fall in love, and yeah they were asking about that, and I had no idea, and I just made my own theories, like I treated it as a scientific thing but it’s not, it’s very emotional.

Rose: I have a comic book of Romeo & Juliet, it’s a manga. It’s got probably 75% of the important dialogue, the manga version’s facial expressions (of the characters) are so much easier to understand.

Andrew: Just as a side point, if anyone here can give me a definition of what love is, I’d love to hear because I don’t know!

Ken: I had to read the dictionary to see what love is.

Andrew: But yes, in English it’s very very important because they’re chosen for Neurotypicals, the questions are phrased for Neurotypicals, some of the texts I did I still don’t understand. I had tutoring from one of the teacher aides to get me through English. I ended up getting a 50 (highest Subject Study Score) for English which I was quite happy about. But yeah it was very very difficult and knowing how much, how long to spend on those essays was hard. And obviously I had to spend more time on the essays that I found more difficult, the text analysis ones because it took me longer and more energy in my brain to process what was going on and how to write about it, how to write about the characters. I ended up just pouring out phrases that my teachers have told me. I didn’t understand how this character felt when he found he had cancer, you know, don’t ask me, I’ll just write what I was told.

Rose: The “Whose Reality” and “Context” component -

Andrew: Yes, ugh.

Rose: I was under the old one, which I had 4 essays in the exam, now that I’m actually teaching this Curriculum, I still don’t understand what they’re talking about.

Teacher: I’ve known Aspie students who in Year 12, for the “Context” component, often write out of context.

Rose: Mmm, particularly “Whose Reality” as well -

Andrew: Interestingly enough, I did “Encounter in Conflict” in Year 12, and at the time I was diagnosed with Clinical Depression, so that was quite apt for me. But yes for the sensory processing -

Teacher: We got about 5 minutes left.

Andrew: I’ll do a quick bit on the sensory processing. Sensory processing, you know, if you imagine, well it’s hard to imagine, but there are so many issues at school that people might not consider. You know, lights, fluorescent lights, brightness of lights, you know -

Ken: Bells ringing!

Andrew: Yes bells ringing, sounds, my hearing is hypersensitive, I could hear the vacuum cleaners going on 3 doors down the road. Unexpected sounds, classroom chatter, working while people are talking in class is so annoying! You know I just feel like saying to people “Be quiet!” you know. Um, crowds, outside, even coming here today there were students out for recess, I immediately, it was quite challenging for me.

Rose: You almost sprinted here!

Andrew: But yeah, sensory processing is a really big issue and also touch. Something I found because I was a Science student doing experiments, you know having chemicals and things around, and unusual things on my hands, handling a sheep’s heart, no, I mean no…

Ken: In Medicine we do anatomy dissections on cadavers, they’re dead bodies, yeah they preserve it in formaldehyde, it smells absolutely shocking.

Andrew: Absolutely. But the most important thing is, and I don’t think some people realize is that the trigger doesn’t have to be there, at the time, for consequences. You can just be here and something happened earlier in the day, and the student may have had a delayed reaction, or stew on things, play it over in their head, try to understand it, then it comes out later on, and it might be a totally different teacher, and they may be thinking “What’s going wrong here? I’ve got all the set ups, it’s done right…”. No, something happened earlier in the day and they need to be aware that that student needs time out because other things have happened that made them exhausted.

Rose: Also from a female perspective, once a female goes through puberty, there’s other certain commands, that time of the month (menstruation/period), sometimes schools don’t have adequate facilities for that, and it can be quite distressful. Suddenly we’re acting strangely and we need to go to the loo a lot, that’s the particular reason why. Um, also socks, my school had knee high socks. I do not like wearing knee high socks. It’s completely unexplainable why I don’t like wearing knee high socks, but the point is I don’t like wearing them. And also my school uniform was a woollen uniform.

Ken: Oh wool’s itchy!

Rose: Yeah so I always had to have my shirt tucked in under my skirt coz I didn’t like the skirt touching my skin. And my jacket, and when we had to wear the blazer in Summer, it was lined up to about 3 inches at the end, and that 3 inches would be rubbing against my wrists. It drove me absolutely insane, so I had to get a modified blazer where the lining just went over the cuff and over the neck. Then you look different and then you have that unfortunate conversation that you’ve got to have (people constantly asking why you have modified blazer).

Andrew: It’s painful though.

Rose: It’s painful! It’s like having a stone in your shoe.

Ken: And you can’t forget about it, it’s constantly there.

Andrew: Sounds can be painful, really high pitched sounds, particular voices.

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.