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…
Category: Employment
Posts on the employment challenges faced by autistics.
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…
I spent Christmas 2023 at home alone. Susan, Leigh, and Anne are in California, visiting family. My anxiety spikes when I’m alone. I worry about all the things that might go wrong because, too often, things have gone wrong while Susan and I were apart. From flooding basements, kidney stones, 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…
November 19, 2023, everything came crashing down on The Autistic Me… and our other web projects. What was meant to be a minor clean-up of our web server became a complete reset. We’re back online now. Things aren’t perfect — but they were far from perfect anyway. I am so far…
Podcast 0110; Season 7, Episode 3; 25 October 2023 David Villec is the neurodiverse father of Tiger, a 10-year-old autistic savant. Dave discusses his personal challenges and those of Tiger. The Autistic Tiger is 10-year-old Tiger Villec and his namesake character, also known as “TAT.” Tiger is a world-renowned artist…
As we approach the last week of September 2023, I can reflect on the return to school for the girls and me, declaring that survival mode exhausts the entire family. Yes, we’re in survival mode, and it’s a lot like hanging on to a rope suspended above a dark, bottomless…
Podcast 0109; Season 7, Episode 2; 29 August 2023 How can parents support their disabled children into adulthood? Will our children find meaningful places in society? Sadly, workplaces don’t always accommodate differences. Mark Lyons and his wife Sally are former teachers. With their son Samuel, they operate SammySocksEtc, an online…
Podcast 0108; Season 7, Episode 1; 15 August 2023 As we start a new academic year and a new podcast season, I am trying to balance my health and my desire to be productive. At the end of every night, I complain that I haven’t done enough. I feel like…
I am honored to be joining the faculty at Texas A&M University for the 2023-24 academic year as a full-time lecturer. The COVID-19 pandemic had, in theory, marked the end of my teaching career. However, friends and colleagues persisted in sending me academic job listings. One friend, in particular, persuaded…