Our experiences in Education were very similar, only flip-flopped—my spiky profile was being highly verbal and sucky at math. But they didn’t know what to do with that either. Verbal IQ tested as profoundly gifted, but Performance IQ was average, giving a composite score just below the gifted cutoff. They let me join enrichment classes sometimes but I felt like an imposter. They retested me in 8th grade when I started school refusal due to bullying and I scored just above cutoff that time. Which meant that during high school I could go to gifted room and engage with my special interests when everything got to be too much. My single semester of senior year was mostly independent study classes that I had designed myself. I sense there is some privilege involved in whose needs got accommodated anyway before the diagnostic criteria were changed to include us. I’m glad you also managed to find educators that were willing to individualize your instruction, even when they didn’t have a label! I think we’re the lucky ones in that regard.
Have you already posted something that would provide some details on what you are suggesting by "flip-flopped" that you can link to? Or, if you have a moment, share here?
One of the many privileges I want to acknowledge is that I present masculine (even if I don't believe in the gender binary). Some of how my autism presented was misinterpreted as "masculine" (misinterpretations of my communication as if I were being aggressive, competative, condescending, rude, etc) which would have been interpreted by adults very differently if I presented feminine.
I'm also included in whiteness, which is another area where my social differences weren't perceived as dangerous/etc and thus more aggressively targeted as would be the case for racialized people.
Yeah, it sent the comment before I was done writing it! I was referring in terms of privilege (at least in terms of my own…which is all I can speak to) to going to an affluent, mostly white school where the parents have the power to hold the school to a higher standard and cater to their individual students’ needs. I taught in Title 1 schools for most of my career (referring to schools where a majority of the students are living in poverty), and it was very different. ND black students, especially, were often characterized as behavior problems and not accommodated, only punished. There was a lot of focus on fixing deficits rather than playing up strengths.
For all its similar flaws, Canadian schools are paid for via provincial budgets from income/profit taxes rather than from municipal property taxes, so the segregationist policies aren't as obvious here. There is a divide when it comes to population density and what larger school boards are able to offer students, but not as stark a difference along community economic lines (which under both Canadian and US sets of institutions are still tied to colonial/racist/eugenics/etc ideologies).
Three provinces (Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario) still offensively fund and operate Catholic schools, which does privilege one demographic as those schools can opt-out of funding and providing some special programming, but the "public" school boards can't.
My immediate family wasn't affluent, but this didn't impact my schooling as much as it would if I had been born under US institutions.
Yeah, my family wasn’t affluent either (I grew up in a trailer park, but my mom made damn sure that trailer park was in the best school district in town). But I reaped the benefits of going to school with a bunch of doctors’ and lawyers’ kids.
My best friend, though not rich monitarily, had high-SES herself (dad was a college professor). She went to a not-so-affluent school in the same district where I wound up teaching as an undiagnosed, profoundly gifted-across-the-board (not just verbally) Autistic kid, and things turned out differently for her in high school (though she still managed to get her Ph.D).
When I stopped going to school (this was going on mid-90’s), I got put in gifted because “we’ve got to do something before this smart kid ruins her life, even if she doesn’t quite fit with typical gifted characteristics”. When she started eloping from class, also due to bullying, they put her in a behavior disorder classroom where kids weren’t being educated, but being handed busy work that no-one even cared if it was completed or not. Most of the kids in there with her were probably also ND, but didn’t come from families where going into higher ed was the norm, so I have a feeling when most of those kids got thrown away, they stayed thrown away.
Our experiences in Education were very similar, only flip-flopped—my spiky profile was being highly verbal and sucky at math. But they didn’t know what to do with that either. Verbal IQ tested as profoundly gifted, but Performance IQ was average, giving a composite score just below the gifted cutoff. They let me join enrichment classes sometimes but I felt like an imposter. They retested me in 8th grade when I started school refusal due to bullying and I scored just above cutoff that time. Which meant that during high school I could go to gifted room and engage with my special interests when everything got to be too much. My single semester of senior year was mostly independent study classes that I had designed myself. I sense there is some privilege involved in whose needs got accommodated anyway before the diagnostic criteria were changed to include us. I’m glad you also managed to find educators that were willing to individualize your instruction, even when they didn’t have a label! I think we’re the lucky ones in that regard.
(Seems you were editing as I typed this :-)
Have you already posted something that would provide some details on what you are suggesting by "flip-flopped" that you can link to? Or, if you have a moment, share here?
One of the many privileges I want to acknowledge is that I present masculine (even if I don't believe in the gender binary). Some of how my autism presented was misinterpreted as "masculine" (misinterpretations of my communication as if I were being aggressive, competative, condescending, rude, etc) which would have been interpreted by adults very differently if I presented feminine.
I'm also included in whiteness, which is another area where my social differences weren't perceived as dangerous/etc and thus more aggressively targeted as would be the case for racialized people.
Yeah, it sent the comment before I was done writing it! I was referring in terms of privilege (at least in terms of my own…which is all I can speak to) to going to an affluent, mostly white school where the parents have the power to hold the school to a higher standard and cater to their individual students’ needs. I taught in Title 1 schools for most of my career (referring to schools where a majority of the students are living in poverty), and it was very different. ND black students, especially, were often characterized as behavior problems and not accommodated, only punished. There was a lot of focus on fixing deficits rather than playing up strengths.
For all its similar flaws, Canadian schools are paid for via provincial budgets from income/profit taxes rather than from municipal property taxes, so the segregationist policies aren't as obvious here. There is a divide when it comes to population density and what larger school boards are able to offer students, but not as stark a difference along community economic lines (which under both Canadian and US sets of institutions are still tied to colonial/racist/eugenics/etc ideologies).
Three provinces (Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario) still offensively fund and operate Catholic schools, which does privilege one demographic as those schools can opt-out of funding and providing some special programming, but the "public" school boards can't.
My immediate family wasn't affluent, but this didn't impact my schooling as much as it would if I had been born under US institutions.
Thanks so much for sharing and engaging!
Yeah, my family wasn’t affluent either (I grew up in a trailer park, but my mom made damn sure that trailer park was in the best school district in town). But I reaped the benefits of going to school with a bunch of doctors’ and lawyers’ kids.
My best friend, though not rich monitarily, had high-SES herself (dad was a college professor). She went to a not-so-affluent school in the same district where I wound up teaching as an undiagnosed, profoundly gifted-across-the-board (not just verbally) Autistic kid, and things turned out differently for her in high school (though she still managed to get her Ph.D).
When I stopped going to school (this was going on mid-90’s), I got put in gifted because “we’ve got to do something before this smart kid ruins her life, even if she doesn’t quite fit with typical gifted characteristics”. When she started eloping from class, also due to bullying, they put her in a behavior disorder classroom where kids weren’t being educated, but being handed busy work that no-one even cared if it was completed or not. Most of the kids in there with her were probably also ND, but didn’t come from families where going into higher ed was the norm, so I have a feeling when most of those kids got thrown away, they stayed thrown away.