The Rambling Musings of Self Aware Stardust

Shortly after I started working at PiM, an Arts High School where I now teach, there were two interactions with students that happened in the same day that got me thinking about how we treat learning disabilities.   The first was with a student in my Math Foundations course who was obviously trying and obviously frustrated. We learned to work well together but any math was tough for them. We’d often break work periods into alternating 5 minutes of working and 5 minutes drawing; they would often grasp concepts but following the thread through longer problems was an issue; they would regularly come in with multiple caffeinated drinks in the morning and explained to me that the constant influx of caffeine helped them work. In short, they hit a lot of symptoms on my ADHD radar: unable to concentrate on a subject that doesn’t interest them while being able to work on subjects that do, easily distracted, unable to break larger problems into smaller parts on own, self-medicating with a s...

  I am an autistic individual who wasn’t diagnosed until their later 30s (even though I began to suspect I was autistic when I learned about autism in college) and I have a son who is autistic and was diagnosed in kindergarten.   As such, I’m part of two communities that should work together but are often at odds: autistic people and parents of children with autism. Having a mom for a doctor and a dad who taught science, my son Isaac is aware of the controversy between vaccines and autism. One night, he asked, “But why would your kid having autism be a bad thing?” You see, when we have talked to him about having autism we’ve stressed that it’s a different way of thinking, a different way of understanding the world, a different way of looking at reality and to him that sounds pretty cool. He knows that sometimes his friends do stuff he thinks is weird and he does stuff that his friends think is weird, but his integration into “normal” life has been fairly easy. Isaac didn’t kno...