Education

Five tips for autistic students starting college or university

On paper, I’m an amazing student. I have a Bachelors degree in Mathematics with Education (with honours), a postgraduate primary teaching PGCE, and last year I graduated with distinction in my Masters in Creati...

Autism and exam stress: 10 tips from personal experience

When I was sixteen, I took fourteen exams in three weeks. In the next two years, I took another sixteen plus a bunch of resits too. At university, I took twenty-four. I did all of them without having any ...

The balance between helping autistic people and doing it for them (and how to get it right)

During my work in special education, one story that really stuck with me involved a sixteen-year-old girl who came to us after a lifetime in mainstream schools. The most revealing moment of her first week came ...

A survival guide for Year Sixes preparing for their SATs (from an autistic teacher)

There are so many advice articles out there for parents. This one’s for children. In particular, this is for the thousands of Year Six children who are about to take their end-of-primary-school SAT...

Asperger’s versus the Bullies: 8 Important Tips for Coping with Bullying

This may turn out to be the most important article I have ever written. And it may not be light reading: powerful subjects need powerful words. Teenagers, this one's for you again. The story of ...

Ten reasons your autistic child needs to learn chess right now

Ah, chess. The game of kings... and Aspies. Now, before I begin, I expect a few readers will come up with the following reasons for their autistic child to not learn chess. Oh, he’ll just thro...

How hard can it be to fund a school for disabled children?

I’ve often heard that you can judge a whole society on how it treats its most vulnerable. And I’m not going to reinforce that sentence with anything. You’re all bright enough to draw your own concl...

Story of an Autistic Teacher: encouraging Aspies beyond their ‘natural limits’

I usually make my posts very personal. I think the human element is extremely important. This may be one of the more difficult posts to write. Because this one doesn’t just describe my brain. It tells my sto...

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Autistic Not Weird

10 hours ago

When I was about nine years old, I wrote out Christmas cards for *loads* of people. I went to a lot of effort, spending hours writing them for as many people I cared about as possible.
One of those people was my section leader at Boys' Brigade. Having written her a card saying "Merry Christmas" and thanking her for a great year, I arrived at BB, lumbered up to her and pretty much threw the card straight in her face. Then I walked off.

I think it's fair to say I was a clumsy child, but on top of that I didn't think the delivery method mattered as long as the card arrived at its destination safely. I would later come to learn that if you walk up to someone, throw a card at them and walk away, they will usually think that you wrote the card under duress. Or just generally don't care about them. Both of those conclusions were wrong in that case. The effort and gratefulness that went into that Christmas card weren't reflected outside of the card, so were most likely assumed not to exist.

The moral of the story is: autistic people are likely to care about you very deeply. But we are *not* experts in showing it in the socially accepted way.
A bunch of us get nervous about opening presents because the better the present is, the more important it is that we show the "correct" reaction, which is often difficult to predict. We learn quite early that being happy and grateful on the inside just isn't enough, and that an element of social performance is required for the other person to believe you're actually grateful.

So if an autistic child throws a card in your face this year, appreciate the card anyway. :P ... See MoreSee Less

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Autistic Not Weird

12 hours ago

When you stop pathologising passion, you realise how amazing autistic "obsessions" can be. ... See MoreSee Less

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Autistic Not Weird shared a post.

14 hours ago

This has been doing the rounds across the internet recently. Great stuff.This letter, shared today on Twitter by someone recently diagnosed with autism, is how you do autism diagnoses letters for older children and adults 💥

Update: Apparently this great letter was written by Vicky Bliss from Lancashire Autism Service. It was shared by The Joy of Bex @debecca (Twitter) ... See MoreSee Less

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