While a fairly short game, the depth and density of the story and gameplay contained in Vagrant Story give it an intensity missing from most longer games.

Let’s just get it out of the way – Vagrant Story is a ground-breaking game. A melange of the action, adventure and RPG genres, Square has truly beaten all odds and produced an engaging, seamless epic unlike any other. Despite a few interface and complexity issues, Vagrant Story is a rare and nearly perfected game.

A brutal battle wages between the Knights of the Crimson Blade and the Mullenkamp Cult in the city of Lea Monde. Caught in the middle is Ashley Riot, an agent for the Valendia Knights of Peace’s elite Riskbreaker unit. After a chance encounter with the heartless leader of the Mullenkamp Cult, Sydney Losstarot, Ashley finds himself in a life-or-death game of cat and mouse amidst a deeper plot larger than the two of them. What are Sydney’s intentions, and how does Ashley play into his master plan? As with Final Fantasy Tactics, which was developed by the same team, the lines between good and evil are endlessly blurred and the story is complex and twisted.

Many have described Vagrant Story as “Medieval Gear Solid,” a comparison that both is correct and not correct. While the Metal Gear feel is there thanks to the perspective, attention to detail, and emphasis on cinematics, one never actually has to skulk through shadows, avoid detection, and the like. An odd blend of action, adventure and RPG gameplay, a lot of Vagrant Story’s charm lies in the sheer amount of control the player has in playing what is mostly a linear game. Most of the game takes place underneath Lea Monde, where Ashley runs through room after room, slaying monsters and recovering information and keys to aid Sydney’s pursuit. You navigate as you would in Metal Gear Solid, guiding the character with the analog pad and rotating the viewpoint with the L and R buttons. Ashley can switch in and out of battle mode, freeing his hands for tasks such as lifting boxes or grabbing edges. While the latter isn’t emphasized too heavily, Vagrant Story does have a surprising compunction for box puzzles. While they start off easy, they eventually become fairly fiendish with the addition of a variety of new and different box-types. While navigating the labyrinthine corridors under Lea Monde is all done in real time, battling is a decidedly different affair.

Even with all of the other gameplay elements thrown in, combat is central to Vagrant Story. Perhaps a tribute to one of the interesting things to come out of Parasite Eve, tapping the attack button pauses the game and causes a large wireframe sphere to erupt from Ashley’s body. Representing the range of the current weapon, you can target any item within the sphere for an attack. Detailed hit-percentage and damage stats help you plan your attacks more effectively, but attacking some areas can have other effects. For example, if you attack a monster’s legs there’s a good chance you’ll reduce their movement rate by 50 percent.

After defeating the first boss, Ashley will gain the use of chain abilities. These allow Ashley to perform consecutive hits when attacking enemies, with every additional attack benefitting Ashley in ways other than sheer damage. Ashley can ready up to three of these at a time and with the proper timing, chain them until the target keels over. For example, you can restore magic points or life with a carefully-timed chain attack. Learned at the same time as chains, defense abilities allow you to key different kinds of defense. When attacked, tapping the right button could restore half of the damage you just took or reflect it back at the enemy. After gaining enough experience, you’ll be presented with a choice as to which new ability you’d like to learn, letting you customize your time with Ashley and develop his abilities to your own play style. Using chain and defense abilities is useful, but builds Ashley’s risk level, preventing them from being abused. Essentially a fancy name for fatigue, a high risk level lowers Ashley’s ability to to connect with both weapons and spells. While one could theoretically chain attacks together forever, players will think twice before doing so, maintaining a needed element of strategy and balance.

In addition to chain and defense abilities, Ashley has a few more elite tricks up his sleeve. Break arts, learned after gaining considerable experience, allow Ashley to sacrifice some of his own life meter to inflict massive damage upon an enemy. As Ashley progresses to and through the dark city of Lea Monde, many enemies will drop pages from the legendary spellbook Grimon. Each page contains a single spell that is memorized once read. Magic falls into four categories, such as attack, healing, and status magic. Some spells, such as the explosion and thunder burst spells, let you position a sphere of attack allowing you to attack multiple enemies or multiple body parts on the same enemy. While status spells are extremely useful, most of the attack spells are too MP-intensive to really be worthwhile. Despite all of these options, Vagrant Story’s gameplay interface is relatively clean and intuitive – hold down the L2 button and you have fast access to just about everything.

Outside of battle, Vagrant Story continues its control fixation with a maze of menus that lets players customize their experience even more. In addition to the standard RPG equip and inventory screens, Vagrant Story lets you forge your own weapons and armor from items found throughout the game. Ashley can only perform these feats in workshops scattered throughout the game, and each factory can only forge items made from certain materials. As Ashley’s weapons gradually become more accustomed to killing each of the six types of monsters, it’s worthwhile to build and evolve six weapons through the course of the game. Switching weapons is the one thing not readily accessible through the L2 menu and would make a welcome addition given the frequency they’re swapped. In addition to forging new weapons, Ashley can disassemble any weapon and reassemble a new one from its parts, allowing for greater customization. Finally, gems can be inlaid to alter a weapon’s stats and allow for more in the way of on-the-go changes, like changing a weapon’s elemental attribute.

As witnessed above, Vagrant Story has a lot of complexity, often times too much – even those who understand the weapons system may have trouble handling certain enemies. While Square’s other games have become more and more accessible to the masses while maintaining a certain hard-core element to be experimented with, Vagrant Story’s combat system virtually requires a comprehensive understanding of the weapon and stat development systems. Not only are the core concepts behind this inconsistent at times, a few interface oversights further confuse the matter. Unfortunately, Vagrant Story’s manual isn’t much of a help in these situations. This becomes particularly irksome about halfway through the game, but only slightly hinders the game’s momentum.

Vagrant Story is one of the most beautifully cinematic games to date, easily toppling Metal Gear Solid. With character designs by the venerable artist behind Final Fantasy Tactics’ noseless wonders, Akihiko Yoshida, Vagrant Story looks and feels like a living 3D comic brought to life. Each model is fluidly animated and textured with a sketch-like quality that gives the game a visual feel all its own. Topped off with impressive lighting and spell effects, Vagrant Story is a visual feast. Adding to the game’s cinematic charm is yet another impressive score by Hitoshi Sakimoto, one of Final Fantasy Tactics’ dual composers. The sound effects are well done and impressive, straying from Square’s standard of synthed noise – from an audio standpoint, the only thing conceivably missing is voice – while the jagged comic dialog boxes are charming, one can’t help but think this game could be more impressive with voice. However, avoiding Metal Gear Solid’s glut of dialog is definitely a plus, especially given the literally perfect translation. Square’s localization efforts have been lackluster and purely functional in the past, but Vagrant Story’s is delightfully different. We can only hope that Chrono Cross’ and other translations receive the same attention as Vagrant Story – you’ll be spoiled from here on out.

In the end, Vagrant Story’s disparate parts come together in a beautiful, cinematic experience. The game’s story is compelling and constantly urges the player to press forward, giving the game the addictive quality of the finest RPGs. While a fairly short game, the depth and density of the story and gameplay contained within give Vagrant Story an intensity missing from most longer games, as well as a higher replay value thanks to the “New Game +” option. While the learning curve is a little high, even for RPG veterans, Vagrant Story offers an experience that’s not to be missed.

Georgia Street is an east–west street in the cities of Vancouver and Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. Its section in Downtown Vancouver, designated West Georgia Street, serves as one of the primary streets for the financial and central business districts, and is the major transportation corridor connecting downtown Vancouver with the North Shore (and eventually Whistler) by way of the Lions Gate Bridge. The remainder of the street, known as East Georgia Street between Main Street and Boundary Road and simply Georgia Street within Burnaby, is more residential in character, and is discontinuous at several points.

West of Seymour Street, the thoroughfare is part of Highway 99. The entire section west of Main Street was previously designated part of Highway 1A, and markers for the ‘1A’ designation can still be seen at certain points.

Starting from its western terminus at Chilco Street by the edge of Stanley Park, Georgia Street runs southeast, separating the West End from the Coal Harbour neighbourhood. It then runs through the Financial District; landmarks and major skyscrapers along the way include Living Shangri-La (the city’s tallest building), Trump International Hotel and Tower, Royal Centre, 666 Burrard tower, Hotel Vancouver and upscale shops, the HSBC Canada Building, the Vancouver Art Gallery, Georgia Hotel, Four Seasons Hotel, Pacific Centre, the Granville Entertainment District, Scotia Tower, and the Canada Post headquarters. The eastern portion of West Georgia features the Theatre District (including Queen Elizabeth Theatre and the Centre in Vancouver for the Performing Arts), Library Square (the central branch of the Vancouver Public Library), Rogers Arena, and BC Place. West Georgia’s centre lane between Pender Street and Stanley Park is used as a counterflow lane.

East of Cambie Street, Georgia Street becomes a one-way street for eastbound traffic, and connects to the Georgia Viaduct for eastbound travellers only; westbound traffic is handled by Dunsmuir Street and the Dunsmuir Viaduct, located one block to the north.

East Georgia Street begins at the intersection with Main Street in Vancouver’s Chinatown, then runs eastwards through Strathcona, Grandview–Woodland and Hastings–Sunrise to Boundary Road. East of the municipal boundary, Georgia Street continues eastwards through Burnaby until its terminus at Grove Avenue in the Lochdale neighbourhood. This portion of Georgia Street is interrupted at several locations, such as Templeton Secondary School, Highway 1 and Kensington Park.

Georgia Street was named in 1886 after the Strait of Georgia, and ran between Chilco and Beatty Streets. After the first Georgia Viaduct opened in 1915, the street’s eastern end was connected to Harris Street, and Harris Street was subsequently renamed East Georgia Street.

The second Georgia Viaduct, opened in 1972, connects to Prior Street at its eastern end instead. As a result, East Georgia Street has been disconnected from West Georgia ever since.

On June 15, 2011 Georgia Street became the focal point of the 2011 Vancouver Stanley Cup riot.

I finished reading ‘The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil’ (1900) by Paul Carus a while ago. Therefore, I will continue to quote from it because I’ve highlighted more than a few pages. “Graeco-Egyptians developed a religious philosophy upon the basis of ancient Egyptian traditions, compiled in a book called the Divine Pymander, which contains many beautiful sayings that remind us of Christian views; but the Divine Pymander (like other philosophical books) is addressed to the few not to the many, and its mysticism rendered it unfit to become the religion of mankind. Apollonius of Tyana is a figure in many respects similar, but by no means superior, to Jesus Christ. For in him the philosophy of the age becomes a religion. His followers, however, were neither better nor wiser than the early Christians; they shared with them the same superstitions, cherishing the same trust in miracles, yet for all we know, they had only few of their redeeming features. Julian, surnamed by Christian authors the Apostate, is in spite of his idealism a reactionary man who set his face against Christianity because he recognised in the latter the most powerful representative of the coming faith. This last pagan emperor, it is true, was a noble-minded and thoughtful man who opposed Christianity mainly on account of its shortcomings, its Jewish affiliations, and the narrowness of its devotees, but he was enamored with the past, and his highest ambition was to revive the barbarism of pagan institutions, which tendency appears most plainly in his retention of bloody sacrifices, his esteem for oracles and a general indulgence in the mysteries of Neo-Platonism. Not only was the figure of Christ conceived after the model of a Teutonic war-king, the son of the emperor, while his disciples became his faithful vassals; not ony did the archangels assume the features of the Asas, the great northern gods, Wodan, Donar, Fro, and others; not only were the old pagan feasts changed into Christian festivals; the Yuletide became Christmas and the Ostara feast in the spring was celebrated in commemoration of Christ’s resurrection; but the individual features of the evil powers of the North were also transferred to Satan and his host. Teutonic legends and fairy tales frequently mention the Devil, and there he possesses many features that remind us of Loki. In addition, the ice giants of the Norsemen, the Nifelheim of the Saxons, the Nether-world of the Irish, all contributed their share to the popular notions of the Christian demonology of the Middle Ages. The very name “hell” is a Teutonic word which originally signified a hollow space or a cave underground, and denotes the realm of Hel, Loki’s daughter. The weird and terrible appearances of the gods, too, were retained for the adornment of demoniacal legends; and Odhin as storm-god became “the wild hunter.” Dr. Ernst Krause, who is best known under his nom de plume of Carus Sterne, has undertaken the work of proving the Northern influence upon Southern fairy tales and legends. He finds that all the myths which symbolise the death and resurrection of the sun, giving rise to the idea of immortality, doomsday, and the final restoration of the world, have originated in Northern countries where on Christmas day the sun that seemed lost returns spreading again light and life. Our philologists believe that the Nibelungenlied contains features of Homer’s great epics; but, according to Dr. Krause, it would seem that the original source of the Nibelungenlied is older than Homer, and that the theme of the Voluspa, the first song of the Edda, being a vision that proclaims the final destruction and degeneration of heaven and earth, antedates Christ’s prophecies of the coming judgment. (Matt., 24.) Christianity comes to us from the Orient, but the idea that a God will die and be resurrected is of Northern origin. Dr. Krause proceeds to prove that the conception of hell as depicted in Dante’s Divina Comedia, which may be regarded as the classical conception of Roman Catholic Christianity, is in all its essential elements the product of a Northern imagination. Dante followed closely Teutonic traditions, which in his time had become a common possession in the Christian world through the writings of Saxo Grammaticus, Beda Venerabilis, Alberiens, Caedmon, Caesarius of Heisterbach, and others. It is specially noteworthy that the deepest hell of Dante’s Inferno is not, as Southern people are accustomed to describe the place of torture, a burning sulphur lake, but the wintry desolation of an ice-palace. That this ice hell can be traced back to the days of Gnosticism would only prove that this Northern influence may, in many of its most characteristic features, date back to a prehistoric age. Dante’s portraiture of the evil demon whom he calls “Dis” agrees exactly with the appearance of the principal Northern deity of evil, as he was commonly revered among the Celts, the Teutons, and the Slavs. Dis has three faces: one in front, and the one on each side. The middle face is red, that on the right side whitish-yellow, that on the left side, black. Thus the trinity idea was transferred to Satan on account of the ill-shaped idols of the crude art of Northern civilisation. Dante’s description of Dis reminds us not only of the three-headed hoar-giant of the Edda, Hrim-Grimmir, who lives at the door of death, but also of the trinity of various pagan gods, especially of Triglaf, the triune deity of the Slavs. When Bishop Otto of Bamberg converted the Pomeranians to Christianity, he broke, in 1124, the three-headed Triglaf idol in the temple of Stettin and sent its head to Pope Honorius II at Rome. Dr. Krause suggests that since Dante, who as an ambassador of Florence visited Rome in 1301, must have seen with his own eyes the head of the Pomeranian Triglaf, it is by no means impossible that he used it as a prototype for the description of his trinitarian Satan. Buddhism is a religious revolution against the evils that are dominant in Brahmanism. Gautama Shakyamuni, who claimed to be the Enlightened One, the Buddha, rejected bloody sacrifices, the authority of the Vedas, trust in rituals and the caste system, and taught a religion of moral endeavor which was to be obtained by enlightenment, or the bodhi. He recognised the existence of evil and sought salvation in the radical abolition of all selfishness through the extension of an all-comprehensive love toward all creatures. The many-sidedness of Buddhism is well illustrated in the Buddhistic conception of evil and of a final escape from evil, which is taught to the thinker in the shape of a philosophy, and to the uneducated masses in the garb of a poetical myth, affording the artist a good opportunity for representing deep thoughts in allegorical form. A Latin proverb says: if two do the same thing, it is not the same thing; and this is true not only of individuals, but also of nations and of religions. It is a habit common among all classes of people to condone the faults of their own kind but to be severe with those of others. The oracles of Delphi were divine to a Greek mind, but they were of diabolical origin according to the judgment of Christians. Jesus was a magician in the eyes of the pagans, while the Christians worshipped him as the son of God, and a man who performed miracles. The priests of Pharaoh and Moses perform the same tricks still performed by the snake charmers of Egypt and India, but the deeds of Moses alone are regarded as miracles, and the Israelites claim that he could accomplish more than the Egyptians.”

I will also quote something that I found to be interesting from Carroll Quigley’s ‘The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis’ (1961). In this somewhat thick book, which was his first published work, he wrote not only about civilized society but also about pre-literary history. Although the book isn’t an in depth study of every culture that has ever existed, he still wrote about what he considered to be the most important developments in human history, or at least some of the most important developments. I found his chapter about pre-literary history to be interesting too. Therefore, I will quote just a few of the interesting passages from it. By the way, there’s a chapter about why Neanderthal man possibly went extinct in ‘Mysteries of the Past’ (1977) by Joseph J. Thorndike Jr. This is one of my favorite books in my collection, and the chapter is titled ‘What Caused the Sudden Rise of Modern Man?’. I won’t quote from it now, but perhaps I will do so in the future. “Neanderthal man was so different in appearance from most modern men that no observer would be likely to confuse them. His bodily proportions were quite different, since he had shorter legs and almost no neck. There were other, more technical, differences. His rib bones were rounder, rather than flattened as ours are; he had no real chin or forehead; his eyes were protected by bony eye ridges along the brows; and his head was attached to the front rather than to the top of the last vertebra. Because of these differences, Neanderthal man is frequently regarded as a different species from modern man, or Homo sapiens. But he is more correctly regarded as a variety, since the critical mark of species difference, inability to interbreed to produce fertile offspring, was not true of the Neanderthal and Homo sapiens types. It is now generally recognized that these two were able to interbreed and leave descendants on those rare occasions when they encountered each other along the margins of their customary habitats. Such encounters were on the margins of their ranges because Homo sapiens lived under temperate conditions, while Neanderthal man lived under semiglacial conditions. They both lived in Europe but at different times. Homo sapiens retreated to Africa when Europe was glacial, thus abandoning Europe to Neanderthal man, while the latter retreated northeastward toward Asia, where he had originated, as the interglacial period commenced. Just as we associated the movements of Homo sapiens with the movements of a glacial piston that ejected him from Europe or sucked him back from Africa, so we could associate the movements of the same piston with Neanderthal man, who came into Europe with the glacier and retreated with it toward northern Asia when it departed. Because of the conceit of normal egotism, it is customary to regard Homo sapiens as of higher intellectual capacity than Neanderthal man. This is a matter of which real evidence is scanty, but the evidence that is available would clearly indicate that Neanderthal man was at least as intelligent as Homo sapiens. This evidence includes the following: Neanderthal man possessed both fire and clothing, necessities for glacial living, before Homo sapiens did. He seems to have buried his dead, leaving with the body equipment needed in some future life, at an earlier period, thus giving evidence of an earlier recognition of spiritual values. His tools were frequently made in greater variety and with somewhat greater skill, and include the earliest compound tools (in which the blade and handle were separate pieces). But these achievements, which might be interpreted to indicate sufficient mental flexibility to permit Neanderthal man to survive the ending of glacial conditions. By adapting his way of life so successfully to glacial conditions and to the pursuit of the great glacial mammals such as mammoths, Neanderthal man made his way of life too rigid to permit him to exist under postglacial conditions when such mammals became extinct. The climate change, by 2000 B.C., opened the forests of Europe, so that megalithic traders abandoned the seaways of the west in all of the southwestern Europe as far east as the Adriatic and as far north as Britanny and, instead, crossed Europe by boat on the rivers, bringing Irish gold, Cornish tin, and Danish amber across Bohemia and southern Germany to the Danube. Down this river they went to the mouth of the Morava where they split, some continuing down the Danube, while others turned south to the Isthmus of Corinth and the Gulf of Argos beyond. In Argos, the new commercial cities of Mycenae and Tiryns welcomed the northern traders and grew rich from their commerce, which continued on, by sea, to Crete, to Egypt, or to the Syrian Saddle. Those traders who had continued down the Danube crossed Thrace to receive an equally warm welcome in Troy, whence the trade routes continued across Hittite Anatolia and the Assyrian outposts in Cilicia to the Syrian Saddle and Mesopotamia. These European trade routes of the Sub-Boreal period were not disrupted, but were rather developed, by the arrival of the Indo-European warrior peoples in central Europe about 2000 B.C. From the neolithic peasant peoples these conquerors extracted food, and from the megalithic traders they extracted tribute, using the surplus accumulated to exploit the bronze-making resources of Bohemia in forest forges. From this system emerged a prosperous, barbaric (but not civilized) culture known as the Great Central European Bronze Age. This culture reached its peak about 1400 B.C., with northern and western connections to megalithic Ireland, England (Stonehenge), and Denmark, and even more significant connections to Terremare Italy, Mycenaean Greece, and Hittite Anatolia. These southern and eastern connections were with similar Indo-European Bronze Age invaders in other areas. The whole system was destroyed by the onslaught of Indo-European Iron Age invaders about 1200 B.C. These later peoples exploded out of the northern Balkans with devastating force, and established in various areas the Celtic speakers of central and western Europe, the Dorian speakers of Greece, and a variety of Anatolian peoples, such as Phrygians and Carians. In the Aegean and Balkans these Iron Age invaders ended Cretan civilization forever and established a Dark Age that lasted for several centuries. This Dark Age, centering on the period 1000 B.C., marks the transition between Cretan civilization and its descendant Classical Mediterranean civilization, performing a double role as the period of invasion of the former (Stage 7) and as the period of mixture of the other (Stage 1). Farther east the same Indo-European population movements performed different roles in other civilizations. In Anatolia the Bronze Age Hittite invaders who came in over the Caucasus across Armenia acted as Stage 1 of Hittite civilization (1900 B.C.), while the Iron Age invaders from Thrace destroyed and ended this civilization a short eight hundred years later, providing the limits to the briefest and least known of all major civilizations. The Iron Age invaders of the Aegean area, whom we have called by different names in the Balkans and in western Anatolia, drove fleeing before them a mixed group of earlier inhabitants of those shores, including Achaeans, Etruscans (Trojans), Cretans, some Dorians, and various dimly known peoples of the Anatolian shore.”

• Neurodivergent adolescents experience twice the emotional burden at school of neurotypical peers.
• Students with ADHD are particularly upset by boredom, restrictions, and not being heard.
• Autistic students are particularly upset by social mistreatment, interruptions, and sensory overload.
• The problem is the environment, not the student.

Learning is an Autistic Joy of my life.

But school was painful. Painful. Painful.

This heartbreak is shared by so many neurodivergent people. Now, a groundbreaking study involving over 700 adolescents (11-16 years old) in the United Kingdom helps explain why—and points toward solutions that honor the joy of learning and the dignity of every student. More than that, the study authors suggest that reducing the emotional burdens students experience in school may potentially prevent decades of mental health struggles and save the lives of some neurodivergent adolescents and adults.

Researchers developed a new tool called the “My Emotions in School Inventory” (MESI) by working directly with neurodivergent teenagers to understand what upsets them most at school. They discovered that emotional burden—how often upsetting events happen and how intensely they affect students of specific neurotypes—plays a major role in depression and anxiety, in ways that cannot be simply explained by emotion regulation difficulties.

Key Findings:

• All neurodivergent teens participating in the study—classified based on assessments into autistic, ADHD, or both (AuDHD) groups—experienced significantly more frequent and intense emotional reactions to school events than neurotypical peers
• Neurodivergent adolescents experience twice the emotional burden at school compared to neurotypical peers
• Different types of events were particularly upsetting for students in autistic vs ADHD groups, with a unique pattern emerging for the AuDHD group.

Students in ADHD Group Were Most Upset By:

• Teachers not listening to them
• Boring lessons or tasks
• Being stopped from doing enjoyable activities
• Being told to “try harder”
• Being accused of things they didn’t do
• Losing or forgetting things

Students in the Autistic Group Were Most Upset By:

• Peers talking behind their back
• Unexpected waits or delays
• Sensory discomfort (noise, lighting, textures)
• Being rushed to complete work
• Not understanding social situations
• Being rushed to move between tasks

Students who met both ADHD and autism criteria experience the same overall level of emotional burden as the other two neurodivergent groups. However, AuDHD creates unique neurological patterns and combinations of traits—which means that simply combining autistic and ADHD predictions and strategies won’t work. One size does not fit all.

Regardless of their specific neurotype, neurodivergent teens were more likely to be upset by:

• Last-minute changes to plans
• Teachers not understanding them
• Chaotic classroom environments
• Not being allowed to use their preferred coping strategies
• Not being able to complete tasks successfully
• Bullying and social exclusion
• Being treated unfairly by school staff

Like canaries in coal mines that warn of toxic gases, neurodivergent students, and neurodivergent people in general, respond appropriately to genuinely problematic environments. The issue isn’t that these students are “too sensitive”; they are experiencing legitimate stressors that harm their well-being and may result in depression and anxiety well into adulthood.

The research validates what many neurodivergent self-advocates have long felt: Their distress isn’t a character flaw or inability to cope. It’s a natural response to environments that are not designed for their neurotype. This suggests several applications.

For Parents and Educators

• Honor each student’s individuality rather than glorifying conformity to one-size-fits-all expectations
• Treat all students with dignity, or specifically NeuroDignity, recognizing that different brains have different needs
• Focus on changing harmful environments rather than expecting students to tolerate them
• Simply teaching emotion regulation skills may not be enough when the environment itself creates additional burdens
• Different accommodations or forms of support may be needed for specific neurotypes and for individual students
• Take bullying and unfair treatment seriously. These aren’t “character building” experiences but represent genuine harm

For Support Strategies

• Students experiencing the predominantly ADHD pattern of stress may benefit from flexibility in how they demonstrate learning, respect for their interests and energy levels, and providing teacher support and resources to create more engaging learning experiences and enhance communication clarity
• Students experiencing the predominantly autistic pattern of stress may benefit from sensory accommodations, advance notice of changes, social navigation support, extra time for transitions, protection from social cruelty, or, better yet, preventing social cruelty rather than treating it as “rite of passage”

This study helps to further shift the conversation from “What’s wrong with this student?” to “What’s wrong with this environment?”

Key principles include:

• Respecting neurodiversity: Different brains process the world differently, and that’s a feature of humanity.
• Creating inclusive environments: Schools should ensure flexibility for different learning and sensory needs as standard practice; this includes supporting teachers and ensuring that school environments also work for neurodivergent teachers.
• Addressing root causes: Bullying, sensory overload, inflexible curriculum, and social exclusion are environmental toxins, not student weaknesses.
• Honoring individual strengths: Each neurodivergent student brings unique perspectives and abilities that deserve recognition.

By understanding what specifically taxes the emotional well-being of different neurodivergent students, we can create environments where they have an opportunity to thrive. This requires treating every student with the dignity and emotional inclusion every human deserves, and recognizing that an emotional response to an unhealthy environment isn’t misbehavior.

Forcing neurodivergent students into a standard box hurts these students and robs the world of the fullness of their talents. Let’s create education that works for the full range of humanity, with flexibility and care. Neuroaffirming education can benefit everyone.