Life is rarely perfect, but it can be blandly normal. I admit that 2024 wasn’t easy. It ended badly. At least it wasn’t quite like how eventful 2023 was, with an ICU visit I’d rather not repeat. For now, I am attempting to accept the bland normalcy of life in…
Category: Education
Posts on teaching, studying, educational systems, and institutions.
Autistics often find themselves judged in the workplace not by their knowledge and skills, but by how well they perform “normalcy” in an office. To appear other than how they are, the Autistics must mask, as in putting on their happy worker faces and mimicking the “neurotypical” people around them,…
August 9, 2024, was my final day as an instructor at Texas A&M University. The university is considered one of the best in Texas, and I was honored to teach there, but I was unhappy and unhealthy. Those two probably go together, with some uncertainty as to which is the…
Podcast 0115; Season 7, Episode 8; 10 July 2024 NOTE: Originally Recorded 18 August 2023 Jenny Sandler and HomeschoolUK.com Jenny Sandler is an experienced educator working with autistic children and adolescents both in and out of school. She holds an M.A. in literacy and an M.Ed. in autism in children.…
Taking on too much at work or in school is something I hear other autistics admit to doing. Add the ADHD many of us have and it’s a potential disaster in the making. We take on more than we can realistically manage, trying to prove our value while setting ourselves…
April brings “Autism {fill in the blank}” day and month. Is it “Autism Awareness,” “Autism Acceptance,” or something else? I don’t have the time or energy to care. Each year, I rant about the month. Most people are “aware” of autism, though I question if that awareness helps anyone. My…
It’s the last few days of April, with finals starting in a few days. Student project teams are submitting their final reports, videos, and interactive fiction projects. As with the entire semester, I’ll be swamped with grading for the next two weeks in a mad dash to file grades on…
Podcast 0112; Season 7, Episode 5; 3 March 2024 Note: Recorded 7 June 2023 Originally Scheduled for September 2023 From “Caregiver Chronicles” website: “Caregiver Chronicles” is the story of one caregiver’s personal and professional journey as a caregiver. The host, Sarah Stelmach-Brown, was a Certified Nursing Assistant for 17 years.…
February 2024 is almost over and I haven’t managed to release a podcast episode with a guest since October 2023, nearly four months ago. The best I could do was a quick podcast on how busy we are, which I recorded in December out of a sense of guilt and…
Podcast 0111; Season 07, Episode 04; 4 December 2023 Our family is tired — exhausted — but we are well. The first half of this school year has gone smoothly, though everyone is extremely busy. We’re so busy that the blog and podcast had to be set aside, much as…