Published on 12, July, 2020
Just curious about people who slipped through the net, so to speak. How did you cope with school? I developed quite good ways of hiding how much i struggled. It helped that i was in most of the bottom sets, as no one really cared back then. I was in the top set for biology, i excelled in that area. Nothing else part from sport. I hated going in every day, i was like a zombie....i literally cant remember my last year in school. Ive blanked it out completely.
I had an awful time at school, but eventually I got a decent degree.
we should have a twitter hashtag where autistic people post their worst school report next to their highest qualification.
Yes. I remember, in the 90s, shortly after getting a 'big job', sitting on a wall near the Presidio Fort in San Fransisco, in the sunshine, and recalling my teenage years when I thought I couldn't do maths ... it turned out, later, that I could do maths - once I'd got rid of the maths teacher who couldn't teach it.
His response to the fact that I struggled with homework one day, because I hadn't understood what he wanted us to do, was to throw a blackboard "rubber" at me and say I hadn't half the brains I was born with, and then cane me on a Saturday morning (yep, we had Saturday morning school, and caning pupils was one of the legitimate teaching tools at the time). That was in the early 70s.
He stayed in the same dismal job, incompetently "teaching" successive generations of miserable kids, until progress consigned his ilk to history (adults were no longer allowed to perpetrate acts of instutionalised violence on young children; teachers were required to actually know how to teach, and study the subject formally before being allowed to take classes; Saturday morning school was abolished; tech began to creep into classrooms; that kind of thing).
As I sat on that wall, about 20 years after getting away from that awful place, I had a piercing moment of mental clarity and sent him a telepathic message more than 5,000 miles. It said "I survived you, you b+%*#@d." I doubt that he received it. He's long dead, but I once met someone I'd been at school with who had family connections with him, and I was very satisfied to be told by this guy that "he was always astonished at what you achieved in career terms". I didn't know he'd even kept abreast of my life; I certainly did everything I could to erase him from my memory, though found it impossible in practice.