aspie rhetor

Teaching disability studies

Yay, a post! I miss writing in this blog. Hello, blog.

I figure that a good post-hiatus post might involve what I’ve been up to lately that is non-dissertation — that is, teaching. This past quarter, I taught an undergraduate section of Intro to Disability Studies, the second time I’ve taught this course. And in the fall I’m teaching a special topics in literature course called Authoring Autism. I kind of figure that folks who read my blog will have a lot to say about the autism class in particular.

Above is an image of my course flyer — I’ve been posting these across campus. I decided on going the “famous people who might have been autistic” route not because I like to retrodiagnose dead people (I loathe doing that, actually), but because 1) retrodiagnosis is one among many topics I’d like my students to critically engage this fall, and 2) I was hoping to attract students, especially from the humanities, to my class. Class enrollment is up to 18 people, which is pretty good for a special topics course. < /explanation>

I’ve drafted a syllabus for the course, which you can find here in PDF format. I’d like to emphasize that it’s a rough draft, and I’m already making changes in the assignments, schedule, and readings (i.e., I’m adding in materials from the neurodiversity special issue of DSQ, giving students more memoirs to choose from, figuring out potential guest speakers, etc.). I’ve also included my course description behind the cut — at root, this is a course that considers how autism and autistic people are represented across media.

I am, however, open to suggestions. Ohio State terms run 10 weeks in length, so we’re limited with our time. But I’d very much like to find out what others in the blogosphere would like to see in a class like this.

continue reading…

My kindergarten graduation

A few weeks back, I played around with a dazzle box and decided to digitize a few portions of my kindergarten graduation. It’s strange how clearly I remember being six years old. I received the part of “Polly Prune” very last-minute, replacing a girl by the name of Farrah. Originally, I wasn’t even cast because I was so painfully quiet and “shy,” but Farrah couldn’t remember her lines, and apparently I knew everybody’s lines. During the last few rehearsals, my kindergarten teacher kept yelling at me to speak up.

I think I did a decent job during my 15-second debut. As for my hat: a woman from church made it. It’s white with little prunes taped on, the prunes being rolled-up garbage bags. My teacher asked if she could keep my hat, and I gave it to her.

On the scarcity of postings.

I’ve been away for some time — away, at least, from the blogosphere. PhDing has consumed all of my energy. I’ve got lists of things to write about (literally — I <3 post-its), but by the time I’m done teaching and grad-seminaring I’m so tranced that all I can do is sit and space out (preferably to Law & Order). I need to combat this somehow. A friend of mine scared me this past weekend and said that what I describe sounds like epilepsy, not AS or migraine. Of course, the more I think about it, if my weird trances and aura experiences haven’t killed me now, then I suppose adding a new diagnostic label to the mix wouldn’t be so detrimental. Nevertheless, no matter how momentarily incapacitating my “trances” or “episodes” may be, I doubt it’s anything other than me decompressing after having experienced great stress.

I’m trying very hard to prioritize my stress. I realize that I can’t, with Asperger’s, selectively choose what’s going to stress me out. But I almost feel as though “society” (whoever that vague term represents) privileges some stresses more than others. It’s acceptable for me to stress over my classes. It isn’t acceptable, though, for me to stress over how to greet my bus drivers. (There’s more than one — that’s hard to deal with.) It’s probably pseudo-acceptable that I stress over my stimming. I mean, the things I do with my hands and lips do make me seem freakish at times. Plus, it’s not as though I can quit stimming, cold turkey. I probably shouldn’t stress about routine changes, like, if the bus misses my stop by 3 meters and I have to walk AROUND a phone pole, which I’m not used to. This causes huge momentary panic, because I now have to account for this thing in time and space that wasn’t previously in my way. Sometimes, I feel like walking is a screwed-up physics that I’ll never master.