We thank our students for sharing their thoughts on disabilities with the GCC community.
I Wish People Knew...
People assume that I always need help with everything. I may require some help with things more than others. I don’t always need help though.
Another thing I feel that people misunderstand about me is that I have no friends. For me it is harder to make friends, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have any.
People assume is that I am stupid and dumb. I am, in fact, not stupid and dumb and I want people to realize that. I’ve been called the r word in the past and worse. I’ve had people say, “Don’t you get what I’m talking about?” and it feels like they’re calling me out specifically.
Things I find helpful include
Lower noise levels to make it easier to concentrate and focus on what the instructor is saying.
More than one explanation of an assignment/concept.
A visual to help explain an assignment because it helps me connect what’s expected. For ex, show a graph and explain the parts of it.
Group projects are good because I don’t feel alone, I’m not doing all the work by myself, and I can get a peer’s perspective.
From Torrey Sandoz
Look Beyond
If there is one thing that I wish for the faculty to know about Autism is that it is very different depending on who you are dealing with.
I can only speak with my experiences with Aspergers and the fact how it makes things hard for me with social encounters.
An anthro class wanted us to relate what we were learning with our own experiences or our own culture.
I was having a really hard time doing that. Especially when adding in emotional responses to our work.
I have a really hard time doing that because all my emotional responses that I can think of tend to be one word responses, not longer or more in-depth.
Instead I find classes that have to do with culture or art more difficult or challenging. It’s hard to take other people’s perspectives and see or analyze events from their point of view.
For me where others would find mathematics hard, I would find it easy. I tend to have a very logical/analytical mind set where I tend to put things in a quantitative way.
For me, I find conversation less like something natural and more like a game or puzzle in which there is a logic I must follow to keep the natural flow of the conversation going without it becoming awkward. This will cause me to get tired out easily when I am around people.
I also I really bad dyslexia and find even though I feel like I have really high cognitive abilities, I tend to be slower at processing information.
As to what helps me, I find the extra time on test really helps because I can take it a bit slower and make sure I am processing everything correctly.