NY Times article on Aspies and college!

[MomOTwins]

Take a look at this great article!

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/05/education/edlife/traits.html?em&ex=1162962000&en=e5daeeaef56d23fe&ei=5087%0A

[Lara]

Thanks very much for posting that interesting article. Boy, does some of that sound familiar! My son's been studying at a college for 3 years now without anyone there being formally told of any conditions. His choice. It's been pretty full-on indeed.

[milivica]

That was a wondeful article, it was painful to read. I had to leave high school for social reasons, not grades. College was great by comparison, but I only went to the college I could afford, a junior college. Not so clicky and all.

I absolutely most loved this:
“We would provide an interpreter to a hard-of-hearing person. Why don’t we provide an interpreter for somebody with Asperger’s?”

so much so, it will be in my son's next meeting. That is EXACTLY EXACTLY EXACTLY what I want...someone that can interpret him to his school world and peers and teachers, as well as the other way around interpreting his school world peers and teachers to him.

You cannot do that, without first understanding how his mind works, what he's thinking that he's not able to say - he has no other thought process to compare his to. You can't say, "I'm not reading that body language" unless you 1) know there's such a thing and 2) know you're not reading it from previous experience of having read it. 'Interpreting' autism, speaking nt and asd is just not something that is going to come naturally to anyone, it takes speciffic training but it can be done. I know for sure, cause the RDI consultant, while talking to dh and I, it was like she was watching a ping pong game....I would speak and she'd tell my husband, "now this is what she means" and visa versa when he would speak. And every time I'd say, "well why didn't he just say that!"

I'll have to read that article again to make sure I didn't miss any more gems in there.

Thanks,
Mili

[Lara]

Mili,
I totally understand what you mean by an interpreter.
My son left school in year 9 for same reasons. He got his AS diagnosis late and had never had any services at all in school. He's since gone on to do an IT diploma and _after_ doing that he went back and finished year 12 with highest marks in all subjects except english which he still struggles with really. (physics, math, chem, biology - top marks. All except english which is his most difficult subject for various reasons, basically because of the way the course is written and his style of thinking - books, paragraphing, plots, sequences etc..) To many people, his leaving school when he did was a sign of failure of some sort, but it wasn't like that at all. It was really a life-saving event and it should remind people that the conventional type of educational system is not for every individual. There are other ways to be educated, whether that's with mentors, with homeschooling, with other organizations who help people with certain gifts and abilities to fulfil their education. I know we're talking about a spectrum here though, and not everyone is the same, so it's not going to be the same for your children necessarily as it is for mine. It's been a long hard road here really but I also think that age and maturity has a lot to do with many changes that have occurred for my son in the past few years. He seems more open and outside of himself than he ever was. Well, not all the time, but a lot more than before. He never made plans all his life. Couldn't look forward outside his self, but he can now. They're still small steps, but to me they're giant steps, because I can worry just that little less now about what happens when I'm not here anymore. :-/