Aspies For Freedom

B"H

My situation is a little different.  This person is my job superior, since I never had a "case manager" in school.  Actually, she is NOT my superior.  She just thinks that she is.  She would have been my superior if she were still the case manager of the student with whom I work.  She is angry that her powers were stripped before I arrived on the scene.  

The situation is complicated.  However, she has taken her anger out on me.  She knows perfectly well that I am on the Spectrum.  These people are trained to know these things.  I cannot hide it from them, which is a good idea if you are in education.  I know that this is not very "Neuro-diversity" of me, but it is based on solid experience in the NT-centric world of public education.  Yet, it is also impossible, as these people are TRAINED to see these things!

Now, I want to be fair to this woman.  She is not a monster.  She is a complicated person in a lot of denial.  This person wants to do a good job, and often does.  It is simply that she cannot tolerate a person on the Spectrum who does not know his place.  She also cannot accept her culpability in the chain of events that brought me on the scene, a chain of events that I cannot discuss.  

That is my suspicion.  I could be wrong, as you are getting my side of the story and not hers.  It is how it appears to me.  My problem is that she has made my life very difficult.  We both care deeply about the student, but in her case she is in too much denial to be of effective use for him.  She is much better for her other students.

Perhaps those of you with more direct experience as a *student* under such a person can explain the psychology at work here?  Why did she insist upon treating me as a child, until the Administration got involved?  I find it condescending.  I know that she means well.  She genuinely cares about her students.  Someone help me to understand, please.

All the best.

My experience doesn't relate directly since I'm over 50 and people didn't know about the spectrum.  I can say that my parents and psychologist thought it would be helpful to move me to a different school in 3rd grade.  I was delighted with the chance for a fresh start, away from the old bullys.

Unfortunately, at the new school, the principal spotted me in the hall with the rest of my class and said (loud enough for everyone to hear) "Aren't you the girl that goes to a psychiatrist?"  I couldn't believe he did that.  I thought "So much for the fresh start." and of course... kids started taunting me.  I was marked.

There is potential merit in professionals.  But being publicly marked as different can be social poison for a kid.

atypical - I have not answered as I have not personally had any experience with this.  

My daughter loves her resource teacher, and even her classroom teacher, now that she has a better understanding of her needs.  

We have not gone down the case worker path.

Sorry I do not have any more information -

In any case -

*BUMP*

Yes, yes, and YES. Even the ones who have meant very well have given me all kinds of trouble, and for the most part I just shut up and put up with it because I knew they could make my life hell if they wanted to. One woman berated me so harshly that I was going to jump off the second story of the school floor I was at. I don't have the time or the words for it now, but I'll respond later tonight, and probably write a blog post too. I am exhausted too because I just finished testing (IQ testing today). At least the guy testing me didn't get mad at me and yell at me for getting the "wrong" answers.

We do not have a "case worker" that I know of.  We have a district psychologist and a resource teacher that work with her, as well as a school psychologist that is doing the group counseling sessions.  

Her reactions to all of them have been so good, I know that they are at least making her feel better when she is with them.  

I will have to update this after she has some work with the private clinic we are going to visit.  I am not sure what they will think of that.

B"H

You're all making me glad I'm with the person I'm with!

My son has had several. Some of them (the earlier ones) were benign, most were damaging in some way, and a few have been outright eeeeeeevvviiiilllllll.

I was ALWAYS pulled out of class to see the god damn social worker. It made me so angry because I wanted to be like the other kids, looking normal like they did. Getting pulled out in the middle of class made me stand out, made me look like an idiot. She was dumb too, I would tell her that I was normal, and the bullying in previous grades made me psychologically ill, but of course she didn't listen.

I would've been ALOT better off if I never had a f***ing social worker. If they would've treated me like every other kid I would have been less sick and I would be more prepared for the adult world. I cannot even be the original career I wanted because the 504 plan made me fall behind in school. I was supposed to be 2 years advanced in math, but I was physically not allowed to attend ANY advanced courses. Now I'm just an average student instead of exceptional, and I got a shitty ACT score because I'm not in advanced math. People who are allowed in AP courses do better than regular students. I was SUPPOSED to be an AP student, but they forced me to be a regular student... and now I can't be what I truly want to be because I cannot get into the colleges I want...

IT RUINED MY LIFE!!!!! BULLYING AND THE SOCIAL WORKER RUINED MY LIFE!!!!!!!

Based on what Soccer Freak and others have said, I am seriously considering leaving the public school system to teach in a private school.  Can anyone give advice and direction as to how to go about doing that?

Anyone?

That's one principal who should have been fired on the spot and banned from any further involvement in education.

As a kid, I was never assigned any kind of case worker (that I'm aware of), but in the third grade, some lady at my school made it her business to "notice" things about me and harass my parents about it.  I got pulled out of class one afternoon for the little meeting a few days before the IQ test.  It was held in the front part of the special ed room.  (That room, which I'd pass on the way to and from the blacktop for PE lessons, was mostly known as the "room full of retarded kids".)  I don't remember much of what the lady said in explaining the upcoming test.  I just remember that I was distracted by the clock and somewhere out of sight, I could hear a teacher and student screaming back and forth "SAY YOUR NAME!  ROY!  SAY YOUR NAME!  ROY!")  A few days later, I scored high on the IQ test but they still found stuff to bitch about.

Fourth grade, my parents found themselves fighting the school board, in the face of threats of it going to court.  Fifth grade, no case, but the school system found itself apologizing to my parents.  (When the teacher I had for 5th took that job, she probably never imagined one of her students would nail first-place in the science fair.)

Grade six, and I was taking all gifted classes except math.  They made me take math with the EH class.  (A fight broke out once between the kid next to me and the kid behind me, the kind of fight where a desk or two rolls and one kid has the other by the shirt collar.  Another in that class got busted for burglary while still in middle school.)  That set me back, and I struggled all the way into college trying to catch up in math.  Kind of embarrassing being one of only two ninth-graders in gifted Algebra I, with everyone else being in the eighth grade.

Math?  Of all classes!  They new damn well I was interested in science and engineering stuff from early on.  Now I've got a bachelor's in engineering and a master's in computer science.  I'd love to rub that in the faces of everyone involved.

Sorry to plug a rant into a serious thread like this, but this is just my way of saying what alot of people on this site say... that public schools are run by a bunch of idiots.

She has an IEP, but no case worker.

I think it is a difference in terminology.  My daughter has a resource teacher.

I spent about 2 hours looking for that terminology on the special education sites yesterday.  The only way she will have a case manager, here in our state, is if social services or child protective services becomes involved.  Which no one wants.

I even just checked her IEP, as you had me thinking I was missing a "rung on the ladder" when I talk to people about her.  Nope, no case worker.  There is the resource teacher, her regular teacher, the school counselor, and the district counselor (who did her testing.)  That is it.

The main problems I have with these people (not all, mind you, but many) who work with autistic kids is that very often what I see is someone whose social skills are very limited to their (NT, bureacracy) terms. They have a hard time reaching out to see another person's perspective. They cannot accept that a rule they try to force their students to abide by (which isn't even a school rule at all) might be arbitrary, pointless, and counterproductive. They are sadly mistaken, though, for when learning must come on their terms, then nothing of value is being learned.

Heck, I have some friends who are clearly very NT, whose social instincts are practically the opposite of mine, but they can see into my perspectives a whole lot better (and this is in high school). They aren't "looking into the strange world of an autistic weirdo", they're just interacting with me. And this difference isn't solely denoted by age/authority: my mother, also notably NT, is way better at communicating and seeing my perspectives, and doesn't try to ram her ways of thinking down my throat.

I have noticed that these special ed. teachers I'm referring to at this school (don't remember much about people from elementary and junior high school) will try to resolve a difficulty I'm having in (what I now recognize as) clearly pathological terms. If I have trouble concentrating, then it's something wrong with me that can be fixed, rather than viewing and interpreting it as a complex interaction between me and the environment and the presentation of the material or activity I'm supposed to concentrate on.

Also, while this is more of a side issue, some people (most notably this one woman who was testing me before she was "relieved of duty at this school") just can't stand that I will have extreme difficulty with some things. They think, "she can do math and physics that is way beyond me, so clearly speech CAN'T be an issue, since we know she CAN speak."

There is also just blatant ignorance, such as giving vague suggestions that something may not be a good idea that will get people to not like you very much, and then when you get in trouble for it even when it's not against any written or spoken rule they say, "We told you not to do it." They're really that f***ng ignorant. The worst part is that they are totally unwilling to challenge the notion that they know what they're doing or that they could be doing things better, so they don't have a hope of changing anytime soon.

I think to myself, why the heck did they choose this profession? Do they really truly believe they're doing us any favors? But sometimes I can see, when they talk about other students amongst each other, that yes, they think they're being competent and doing their jobs. While they do these things inadequately with lots of people, they do seem to have a particular frustration with me. I think this in part stems from the fact that this high school I go to requires a 2.0 GPA, and the school has prestige in academics, so they don't expect to see someone have such difficulties with things like speech, for instance, and they also seem to be easily frustrated by the difficulties of access stemming from my low vision.

The adjustment has been particularly hard the last two years, because while my eyesight has been progressively getting lower since I can remember, last year I didn't have much recourse as I couldn't read books and such without a magnifying glass, which that year I lost when I dropped it on the bus and didn't realize that it had my left hand. So mostly I didn't ask for help, I just would ask people I knew about what happened in the books we were to read, and my grades dropped a lot (that wasn't the only reason, but it's a large part). But most people except for a few teachers haven't really handled that well, and my work sufferred as a result. Even this year I got a really good magnifying glass, but it takes awhile to get used to reading books with it, and I can only read a small amount at a time, so by the time I can return to the text I've forgotten what I've read.