When it comes to respect for elders, I remember an incident when I was in Year Four. The principal walked into the classroom holding a long, yellow cane, and after saying "Good Morning," he said, "Now, I hope this isn't for you people. Stand, Damien." Damien stood and when he was asked a question, he simply replied, "Yes," and the principal winced and said, "Yes, Mr. Irving! Answer properly!" And I thought, if Mr. Irving had said, "Could Damien please stand?" he would have been modelling the respect he wanted. I have often struggled with respecting people who don't respect me, regardless of age.

My Year Five Teacher, for example, I respected out of fear, but I don't remember her with respect. I remember her as an autocratic bully. Eight years later, my father was driving along the road past my old school, and that teacher turned in front of him to enter the carpark, in her car. She was supposed to give way to him, but she instead gave him a mouthful of abuse. My teacher believed that she was right when she was wrong. I also remember her posing a pointless question to us from the dictionary, where the question was, "What part of the ginger plant gives the spice?" And she said, "If I was to say, "The leaf," what would be wrong with that?" I thought, in retrospect, that she thought the reader was a fool, when she should have said, "I want you to answer this question in a sentence, to work on sentence construction." Also, one day, and this was where I wish I'd had an integration aide, she said, "You have to write to a friend." As I didn't have many friends in the class, I asked if we had to write to a friend, and an integration aide could have pulled the teacher up and said, "Just a minute. The question is not intended as "I haven't been paying attention," what Peter's asking is, "Do you have to write and give the letter to a person in the class? Or can you write to your cousin, grandmother or whatever?" And the teacher could have replied, "You won't be giving the letter to someone else in the class. You can write to your cousin, your aunty, your grandma, anybody you like."

I think, though, when it comes to rules, we may not follow neurotypical conventions, and some of us abide by rules out of fear, but we also tend to see that what is legal isn't always just and will challenge it.