I am an autistic grad student studying psychology. I don’t really talk about being autistic in class or at school in general because I want to make sure that I don’t experience anything negative, like faculty thinking I am less capable. However, I am very open about it in pretty much any other setting, especially social media, and am not in the least bit ashamed of it because it makes me who I am.

At the time of this interaction, I had posted some pictures online that I took at a concert featuring my favorite band, which I have loved for years and had never gotten to see before. One of the photos I posted was captioned, “Not pictured is me bursting into autistic tears halfway through [Song]”, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to say considering that I am autistic and did start crying. My account was public, so anyone could see it, but I didn’t think anything of it.

The next day, however, I got an email from the head of my program asking to meet. Later that day, I went to his office and found him sitting at his desk with a very grim expression, alongside one of my professors, who was staring me down with his arms crossed.

Program Head: “Do you know why you’re here today?”

Me: “Uh, no, actually. What’s going on?”

[Program Head] pushed a printed-out screenshot of that photo across the desk.

Program Head: “Your professor brought this to my attention.”

Me: *Genuinely confused* “Okay?”

Professor: “I feel like, as a future psychologist, you should know better than to mock those with this kind of disability.”

Me: “Wait, I wasn’t—”

Program Head: *Cutting me off* “I am not interested in hearing excuses. This is something I absolutely cannot tolerate, and if I could, I would expel you right now. I can’t, considering that this is your first infraction, but—”

Me: *Trying to get a word in* “Wait, hold on—”

Program Head: *Holding up his hand* “Please do not interrupt me. This is your first infraction, so this will be strike one. If you ever post something as insensitive as this again, you will be expelled.”

I was near tears and shaking like a leaf.

Me: “Can I talk now?”

Program Head: “I don’t see what you could possibly have to say right now, but go ahead.”

Me: “I wasn’t mocking autistic people; I am autistic.”

He gave me a look like a deer in headlights, glancing over at my professor, who had gone pale. Slowly, he reached across the table and pulled the paper back toward himself.

Professor: “I had no idea that you were—”

Me: “Well, I am. I wouldn’t make fun of something like that anyway.”

Program Head: “You can go now. I need to discuss this with your professor.”

Me: “What about the strike?”

Program Head: “I will remove it from your record. Please accept my sincerest apologies.”

Once I gathered my wits and left, I could hear faint arguing. My professor didn’t make eye contact with me for the rest of the semester, and the head of the program gave me a gift card to make up for it, although I definitely don’t trust him as much anymore after he tried to punish me without even asking me for my side of the story.

CONTENT WARNING: Cancer, Death

My last year in public education was horrendous. I had a narcissistic first-year principal. I had an undiagnosed emotionally disturbed student; the next year, I was told he was diagnosed after he bit a chunk out of another child’s face. I got inundated by an overflowing kindergarten class. I also learned that my mother was declining from stage four colon cancer that had metastasized to her liver and lungs.

I was in the lunchroom on duty when the hospice nurse called me to come immediately. My mom was actively dying. I left the lunchroom to find an administrator.

The front office was empty! I had no idea why. It turned out that every single person in the admin office had left for lunch, leaving absolutely no one there to handle emergencies that might crop up. Not knowing that at the time, I ran into the library, thinking they might be in there. When the librarian saw my face, she asked me what was wrong. I told her. She told me to get going and that she’d tell the principal to ensure my class was covered.

I left and got to the house with just a bit of time to spare, so I was able to say goodbye to my mother and tell her that I loved her.

That evening, I tried to call the principal and the assistant principal. Neither answered. One of my teacher friends told me she would talk to them for me.

Days later, at my mom’s viewing, the narcissistic first-year principal walked into the funeral home and told me she’d come to see if I was telling the truth. She wasn’t even talking quietly or being subtle; she just strolled directly into the service and loudly told me that she was there to see if I had been lying.

My brother was standing next to me, and he was stunned for a moment. Until, at least, she turned to him and — equally loudly — asked what my relationship was to the deceased. That snapped him out of it.

I can’t type what my brother said to her because of the kind of language he used. Let’s just say that much of her ancestry was in question, as were the number of brain cells she had. He also gave her a direct order to do some extremely anatomically difficult things involving intimacy. She looked ready to spit fire when she realized that the whole family had turned and were eyeing her in a way that suggested torches and pitchforks. She left.

Days later, I found out that our school secretary kept me from being fired by calling the Administration Building and explaining what had happened to me from beginning to end — and telling them that all the admin staff had left their post with no coverage. We got a new principal.

I’m the author of this story and this story. The year after the second story, after moving to a completely different area of my city and transferring to a school quite literally behind my house, things were a lot better. I was able to make friends more easily, the overall feeling of the school was a lot nicer (minus the scandals like the seventh-grade girls’ bathroom getting lit on fire and someone leaving a bottle of milk in the lockers over the summer), and my teachers were a lot nicer… except for one.

My gym teacher was the stereotypical gym teacher bully type. He bragged about never taking a sick day, and he spewed that people on any sort of financial aid were lazy. I took both of these very, very personally. Not only was my mother suffering from epileptic seizures constantly and often had to call out of work when she had a particularly bad one overnight, but we were on food stamps, and my mother got partial disability payments.

[Gym Teacher] loved to belittle anyone who didn’t fit his perfect mold of a star athlete student, and if you weren’t on one of his teams, you were lazy and doomed to fail.

During my eighth grade year, this middle school made the decision to transition, year by year, into a high school, and since it was less than a minute’s walk from my house, I decided to stay at this school for high school after finishing eighth grade. This would make me a member of the first graduating class of this school. Moreover, most (but not all) of the teachers actually stuck around; some are still there, years after I graduated!

Unfortunately, one of them was [Gym Teacher], who also made the schedules for the students. And while the curriculum required one phys ed credit to graduate, I had him EVERY. SINGLE. YEAR. It was horrible having to listen to the same spiels every day for another four years.

Come senior year, however, I made a painful decision. My classes were just rehashing the same material I’d been learning for the past three years; I wasn’t learning anything new. In the middle of the school year, my dad’s gallbladder went out, and my worry about him after his surgery gave me such chronic insomnia that I couldn’t function for over a month, and then the city shut down for another month right after due to a massive blizzard. I was out of school for a total of two months, and my teachers were cool about it and gave me a packet of makeup work… which I finished during the lunch period the same day because it was middle-school grade work.

Because I wasn’t learning anything new that would properly prepare me for college courses, and because my dad was still recovering and couldn’t do a whole lot by himself, I made the decision to drop out. I don’t regret it one bit, honestly, but what followed that decision is something that made Dad’s rant at my sixth-grade teacher absolutely pale in comparison.

My parents and I went up to the school during a day off to start the process of unenrolling me from the school. On the way up, Dad had to use the restroom, so Mom and I waited outside for him… and [Gym Teacher] saw us. He asked what was going on and why I was in school on a day off. We explained to him that I was preparing to unenroll.

To make a long story short, he attempted to guilt me, saying he was “so disappointed” and that I was “wasting my talent”. He caused me to break down sobbing. My mom got quite mad and told him that he had no right to decide whether or not I could drop out…

…and enter Papa Wolf, who saw me sobbing and my teacher lecturing me.

I thought he’d wanted to throw my old science teacher into a tree, but I have a hunch he would have hurled [Gym Teacher] out of a window. He roared at him loud enough that teachers were poking their heads out to find out what was going on. The less said, the better, because the language my dad used was… quite colorful, to say the least.

[Gym Teacher] left us alone, and we went to the principal’s office to get me unenrolled. The principal then tried to come up with all manner of excuses why she couldn’t just sign the singular form, which both of my parents shut down rather quickly. One signature later, I was unenrolled.

(I get the feeling they were trying to keep me around to boost their standardized testing scores because after I left, the school name went from [City] Community Academy to [President] High School at [City].)

As with my last story, though, this one has a happy ending, as well! Two years later, a school librarian stopped by my mom’s place of employment to try to set up internships for the students. My mom mentioned that I used to go to the school, and when she gave my name, the librarian was speechless. Apparently, I was quite popular among the faculty. We sat down and had a long discussion, and I decided to go back and graduate; they’d instated a new principal in the time I was gone, who personally expedited the process and assured me he’d do everything he could to help me graduate.

When he shook my hand as I walked across the stage, he told me he was so proud of me, and frankly, that made all the crap I endured worth it.

Related:
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Teachers Are Supposed To PROTECT Kids From Bullies

The high school I go to has recently been extensively renovated. One of the main changes was getting rid of the traditional multi-stall bathrooms and building rows of single-stall, genderless bathrooms instead. The toilets are in small closets, about ten in a row, off the main hallways, with sinks on the wall outside the closets.

One day, about two weeks into the school year when everyone is getting used to the new bathrooms, the principal calls the entire school into the auditorium for an unplanned assembly.

Principal: “As you’ve seen, the new bathrooms don’t have sinks in the same room as the toilets. The sinks are in the hallway outside the bathroom, and I can’t believe I need to say this to high school kids, but… we know when you don’t wash your hands after using the bathroom. That’s gross. Just… gross. So, from now on, anyone caught not washing their hands after using the bathroom will be given lunch detention, and continued refusal to wash their hands will result in additional punishments for willfully spreading biological hazards by not washing their hands after going to the bathroom.”

It took a few kids getting suspended from school for their terrible hygiene practices, but I personally haven’t seen anyone coming out of the bathroom without washing their hands for a while, so I hope it’s working.

This story is set in 2021 when I was a long-term substitute at a middle school in Italy for a teacher who had gotten badly injured. I could tell hundreds of stories about my time there, but suffice it to say that it was an extremely toxic workplace, my coworkers were less emotionally mature than the kids, and the experience left me so hurt and disillusioned that I swore off teaching in a classroom setting forever.

This particular tale is about our lovely vice principal. This woman never liked me, and the feeling was very much mutual. She was generally known as a good teacher, but somehow, her ability to teach her subject (English as a second language) to the kids didn’t translate well to her ability to get her point across to coworkers. She was a terrible communicator, constantly giving vague instructions and ambiguous messages that would leave me staring at my phone for several minutes wondering what in the world she meant.

One day, I was in the staff room discussing one such message with a coworker, who was just as confused as I was about the latest riddle [Vice Principal] had sent to the staff group chat.

[Vice Principal] heard me ask what the message meant and proceeded to publicly tear me a new one, going on a rant about how it couldn’t possibly have been clearer, questioning my intelligence and my fitness to teach, and ending with this gem:

Vice Principal: *Sarcastically* “Good thing you’re teaching Italian!”

For context, I was mainly teaching Italian as a FIRST language, i.e., grammar and literature; she was essentially making a dig at my reading comprehension, insinuating that if I was too stupid to understand her text message, I couldn’t possibly teach the kids to understand our literary masterpieces.

I was too stunned by her tirade to come up with an answer, but for once, I didn’t have to.

Coworker #1: “Actually, I didn’t understand what you meant by that, either.”

Coworker #2: “Me, neither!”

[Vice Principal]’s face as she was forced to consider that she might actually be the problem was a sight to behold. She sputtered and stormed off without saying another word, and I sadly never experienced such a show of solidarity again, but the Great Text Message Mutiny stands out as one of the few somewhat positive incidents I had during my teaching stint.