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…
Tag: teaching
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…
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…
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…
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…
The public school experiment for 2022-23 ran its course by January 26, 2023, when we gave the fifth grader a mental health day at home. She won’t be returning this school year. During the last three weeks, we became aware of problems we didn’t know existed at the school, learned…
Podcast 0095; Season 6, Episode 5; 29 November 2022 Michaell Magrutsche Michaell Magrutsche is truly a multimedia artist: a painter, photographer, music composer, digital artist, and author. A former Newport Beach, California, arts commissioner, Michaell promotes the value of public art. He is also the author of five books and…