Things which are self-evident

Being Aspie means having a rule-bound life. There are certain areas where I just access the "program" in my mind and the job is taken care of. For instance, if I am going to drive to a city north of my city, I access that program with its set of rules, and I don't really have to think about what I am doing--I know which lane to be in and while I pay attention for things that are out of the ordinary, I know I'm not going to surprise anyone by switching lanes at the last minute because I'm following my program for that destination.

But it also means expecting other people to follow the rules. How many times have my husband and I been on a walk, and I start crossing the street in front of a car (not directly--there's some distance). He tries to stop me and I say, "but there's a stop sign there." The stop sign is sufficient for me. That person is going to stop. But NT's don't always follow the rules and I forget that.

There is another place where the lack of NT rule following irritates me, and that's when a set of ideas leads to some really obvious (to me) implications. Take teaching, for instance, which is what I do. If a theory that I adhere to, such as constructivism, suggests that students need to be involved in their own education, then why are we shoving a curriculum down people's throats. If we think that tests are basically bad forms of assessment (in my semiotic perspective, tests are unusually poor representations of a person's knowledge or ability to do something), then why are we testing, for goodness sake??

This tends to make me a bit iconoclastic and also I'm sure I'm not that easy to deal with because my attitude is, if you can't even try to live up to your ideals (which I read as rules) then why have them? I'm trying to be patient. But others would say that I'm simply trying.