A few days ago somebody online asked if people think I have an accent

[conuly]

This is a fairly common thing for autistics to have, a sort of developmental foreign accent syndrome, and I've got it too. (So, I think, does my mother, but she has an alternate explanation. Well, whatever the origin, she also is afflicted by people asking where she's from.) Interestingly, the further I get from NYC, the less people are likely to hear some strangely unidentifiable foreign accent in my speech.

Anyway, it's been a while since this came up in real life, but what do you know, just yesterday one of the people at the doctor's office asked when I was there with my mother!

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Comments

[conuly]

Can't you get a diagnosis but not disclose it?

[fred_mouse]

Yes. Except that eldest's responses to strange situations was such that putting them through it would only have been worth it if we were going to use it. And while the school turned out to do quite well (there were 5 identified kids with autism in youngest's year group of ~45 kids) I don't have a lot of faith in the public education system dealing with unusual kids, particularly ones that are academically 'gifted' *and* not NT. Now, there probably is a benefit to having a diagnosis, because the university equity office can use a formal diagnosis for accommodations that they can't get without one. (At the high school level, there is almost no point in putting in a request for accommodations for the final exams. I've heard a number of doozies, but basically, you have to do the exam at the set time or fail. Which meant for me, an examiner came to my house, while I was still feverish and contagious [chicken pox] and invigilated my exam in my lounge room! I'm told that they don't even do that these days, and I would have had to take my contagious self to a examination hall across the other side of the city).

[conuly]

Oh, geez. That's a ridiculous system. Sick kids having to take tests? When they're sick? Now I've heard everything.

[fred_mouse]

Yeah. This is only for the final high school exams, which are made out to be A Really Big Thing, but euh, people's lives are generally not in the balance.

[shehasathree]

I am so UGGHH to hear that WA is just as bad as Vic in this regard.

It was bad in 19999 when my boyfriend broke his jaw on his way to a midyear exam (which meant he also missed the GAT, which...meant that VCAA screwed up and didn't bother averaging out his marks from the two assessments he did complete, they just gave him a very low Study Score, which wasn't revealed until after the end of the school year, and Change of Preference day, etc etc ugh ugh ugh).

It was bad when i did Year 12 while in the midst of an episode of clinical depression/autistic burnout, and, afaict, it's still bad now, because i recently looked into what kind of accommodations are available for kids with documented learning disabilities, including dysgraphia, and...it was pretty dire.

[fred_mouse]

It is all so shitty, isn't it. And here there is such pressure that this is the One True Way to get in to uni, and the truth is that there are several better ways that might well do a better job of preparing kids, it is just that the Prestigious University probably doesn't accept it.

[shehasathree]

Yes in-bloody-deed.