First cohort presentation

Related journal entries

• The undercurrent: executive function skills

  My main focus at work right now is executive function skills — the foundational skills underneath all of life's activities, not just schoolwork. I study systems, and EF is a system we have to scaffold for our students in LEC workshop — until they can build systems of their own.

• Naming the destination: the blueprint of belonging

  I have a name for what I want the dissertation to leave behind: a blueprint of belonging — a buildable plan for how a predominantly white private school welcomes, supports, scaffolds, and retains its BIPOC and marginalized students, including neurodivergent students and students pushed outside the bubble of normalcy for gender identity or any other reason.

• The Dreamkeepers, and the teachers I want to learn from

  I love Gloria Ladson-Billings, and the Dreamkeepers chapter of her culturally relevant teaching work most of all. She found the teachers who actually succeeded with African American children and studied what they did. That is the standard I want my research measured against — and the reason narrative inquiry is the right method for it.

• Morning chapel: belonging as a quality of God

  What I said about belonging is, for me, a chapel truth before it is a research finding: belonging is a quality of God. Living the quality of welcoming others is what makes others feel they belong — and that is expressing Love the way God expresses love. Love is a living verb.

• Fair is not the same as equitable

  My whole career has been about growing in my understanding of fairness versus equity. Fair treatment is not necessarily equitable treatment — students need scaffolds that help them reach their best potential — and I want to understand what that requires in the elite school where I teach.

• Room for the mess

  Teaching can be messy and should be, because life is. The planning is not there to prevent the mess — it is what makes the mess worth paying attention to when it shows up.

• The gym tells the truth: watching my school change since 2018

  In 2018 our girls basketball team was predominantly white — I don't think there was a single Black player. For the past three to five years the team has been mainly Black, more highly skilled, and last year we won state for the first time in school history. I want to study the data behind that change.

• Micro-assumptions: the guess that comes before the slight

  A microaggression is something a student hears. A micro-assumption is the thing I believed a half-second before I opened my mouth. This entry is about well-meaning white adults — me included — and the daily arithmetic of small guesses that adds up to a mountain a student has to climb alone.

• Brad Lomax, Fannie Lou Hamer, Donald Galloway: living the intersection

  Three civil rights leaders who lived the intersection of race, disability, class, and gender — and one quote I have carried my whole life without knowing whose it was.

• 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.

• Two paradigms: fix the person, or hold the person

  The world seems to divide along cultural paradigms about what neurodivergence means — and the older paradigm was never the deficit one.

• Who gets called gifted, and who gets pulled out

  How do we take all of these layers and move toward more equity for neurodiverse students in schools? Start with who gets identified — and who gets sent to me.

• 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.

• Victor, Carrie Buck, and what a diagnosis was allowed to cost

  Itard believed empathy and language separated men from beasts. Ninety years later the Supreme Court decided Carrie Buck's rights did not matter. The same logic runs through both.

• The movements were never separate — I had just been taught them separately

  Brad Lomax, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Donald Galloway did not treat disability rights and racial justice as adjacent causes. My own coursework had.

• 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.

• Why I can't just measure belonging

  I kept reaching for a survey, then stopped. A number can tell me a student feels safe on Tuesday. It cannot tell me why they stopped raising their hand by November.

• The meeting that changed my mind

  I walked in to manage a conversation. I walked out with a genuinely new question about whose expertise counts in a room.