01:
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.
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23:
As does any stressed out grad student, I’ve been questioning my decisions. Why am I an English major? How on earth did I come to enjoy rhetoric and composition in the first place? How can I stay up later without abusing caffeine?
This past fall, in a composition theory course, we were asked to compose our “entry tales” into the field. I decided to focus my narrative on the intersections I saw between my experiences as an Asperger’s autistic and my experiences as a compositionist wannabe. As I reread what I wrote nearly one year ago, I’m struck by how much I’ve learned since then — “then” being a moment when I thought I knew lots. And I realize that I’ve got lots more to learn… which makes me want to stick around in academia for another fifty years, even if it does mean that I have to socialize.
What I wrote, October 2007:
I have in my stockpile two narratives for describing my entry into composition studies. The first, and most often used, relies on metaphor and describes my aspirations to become a computer programmer when, lo and behold, I “saw the light” and realized, via divine inspiration, that English studies held my salvation. This first story often makes for wonderful application fodder: it lumps my previous computer science background and my newfound love of writing into a realization of spiritual proportions, thereby opening up the digital communication doorway in composition studies. Through this story, I have somehow become the mediator of two discourses, the champion of writing/communication and technology or writing/communication as technology—anything dealing with both words, as long as the emphasis remains on writing or communication.
My second narrative, however, does not meld the right-brain/left-brain worlds quite so fluently. In fact, of the few times I’ve dared to disclose it, my audience has probably doubted the existence of any “mediating” corpus callossum. Like many an interesting story, this one begins with the lost me seeking to be a saved me—a high school drop-out attempting a technical college. There’s a stock character, Professor Dan, the pony-tailed English teacher with a penchant for hacky sack and Donald Murray truisms. At one point, as with all stock conversations, an exchange occurs between the outside-the-box hipster and the conservative, inexperienced student, an exchange meant to spark conflict and radical new ideas, man, an exchange meant to so totally blow minds—except, this exchange results in all of the wrong things. After reading several of my essays, Professor Dan tells me that I’m in the wrong major and that I should switch to English. And I, horrified that I could be in the wrong major, visit the English department head and switch majors that day. Later, I learned from a mortified Professor Dan, after one of his close-your-eyes-while-freewriting techniques, that he was merely complimenting me, not really suggesting that I must go change my major that instant. He had wanted me to “think about it,” to muse and question, not to take immediate action. I recall thinking, in a bemused and irritated manner, Why didn’t he just say so?
Literally speaking, story number one occurs after story number two: after I’d already done the deed, I began to question being a student of English. There have been other notable misunderstandings on my part along my path toward grad-student-hood, but all theoretical perceptions of writing and communication began, for me, the moment I failed to understand the subtext of an important conversation: I could not register the simple genre of “the compliment,” and yet there I was, an English major. As a composition scholar wannabe, issues of understanding, of perception versus reception, strike me as most paramount. As a student-teacher with Asperger Syndrome, a mild variant of autistic disorder, I supposedly cannot communicate appropriately: I am what some (but not what I) might label as idiot savant, social retard, or male-brained. In everyday situations, I fail to meet the aims of the English 110 text, Writing Analytically, to make the implicit explicit, to root out the subtext from the apparently literal, or the literal from the apparently subtext. And somehow, I am a person with a communication disorder teaching first-year students how to communicate. This paradox used to trouble me, therefore keeping me closeted and guarded—until very recently.
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02:
Being that I’m currently enrolled in a digital media studies course, I’ve been creating lots of digital media-type artifacts. Our class, as it comes to a close, has been dabbling in wikis, and I decided to make my last course/wiki nugget in image form. I like images.
I just finished reading the collection Teaching Writing with Computers (edited by Takayoshi and Huot). In many respects, I really wish I’d come across some of the articles within before I became a red-pen-handler-of-doom. (OK, actually, in all honesty, I usually swap between pencil and Word’s “Track Changes” when I grade. And I’ve generally set “track changes” to blue when I leave comments. But I digress.) While some of the material in the various essays is outdated, much of the content deals with broad, general suggestions for integrating technology, and not so much specific tool-based ideas. Nevertheless, despite the conglomeration of really cool ideas (e.g., having an outside speaker/specialist “speak” with your class via chat room or discussion board), many were really, really commonsensical. However, especially since I come from an AS perspective, I *do* realize that “common sense” ain’t exactly a universal since it’s constructed. I’m a bit hesitant to say that any of these ideas are “no-brainers.”
Consequently, I continually had to re-analyze my starting points here, especially since I do consider myself to be technologically/digitally literate. And, I’m sure most FYW instructors haven’t had the benefit of learning Flash or C++. So, I decided to try my hand at sarcasm (and the color pink) in creating an e-Teaching how-to manual.
I’m kind of wondering: who would indeed claim the below items to be true? Non-writing instructors? Writing instructors who haven’t read the TWWC essay collection? My mom? The only slightly agreeable one, it seems, is my very first image (behind the cut). Are these images blatantly sarcastic? (Translation: how utterly obvious is it that writing instructors should do the opposite of what these images command? And, if it is obvious, why?)
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25:
Sometimes, I’m really surprised that I can talk at all, surprised that I actually have a voice. When I teach, I feel so different and utterly disconnected from who I am in reality. I suddenly don the mask of being social, of being talkative.
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