First cohort presentation
Ten minutes on how one school's "rigor" was really comfortable distance. A stranger asked the question I hadn't answered.
I over-prepared the slides and under-prepared the argument, which is a reliable sign that I did not yet believe it.
The question afterward — "who benefits from calling that rigor?" — is now written on the first page of my research notebook.
Related journal entries
- 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.