Higher Education for Mentally Handicapped?

Anonymous Coward asks: "I am an autistic high-schooler, who is currently in special education. I am very bright, but I lack the ability to do even very basic math. I am interested in Technology and Computers very much, but after looking at the requirements for a computer science major, there is no way I can do all that. What options, other than college, are available for a good education?"

Comments

Tech schools

[john_is_war]

There's the option of possibly using a technical school. They tend to be a little bit more hands on so you could probably find a certain path you could take which accomodates your needs.

Another option would be finding a college that has a "Built your own majors" or whatever they're called. Plenty of schools have them, just check around. That way you could just work with your guidance counselor to create a course structure that shys away from what you have difficulty doing.

Computers and Math

[flonker]

Computer programming requires a very intuitive grasp of boolean logic (Discrete math), symbolic logic (Algebra) and set theory (Discrete math again). Also, a good short to mid term memory is more important than intelligence. For many people, programming is a state of mind.

For example, the speed of a bubble sort is O(n^2). A trivial bubble sort has to iterate over a list for every element in that list. So, assuming n items in the list, the bubble sort needs to go through the list n times, each time going through the list (in a nested loop) n times. Giving you a speed of n*n, or n^2. Anyway, a merge sort is O(n*log(n)), but it requires 2n memory, whereas a bubble sort is done in n memory. So, which would be better for your application?

Network administration usually also requires a bit of math.

For example, the IP addresses 10.1.1.1 and 10.1.5.8 are in the subnet 255.255.248.0. To do this, I converted both IPs to binary, and found the most significant 0, and then 0'ed out all of the bits below that. Then I converted back to decimal.

(I simplified the examples, because explaining subnets or sorting is beyond the scope of this post.)

In short, I rarely do basic math, but some of the more advanced stuff is critical. I would suggest grabbing a copy of a programming language, and attempting to modify a simple program to do something else, to see if you have what it takes to be a programmer.

I'd suggest Perl, but that's my opinion, and opinions about languages vary greatly. Perl is one of the more natural languages, and may be more forgiving for you. Then again, it may cause more problems because you're not explicit enough in telling it what you want, in which case try Python.

Good luck.

What kind of autism?

[orthogonal]

It's become almost trite to assume that many people in computing -- especially programmers -- are on the autistic spectrum. Usually this means Asperger's rather than "classic" Kanner autism, but in truth, it's not yet clear what bright-line (if any) separates the two conditions, and many studies have lumped Asperger and Kanner autistics together.

The lay distinction is that Asperger's is high-functioning autism, or autism without mental retardation, and in some cases of Asperger's even higher than average intelligence; but while there are more high-functioning individuals with Asperger's than Kanner's, high-functioning and low-functioning individuals with both syndromes exist. A diagnosis of Asperger's, unlike Kanner's does not include late speech or speech followed by a loss of speech, but both forms involve speech abnormalities of one sort or another, and both involve significant social impairment, related to an inability to "read" others' body language or (more so in Kanner's) an inability to conceive that others' perceptions differ from the autistic person's.

In nuerotypical (i.e., normal) brains, the part of the brain called the fusiform gyrus is activated to "read" another person's emotional state from the other's facial expression. In autistic persons (either Kanner or Asperger), the fusiform gyrus is not activated, with some studies showing autistic used parts of the brain used for object processing and others that each autistic individual uses a different brain areas to process facial emotional cues. High-functioning autistics generally explain that they process faces consciously, apparently as part of general problem solving.

Autistics are often seem as having less empathy or "flatter" emotions, although Temple Grandin, a high-functioning Kanner type autistic, reports that autistic have different emotions with the predominant emotion being a pervasive sense of fear. It is unclear whether this fear is the cause, effect, or just a
correlate of, the social impairments of autistic.

Autistics genenerally have special areas of interest which they obsess over, and this is in fact one required criteria for diagnosis.

Autism has only been included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders , the handbook of (American) psychiatry, since 1994, and so was apparently often mis-diagnosed (as depression, schizophrenia, or Pervasive Developmental Disorder) until recently; in many cases, the diagnosis of a child has led to a retroactive diagnoses (usual of Asperger's, as it's more "subtle") of one or both parents. Autism is one of the most strongly inherited neurological syndromes.

For more and more balanced information (I happened tonight to be browsing the journal articles that I cited, thus my emphasis on them) see (as usual) Wikipedia's article on autism.

To the submitter: do you know what form of autism you have?

From a fellow AC

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Well, at the very least, AC means Autistics & Cousins in this case, I've got Asperger's. Here's how I did it, and I fully recommend my method to anybody in computer science: I learned to break problems down into iterative methods, and programmed them into (at that time) a RPN calculator. I still don't have any real understanding of trigonometry besides memorizing which functions are complementary- but the additional algorithim practice this gave me has become utterly invaluable in real-world programming, where I haven't had a single project in 8 years that has used any math more complex than the quadratic equation I used in high school.