Enrolled — first cohort seminar
Walked in with a list of problems. Left with a list of questions, which felt like the first real progress.
The first night, we were each asked to name the problem that brought us here. I named three, confidently, and by the end of the evening I could not defend any of them as problems rather than symptoms.
I wrote in the margin of my notebook: "stop solving, start describing." It has held up better than most of what I wrote that semester.
Related journal entries
- The internet let separated people find each other
A layer of shared knowledge, community, and communication that changed who could be heard — and who stopped being alone.
- What I first thought · I learned that · I wonder if
The prompt I gave the room at the end of the presentation, and the norms question I want every adult in a school to sit with.
- Racialized rigor: pushed harder, punished faster, measured against a standard nobody names
The demand is heavier, the grace is thinner, and the whole arrangement is delivered as care. I am trying to describe how racialized rigor actually shows up in a building — because until it is describable, it is deniable.
- From "othered" to included: the words came before the science
Neurodivergence and neurodiversity are not two names for the same thing. One asks what is wrong with this person. The other asks what is wrong with the room.
- Not broken — differently attuned
Two constructs at odds: a Global North paradigm that medicalized difference as defect, and Global South paradigms that had already integrated it.
- Norms around us: the exercise I could not answer cleanly about my own building
I asked the room to name two or three norms at their workplace that might exclude someone with a different neurocognitive style. Then I had to answer it myself.
- The hallway is a curriculum
We keep asking why students disengage in the hall between classes. But the hallway is where the real sorting happens — and we've never once designed it.
- What a principal hears in silence
After a whole week of observation I realized the office is the busiest room in the building, and the only one with no doors to open. Leadership here is mostly listening.