yeah my brother's autistic with pretty high support needs, and amusingly what we both kinda needed out of school was pretty similar in a way. individualized support to do stuff at our own paces, but social integration with same-age peers. parents fought for that and...sometimes got it for him.

yeah, i was never gonna be super connected. just too different on top of having the earlier part of childhood in Congo. but the combination of enough challenge and some interaction with actual intellectual peers, without completely sacrificing connections with people my age, might have been a winner

when i think about what i would have wanted, what would have been best, it's basically to be able to run ahead academically as much as i could, to be continually challenged, but without being segregated off as "special", more than would happen anyway.

I'd have definitely had the adhd caught in that timeline, gotten on medication sooner. i'd have likely been a lot more conventionally successful, & probably also a worse person. idk when i'd have realized I was trans. maybe earlier, bc i'd encounter us earlier, but equally i'd have had more to lose.

yeah. there's an alt history timeline where my parents aren't so invested in me being "normal" and have more resources, I end up extremely accelerated and go to university at, like, 14, and my life looks extremely different.

can recommend @lore.house

less that there is a bottom decile and more that it has a bunch of uncertainty and desperation, even though you are very unlikely to literally starve, etc. people from the past would assume that all the automation. medical care, etc. would mean even the poor in a country were free of that feeling.

Too obviously a medication imo

I think the experience can be valuable to the kid in and of itself, certainly it was for me, to get perspective on people whose brains didn't work like mine does. but it is not a universal good or a real solution to differing abilities, and students need to be supported in it and are usually not.

But the extant alternative doesn't fix the problems, either, it just makes it so only the kids who are struggling the most have their learning environment sacrificed, and puts the top tier in their own sometimes toxic bubble.

Doing right by all kids requires something actually new. idk what, though

The glee with which a certain type of educator will kneecap the education of someone like me, remove interesting and challenging things in favour of boring easy stuff with a chance of highly disruptive classmates, just pisses me off so much. Parents were never rich enough to pay for better, either.

That sort of in practice lock-in, combined with uber-competitive university admissions, leads to more parents putting more pressure on younger kids and their teachers, because all of a sudden how their kid does in grade 3 math has Consequences for their future academic options.

Streaming works better academically for the mid/top tier, but it also kind of locks you into a path early, so if you end up badly off in elementary you're even more sunk in high school, no real recovery path. Had a church friend who was basically locked out of university bc of early issues.

Both approaches have costs. Heterogeneous classes end up serving the brightest students quite badly, in terms of providing real challenges, instead leaning on them to help lift up their peers. I know some of those who struggled were a bit demoralized by me as well.

I then became one of the best-suited people for heterogeneous classes. I really liked helping classmates, figuring out how to help them get it. But it also meant I was never ever challenged academically again until university. Which is part of why nobody caught the ADHD until i hit a wall in uni.

And then in high school, where I had more autonomy and could slack off, I did (because undiagnosed ADHD), and did well anyway. Meanwhile some classmates worked their asses off to scrape a passing grade. Which ended up making me a lot kinder to my peers, bc what I'd seen as a moral failing wasn't.

My parents were very much of an egalitarian bent, and generally tried to attribute academic success to diligent work rather than innate ability, and pre-teen me in heavily streamed classes had assumed that kids who didn't understand things as well simply didn't read enough, or work hard enough.

yeah she was pretty content with me curled up sorta around her here for a good half hour