Monday 24th January 2022: On Education – Autistic Teaching? + Links!

Hi everyone!

How are you doing? I’ve been enjoying getting the blog back to a weekly schedule. As long as I put in sufficient amounts of rest periods, I will generally do just fine. I now have the Mondays to Thursdays where I do the most teaching, keep the Friday free for activism and do a few hours of teaching on Saturday. That seems to be working out at the moment. I’m really on the way back. The second half of 2021 was not easy but, as long as I keep focused on giving myself breathing space, I should be ok – until the next crisis. But even then, I’ll be able to weather it. I’ve weathered some pretty rough seas in my time. What I’m saying is that I’m just really, really old.

On Teaching

Teaching makes a difference and, when you’re autistic, it’s so damn valuable to give something back. Most of us spend our lives feeling like we’re always withdrawing credit, but never paying in, as it were, just by being alive. Neurotypicals don’t have that. We always feel like we need to validate our continued existence in the face of, well, not being valued as human beings. We don’t have that sense neurotypicals have of simply deserving to live, because we are alive.

I talk a lot about why autism is an identity, not “just” a disability. The amount of imposter syndrome we experience is huge. This is the case from kindergarten up to Higher Ed. Most of us spend hours every week trying to justify us being there in the first place – whether that is the higher band for maths or at a world-renowned university. When the world is telling us we don’t deserve to exist, excelling in any way makes us vulnerable.

When I first went to school – kindergarten, pre-school, call it what you will – I could already read. I thought I also had to know maths, which I didn’t yet. I never got the idea that school was a place to learn, not just somewhere you would be tested for things you already knew. I now obviously know that’s not how we’re supposed to be taught – in fact, it’s kind of my job.

Maths would remain a pain until the day I left school. I still have nightmares about maths exams. Being dyscalculic doesn’t help and having crap depth perception and spatial insight just make the anxiety worse. To add insult to injury to my old self; I’m now teaching KS1 maths to students with learning disabilities as a tutor. Even worse, it’s going really well! I don’t know what happened. I do still get muddled up, but I’m doing alright. Working in that café, back in 2017, really helped. Maybe I should have just been assigned a teaching role when I was 5. I would have done far better!

When it turned out that the other children couldn’t even read yet, let alone do any form of maths, I didn’t feel superior. But I was treated as if I did. I also spoke in a Dutch that didn’t share the regional accent of where my school was. I was evidently queer. I was a walking target.

I did really well, academically. I did poorly on everything else. But that’s for another blog or a talk on being an autistic student. This one is about being on the other side of the classroom!

Being Teachery

Nowadays, though, I’m a teacher – as is perfectly obvious to everyone – and have been since 2012, when I had a long heart-to-heart with my friend Diane Fitton, who now works as a stand-up comedian. We started doing stand-up at the same time, back in August 2009. Back then, she was still a full-time teacher.

I had started medication for depression and anxiety earlier that spring (yes, that medication) and was making some life decisions. I didn’t want to do customer service roles anymore. I couldn’t face call centres any longer. I needed to do something else. Lack of confidence had always stood in my way. Also, I would avoid young people like the plague. I was frightened of them, really. And I believed that people who claim to love children are, inherently, a bit dodge.

I still believe that to some degree, especially since my partner is a hardcore anti-natalist (someone believes that humans being born is morally indefensible). But, as he often points out, my partner is profoundly childish. And that’s a good thing.

I also felt I needed to run away from the idea that I was just going to become a teacher. In 2003, I was trying to learn a bit about my father. He’d been to the Soviet Union, back in 1980, on one of those limited bus trips they still do around North Korea nowadays. All he told my mother was that it’d been cold. When she was pregnant with me, 7 years later, all she could put in the photo album was a picture of a snowy cloud and a speech balloon saying “brr!” My mother taught me how to make much from not a lot at all. As this blog shows, I do the same quite a bit.

My history teacher spoke a bit of Russian and could read Cyrillic. I asked her to help me decipher the writing in some of the photos he had taken. She was sitting down and I was leaning over her as she was trying to read what was on the photo. My RE teacher, Wim Maas (now sadly passed) opened the door, saw the scene, and immediately cried out: “You’re going to be a teacher.” There was something of the Robin Williams-in-Dead Poets Society about the man. Despite running away from this for 9 years, he was right.

Being Brutal

Back to August 2012, the kitchen of Diane’s hotel room at the Edinburgh Fringe. I asked her to be brutal and she complied. She told me teaching was really tough. The circumstances under which teachers operate are prohibitive, leading to frequent burnout through overwork. There was really no reason for anyone to qualify. In the core subjects, the responsibilities were absurd. In elective subjects, there were too few opportunities to make your mark and the pay was atrocious. Still, if I was going to do it, I’d need to start slow. She thought I definitely had the chops, but if I could stand the culture and was able to do the work, I would be a great teacher. Though not necessarily in this system. That was a decade ago. The system has only gotten worse, with lower pay, fewer days off and less support across the board.

Well, I took Diane’s advice. I started tutoring, outside of the school system, first privately, in Amsterdam. Then, at a homework institute in Landsmeer (shout out to Petra!). I started doing tutoring sessions across the humanities, particularly English (which is the mandatory second language in Dutch schools). When I moved to London, I tried to keep tutoring, but I was too often too exhausted and many of the organisations were very exclusive. They would not be hiring you unless you had several reference, particularly academic ones. The pay would have been absurdly good, but as an MA candidate without an Oxbridge background, I didn’t stand a chance. Several rejections weighed on me and contributed to my downwards spiral in early 2014.

After getting off benzodiazepines in October 2015, Harry and I moved to Watford. I was suddenly able to do more tuition (gosh, I wonder why that would be?). I did really well. The first company I started working with consistently was First Tutors. I still use them to this day. They are so great because they mostly stay out of the tutor’s way. What’s being sold is the tutor’s contact details. My relationship with the tutee and their parents is the most important thing. Sure, I still felt massive impostor syndrome at times, but my results got better and better.

When we moved to Oxford in June 2016, I got into teaching relatively quickly. First Tutors had a lot of potential students in the area, but regular students didn’t start coming in until later in the year. Before that, I actually got my first proper teaching job! The Daily Info (Oxford’s daily online ad database and saviour of many a career) showed that various schools were looking for English teachers. I was interviewed by Jolanta and Marina, first for an EFL job, but when I couldn’t provide a CELTA certificate, I couldn’t be hired for this. But, there was another vacancy available.

The school was teaching a two-week course called Multicultural Agents and Perspectives to a group of Mexican students, but the teacher had dropped out at the last minute. They thought I would be brilliant teaching that. I asked about the curriculum: there wasn’t one. And could I start on Monday? I did. I spent the weekend creating a full syllabus for an introductory course in cultural studies, taking in literature, rhetorics and history. I created tests and made an ungodly amount of slides. I started that Monday and, when the students left, I actually shed a tear. They had adored the course. This was the first job where I outright stated that I was autistic when I got it. It was strange. I needed to mask, but it was comfortable. My students valued and respected me and were challenged in exactly the right ways. I’m still really proud of those two weeks.

One of the students was one of my people (autistic, I mean. Not secretly Dutch). He had a meltdown after his spoken presentation and was crying. I remembered what my teachers did when this happened to me (this frequently happened to me at his age) and gave him a hug. Marina wisely told me that this was not a good idea, which was a huge benefit to me. Teaching in the private sector in 2016 was a different world to general education in the early to mid 2000s, in another country. I needed to find different ways to prevent meltdowns and allow students space to recuperate if things did go badly.

That was the course that confirmed to me that I couldn’t just be a tutor, I could teach classes. I could create resources and plan curriculums. I thought I’d found my calling.

Back to the Grindstone

Then, of course, came the crash. I’d signed up for doing supply teaching via several agencies, starting after I’d finished my MA dissertation in October 2016. I lost jobs, because I had meltdowns. I was told not to come back after having a panic attack in the teacher’s room. A student screamed at me and I shouted back – I should never have done that. I was rightfully sent away. I found the lights, noise and general atmosphere of hurried aggression in staff rooms unbearable. The work was inconsistent and badly paid. I decided to jack it in for the moment and focus on tutoring, as well as catering work.

Despite feeling I should never teach again after those experiences, I fell in love with tutoring all over again. I taught a young man Philosophy A-level all the way to his exams. His mum paid for me to get the AQA A-level Philosophy coursebook from Blackwell’s (shout-out to this student, his mum, Michael Lacewing and Blackwell’s, the third-greatest bookshop that I know) and we just got started. I also taught a young man German A-level with great success – he went to university to study languages, despite his teachers’ lack of confidence in him.

All during this year, I was building up confidence in myself as an educator once again. I started my CELTA in May 2017 and graduated a month later. I then taught a summer at several language schools around Oxford, including teaching the Multicultural Agents & Perspectives course again. Unfortunately, the students were a lot less engaged this time. I’d gotten extraordinarily lucky on my first go-round.

When Marina and Jolanta’s school went out of business in August 2017, we hadn’t had copying paper for two days. We had been observed by the British Council a month before. We were doing very well. But the school went under anyway. I am still so grateful for how much I learned there, as a teacher, for the very first time. I remember walking around playing The Boho Dance by Joni Mitchell on my phone as I said goodbye to the building.

The rest of the summer was rough. I finished my contract with Kaplan (shout out to Ed!), Harry was moving out and I had meltdowns trying to find someone to move in with. I lost one job because I’d told my line manager that I’d been struggling. He told me to return after Bank Holiday Monday. When I did, I was not on the rota. I asked about it, but I heard nothing apart from an email that same day which informed me that my contract had come to an end with immediate effect. I was frightened. Not again.

I found a job at a specialist autism school near Oxford, as a teaching assistant. It was too far away, I was cycling there daily and struggled with the constant shifting between ‘teaching mode’, ‘autistic mode’, ‘neurotypical mode’ and ‘professional Jorik mode’. It was confusing and messy in my brain, I was heading to a depressive episode anyway. I lost that job too. I’ll talk about it at speaking engagements, so you’ll have to go to one of those to hear that story.

I was suicidal. I was sectioned for the first (and hopefully only) time in my life. I didn’t think I could be a teacher anymore. But I could. The job was still there. I still had students. I got a job at EF Oxford where I stayed for 3 full years. That was a joy, I’ve written about it before.

Still, the next job, at an academy in Slough, I lost due to being autistic. That was in November 2020, I’ve written about it and I speak about it in my Education talks. Since then, I’ve been a full-time mentor, tutor and activisty-person. I love the freedom and the joy of an empty to-do list is the only thing that seems to make me want to write.

This week, when I wasn’t enjoying teaching, I was thinking about the past ten years as a teacher. I am proud and slightly terrified that in an equitable society, I’d have finished a quarter of my professional life by now. Of course, I’m a millennial and I’ll never be able to retire, but hey. I feel like a big boy with a big boy job and despite how pathetic that is, it does strengthen me. I’ve done this, in the face of systems of resistance and with an often-rubbish brain. I’m more than a little proud of that. Now just to learn how to take care of my own brain and I’ll be swell.

But what about later?

I’ve also often been told I should be a university lecturer. I don’t know whether that’s a thing I’d want to do. Doing a PhD is rough, especially without outside funding. The pay is also terrible for anyone starting out and I’m not interested in staffroom politics. I want to go in and get out and do as good a job as possible. Right now, I’m really happy where I am, though I would prefer some extra time for writing.

That’s why the only university teaching job I’d take now would be one where I would be working with neurodivergent students, clarifying the curriculum and teaching something I’m passionate about, like creative writing. As long as it provides me time to work on my own writing and, you know, time to breathe. In the meantime, I’m still sending applications for EAP roles over the summer. If you run a university or college and you’d like me to teach English for Academic Purposes over the summer, let me know.

In the mean time, there are many excellent autistic and neurodivergent teachers who speak and write about their experiences. I recommend fellow author Chris Bonnello at https://www.autisticnotweird.com Also get his latest book in the Underdogs series. But it from somewhere that pays their taxes. Tell him I sent you.

Being Active!

When speaking to neurotypical teachers or neurodivergent staff only familiar with the general curriculum, I’m often asked what general approaches to use. The issue is, there aren’t any. Not yet at least. As far as I know, being an autistic teacher, teaching other autistics, the most important things are humility, flexibility and a willingness to collaborate with the student, rather than impose things on them. I had very few teachers like that. The ones I did have got a mention in the ‘gratitude’ section at the end of my book.

I am however interested in resurrecting one piece of activism that I used to push for when I worked in the NHS. All autistic people benefit from safe, accessible and affordable spaces to exercise. I certainly do, though most gyms are made with the worst possible lighting, overbearing music and smells. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a Pure Gym. The smell is unbearable, and I’m not even talking about the body odour of the other human beings present. Because of what you’ve learned on this blog thus far, you know that autistic people are marginalised. We don’t have a lot of money to burn. As a consequence, actually accessible gyms, swimming pools and tracks are out of our league.

Additionally, when we have access to gyms and training equipment, we can injure ourselves in ways that neurotypicals often wouldn’t, increasing our access problems. As a child who hated PE, I know my teachers found it difficult to work with me in turn. When I was at Kestrel House three weeks ago, I had a conversation with the PE teacher. He’s trying his best, but he finds it difficult to adapt his training to children whose bodies are different to the ones he was taught to work with.

This is why I want to work with educators, personal trainers, psychologists and gyms to develop autism-inclusive physical education in schools and support programmes for personal trainers working with autistics. There is a huge need for it. I’ve been lucky, but many of us haven’t been. Due to issues relating to hypermobility and reflexes, our bodies don’t behave in ways that bodies usually do. Having a neurodivergent approach to working with autistics would benefit PE teachers, gyms, trainers and, of course, autistic people. Prevention is better than cure and accessible exercise is a great way to counter some of the main causes of death in our community: heart disease and mental health deterioration. If you are interested in working with me on this, please get in touch!

Bbbb…. click the links below and stuff

I was in this particular piece of research. Ralph is looking for more autistics, so please, send him a message, wherever you are.

Research Opportunity – NOW RECRUITING ACROSS THE UK – PAID AND REASONABLE TRAVEL REIMBURSED

Simulated suspect interviews with autistic and non-autistic adults Police interviews are a crucial evidence-gathering stage within the criminal justice system. However, they are also socially and psychologically demanding for victims, witnesses, and suspects. Previous research shows that police witness interviews can be particularly challenging for autistic people. However, autism-friendly adaptations to witness interviews can help autistic people to provide full and accurate witness statements. Researchers at the University of Bath want to better understand the needs of autistic people in suspect interview settings. The study will aim to influence the development of autism-friendly interviews. Who can take part? Autistic adults (between 18 and 65 years old): With autism diagnosis, Speak fluent English, Have the ability to use a computer keyboard and mouse, Have normal (or corrected to normal) vision, Who are not colour-blind, Without diagnosis of intellectual disability, Without current diagnosis of psychosis, NOT be currently receiving treatment for significant mental health problems. What do I need to do? Participants will attend the University of Bath to complete the study that will last approximately 90 minutes. About the study:It will be completed using a laptop.Participants will complete a task, an interview, questionnaires and two psychological tests  (i.e., verbal comprehension and reasoning).Strict Covid-19 precautions are in place during the study.Participants will receive £10 per hour.The researchers can also reimburse reasonable travel expenses. The task and interview to complete will be a simulated police activity. Participants will either receive a criminal or non-criminal task and will be instructed to either be truthful or deceptive. The simulated interviews are designed to not cause distress and are conducted in an encouraging and friendly manner. Participants are reminded pre-interview that this is a simulated activity (i.e., not a real police interview) and that they are free to withdraw at any point without needing to give a reason. If you are interested in taking part, or would like to find out more, please contact the lead researcher Ralph Bagnall on rb2069@bath.ac.uk. Deadline to take part is April 2022.

This is Paul Nicholas, talking about being autistic and angry. As someone who is both of those things a lot of the time, this is super helpful stuff.

See you next week!