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,…
Tag: academia
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…
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…
NOTE: This rant is cross-posted and expanded from the Rogue Rhetorician, where I focus on rhetoric and philosophy. It’s been a decade since an academic supervisor wrote that my various creative and non-fiction writings were all of little value. He took my sarcasm, my jabs at academia and academic writing, seriously and…
Once again I’m preparing for a low-paying adjunct assignment, vowing this will be the last time I work so hard for so little money. My base salary is $1900 per class. I spend a lot of time on these classes, updating existing materials and preparing new. Regardless of the term…
Podcast Episode 0038; Season 04, Episode 02; September 1, 2020 To my disappointment, but not surprise, the most-read blog post on The Autistic Me discusses the research on autistics making other people uncomfortable from the moment they meet us. I have taught business courses for several years. As part of…
People are uncomfortable around me. I know that since I was in kindergarten or first grade. Research suggesting people form impressions of autistics within half a second doesn’t surprise me. I’m going to prepare a podcast on this topic, because I’m realizing the pandemic has somewhat freed me from trying…
When I went off to graduate school in 2004, it was because I couldn’t stop chasing the dream of teaching. After the master’s degree, I chased the doctorate, trying to improve my chances at that elusive higher-education job. And then, the master of fine arts in 2017, capping a 13-year…
Increasingly, I am aware of the “communities” to which I don’t belong. An overused word in the humanities, “community” is more than a group of people with some minor similarities. A community has to have some manner of unified sense of purpose. I belong to several organizations without any desire…
I spent the last two days working on two versions of my résumé: techie me and teacher me. I feel “incomplete” when I read one or the other, as if I’m not being honest about who I am. The technology résumé is modeled on samples I found online at two…