Jobs for autistic strengths and "autistic strengths"

Full disclosure: Real Social Skills got me thinking about this with some tweets (first tweet, second tweet, third tweet), and then a blog post, both of which I think you should read. That said, I think my thoughts are parallel rather than identical and it's still worth my writing my bit.

To me, what she's saying reads a few main points:

• Some models of autistic strengths assume that attention to/liking of detail is one of the strengths.
  
• They then assume this means we will enjoy repetitive, detail-oriented jobs most people find mundane.
  
• That's still putting us into different sorts of jobs than everyone else (segregation!) but calling it strengths based and assuming we're all the same.

Since this is May 1 (Blogging Against Disablism Day), I've got some "spot the (dis)abl(e)ism" thoughts. Let's break those down. Here's what I'm reasonably certain isn't ableism:

• Thinking it's a good idea to play to an autistic person's strengths does not read like ableism to me.
  
• Recognizing that some strengths may be statistically common in autistic people does not read like ableism to me.
  
•  Understanding that the jobs we find interesting or want to do may be different from what "most people" find interesting or want to do does not read like ableism to me.

Helping an autistic person find a job that's a good fit for them based on their (autistic, since they are autistic and autism is pervasive,) strengths would also not read like ableism to me It would be helping someone find a job for their autistic strengths. Unfortunately,  the way programs around finding jobs for "autistic strengths" often run ... does have ableism involved.

• Assuming that "autistic strengths" means exactly a certain set of (perhaps statistically common) strengths is treating us as a monolith, and therefore ableism. Not all autistic people are detail-oriented, for example. (I appear to be a lot more detail-oriented than I really am thanks to pattern-recognition.)
  
• Assuming that a given strength will correspond to a given interest is stereotyping based on interests. If you're only doing this in the presence of an assumed disability, it's ableism. If not ... it's still inaccurate stereotyping but it might not be ableism?
  
• Celebrating how we can therefore do these jobs other people find boring and pushing us into those jobs is effectively workplace segregation, definitely stereotyping based on autism, and therefore ableism.

And this is what a lot of autism employment programs seem to be doing. It's not what we need. My jobs? Based on my actual strengths, some of which are a bit stereotypical and some of which are decidedly not. Math? Yeah, I'm good at that and I like it. People tend not to be surprised by that one. Grading? I guess that involves attention to detail, or pattern recognition that makes breaks in expected patterns stand out. Teaching? Seems a bit social, yes? Well, explaining things to people in ways they can understand is absolutely part of my skill set. As a student, I often explain math-heavy neuroscience papers to my non-math classmates in the neuroscience program. As a teacher, it means finding the way to explain a given concept that actually makes sense to my students. I don't think any autism employment program is going to suggest that a person who can't always talk become a teacher, but that's what I do. Editing? I guess it's attention to detail, but it's also language. None of my work has been in areas typically considered "boring," and a lot of the work people consider "boring"? Really wouldn't be a good fit for me. Assuming it must work for me because I'm autistic isn't going to work. I'm an Autistic person, not a machine made of autism stereotypes. 

Day 2 (not) in the inaccessible classroom

Yesterday, lab was bad. Like, I wasn't able to stay kind of bad. And I wasn't too happy about that. Today, I didn't go to the main lab meeting. It was going to be in the same place, with the same noise issue, and I was having none of that. I was also invited to a lab meeting/seminar about an hour from campus during the usual lab time, but I'd have said “sorry, can't go” if there hadn't been a reason I was already preferring to avoid the electrical engineering lab today. I take my teaching obligations seriously, and err on the side of staying to teach even in situations where getting a substitute would really be OK.

But there was a reason for me to skip teaching today, called an inaccessible classroom environment. So I checked with the primary professor, and I got the go-ahead to skip the main lab session in its (unusual) room and go to the seminar. Instead, I was to negotiate a time to meet with a student who needed to use the oscilliscope in our usual lab classroom. The usual classroom doesn't have construction or explosion testing nearby, so this is great. I quite like being helpful as a teacher in ways that I can be, you know, actually helpful.

(I can absolutely be helpful as a teacher while speech isn't working. When I teach for the Art of Problem Solving, everything is always already typed, and that means speech is irrelevant. I've tutored real analysis without speech before. I've even run labwithout speech before. I wrote on index cards, which I left with the students whose questions I was answering. It worked out fine. Speech was not the problem. Continuing sensory assault which prevented me from focusing on a problem long enough to answer it and which was bringing me to the point of meltdown was the problem. Or: An inaccessible classroom was the problem.)

And my meeting with this student wasn't an issue of “well here's some make-work.” She actually needed to use the oscilloscope, and therefore the professor actually needed to find a TA who could meet this student in the lab. Not only that, but there were 6 other students who needed supplies from the lab (extra chips because they need 5 two-input and gates and their chip only came with 4, more wires because the lab needed a ton of wires, that sort of thing.) There were even three other students who came in needing troubleshooting help. So I got a small group of students working in the lab at an hour that worked for me, where it was quiet, providing actually needed supervision. This was good, becauseI don't take well to make-work, not when I can't really work 40 hours in a week and collapse in about a week when I try. I need prioritization to make sure that the work I'm doing is truly needed, not busy work.

In case your wondering where all the reflections on my teaching are coming from: I'm preparing a proposal on teaching while disabled. If the proposal is accepted, I'll have to keep a teaching journal in the spring semester. Since blogging is like journaling but more accessible to me (Julia says this too!), blogging gets me in the habit that I'll likely need to form. Plus I form insights by letting myself write, and that means blogging helps me organize my thoughts in ways that may well help with the proposal writing.

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Silence of Absence

This Autistics Speaking Day, I had to leave the electrical engineering lab I'm a TA for early. It wasn't the professors fault, or the fault of my students, not at all. I did lose speech before I exited, which was literal silence, but that's not an issue. I've helped run lab without speech before. I'm pretty good at making myself understood without speech -- I type quickly, I can write by hand with pen on paper, and as long as you don't incorrectly presume that autistic means no body language, I'm not actually all that hard to read.

This was not the same as the time I successfully ran lab without speech. That day, speech wasn't working because of an event that took place prior to lab. The event was a one-off, not something that continued. This time, the cause of speech-kaput was in the lab. Or below it, to be precise. There's construction going on in the engineering area, including inside some of the buildings. One of the places that currently has loud construction is ... right below the computer lab, where we were meeting. There's apparently also explosion testing near the lab? Bad placement. That meant that the cause of speech-kaput was in the lab. It was also ongoing. If the cause were a one-off event in the lab, I could keep working. I'd be interrupted once, then go back to work and stay working. However:

• Each round of noise (honestly pretty short) was painfully loud, interrupting me and making me jump.
• The amount of time between rounds was unpredictable. Sometimes we'd get several in a row, quickly. Sometimes there'd be enough time to start working again, be concentrating on something, and then get interrupted again. Never enough time to fully recover, but sometimes enough to try working again.

That's a bad combination, and I lasted about half an hour ... of a lab session that's typically three hours. 

After I taught lab without speech, I felt good. Not great, because I was still reeling from the effects of the event that made me lose speech in the first place, but good. I'd done what needed doing, and I'd shown myself that I could teach without speech. 

After I had to leave lab today, I didn't feel good. All too often, autistic people are silenced in conversations about autism by never even getting to be a part of the conversation. It's hard to have a voice (mouth-sounds or otherwise) when absent. And I was absent, because presence was inaccessible. I was silent in an entirely different way than when I was present, literally silent, and still teaching. 

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Switch out the capacitor

This semester, my teaching assistantship is in electrical engineering. (And for as long as I'm a TA instead of a research assistant, I suspect it's going to stay in electrical engineering or similar, since electrical, biomedical, and computer engineering is the department my advisor's in.)

So now I'm one of three responsible people in the room for a digital circuits lab. (All three of us speak Mandarin, which is cool, but not the point of what I'm writing today.) They've both been doing circuits for much longer than I have, which is to be expected since I'm brand new to electrical engineering. Still, I'm a pretty quick study and I have very good pattern recognition, which comes in handy when my job mostly means troubleshooting other people's circuits to figure out what's wrong.

This isn't about my ability to troubleshoot circuits, really.
Unless it is, because I can't troubleshoot a circuit while looking at a light that's blinking at 5-20 Hz. The light is small enough that I'm (mostly) OK with the light near the edges of my vision, but the blinking light is the signal on the circuit I'm troubleshooting, which means it's on the circuit I'm trying to fix. That's not going to work.

"Alright, I'm turning off the power. I can't work with the flashing in my face and you should turn the power off when moving wires anyways."

That's method the first. You've got two reasons to turn off the power (plus "the teacher says so") and one of them is a safety thing they've been taught but tend to ignore. I'm still telling you what my need is (no flashing lights in my face) but it's not the only reason for what I'm asking you to do. I tend to go to this first if the problem seems to be with the circuit.

"Can you switch out the capacitor for one size up or one size down? I know this is the one on the lab sheet, but I can't work with that blink rate."

That's method the second. It eliminates the bad flash rate permanently, which is good, and it lets me leave the light on while trying to figure out what's going on with the oscilloscope. The only problem is, of course, that it's not the capacitor size used on the lab sheet, so I am telling students to not follow part of the directions. Still, why are the directions setting up a circuit that blinks in the most common frequency rate for problems? Seriously, why. Why are they so sure no one who'd have a problem is in the class? (Or, you know, teaching the class. Disabled teachers exist and all.)

Now, here's the bit where being a teacher and being around good folks is helpful: the students listen. I'm not sure how so many people don't realize that flashing lights can be an issue (and I don't blame the students at all for, well, following directions) but no one is arguing with me when I point out that the flashing lights can be a problem for people, including for me. They turn the power off, or they switch off the capacitor. They ask, "Is that a common issue?" and I say "More common than you'd think with how many things flash in that range..." Who knows? They might even remember that flashing lights can cause problems.






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The absent minded professor

It wasn't exactly a secret to me that some professors are autistic. First off ... professors are a subset of humans, and therefore I would expect to meet some autistic professors. Then there's the bit where a really focused interest (in an area you can get a doctorate in) might come in handy for getting a PhD. Plus I'm pretty good at recognizing other autistic adults when I meet them, though they don't always know themselves.

It's even less of a secret (by which I mean it'd be pretty easy to deduce if you think about it, plus you could find out by listening to us) that academia is frequently inaccessible for autistic people. Department politics? UH-OH. Bureaucracy? UH-OH. Networking, and getting jobs in ways that may or may not have much to do with the "official" channels? UH-OH.



And yet.
Hans Asperger described some of us as "little professors." Why did he think we were like professors? Or, perhaps more to my point, why did he think professors were like us?

Neurodiversity in the academy.
We've been there all along. Or, some of us have.

Can you speak, at length, on your topic of interest?
Can you speak at all?
We might have use for you.

Do you look like the person we expect at university?
Enough that we'll deal with the bureaucracy for you?
We might have use for you.

Can you maintain the schedule we expect?
Even the graduate school version? And the adjunct version?
We might have use for you.

But that's not really neurodiversity, is it?
It's just moving the line.

The absent-minded professor may well be autistic. I've met a few who are.
But without solidarity from the ones who were always given a space, this supposed representation is nothing but Aspie elitism.
(I don't pretend that Aspie is a useful category, but elitism based around the idea that it is? For people presumed to fit there? Now, that is very real.)

Remember that the absent-minded professor we are shown is always a man, always white, usually at least middle aged.
The only allusion we get to autism as disability, and not purely (or even primarily) social, is that his wife might take care of him when he forgets to eat. Or he just doesn't take good care of himself.
Sensory processing issues? Who knows.
Executive functioning? I think that's why his wife is feeding him. Or maybe it explains the Rube Goldberg machine that makes a mess of the food but does provide something vaguely edible. Usually.
But it's always a him, and it's always his wife.

What about the autistic people who aren't a "him?"
Women. Nonbinary people.
What about the autistic people who don't have wives?
Who takes care of us, if it turns out that our living alone wasn't such a great idea after all?
Or do we just not get to be academics?

So here's to the ones who were never supposed to make it through.
Here's to the ones who didn't, because they weren't mean to.
The university might be a haven for some of us,
But without solidarity from those who were permitted
For those who never passed for consistently verbal white men who live on their own or found a woman to pick up the slack
Or even for the "close enough" of one difference away,
It's only ever another aspie elitist wrong planet to build a home on.





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#AAC and the day taught lab without speech

After just over two years teaching, it finally happened. I had to teach, and speech wasn't working. This is for a lab class, introduction to digital circuits, and for the sections I work, there's three of us in the room. There's the professor who is generally in charge of lab for the class, and there are two teaching assistants. I'm one of the assistants. So I'm not alone in charge of the room anymore, though I am still one of the people in charge. People tend to assume that the folks in charge can communicate via mouth sounds, and I usually can ... but not always. I've usually been able to plan so that speech is working when I teach, tutor, or present ... but not always. This was the first time it happened as a face to face teacher.

Now, I'd thought of quite a few ways to handle this ahead of time. For me, competence at anything has to include competence at doing the thing while speech isn't working, and this is now my third year teaching face to face. It's a lab now, and it was a lecture before, but the general idea is similar. I need to be prepared for speech to give out while I'm teaching, because if I keep teaching long enough, eventually I will need to teach while speech isn't working.

I thought I could write on a white board. In some classrooms, I probably could. It didn't work out in the lab. There's one white board, and it's not near the lab counters that people are working at. Helping a student with their set-up while running back and forth to the white board every time I need to say something isn't practical. Since I'd been in the classroom before and noted where the white board was, I wasn't completely shocked when this didn't work and did have more back-ups, but the white board marker has been my go-to for a while. The white board, after all, is my most used communication board. 

I thought I could carry my iPad and use one of my communication apps on it. In some classrooms, I probably could. I think this would work fine in a lecture style class, since lots of teachers use iPads and projectors nowadays. It wasn't practical in my lab class, because the iPad is frankly ... too big. Space is at a premium at the lab benches, and my iPad doesn't fit in my pockets.

I had no illusion that my laptop would be the answer in the lab. Typing into a word document and projecting my screen to the front of the room is something I've done before -- it's what I did when I presented at Autcom without speech, and it works fine when there's a projector I can hook my laptop to and I can be at my laptop. That doesn't work when I need to move around a lab where even the iPad is a bit big for my purposes.

Which brings me to pen and paper. It's a writing solution, just like the white board marker is, but it's a bit more portable because paper is smaller than a white board. I use blank 4"x6" index cards to print my reading notes, because a note card system similar to the one I was taught in high school works well for me, except for the part where my handwriting is terrible and will eventually make my hand hurt. Still, if I slow down enough it can be read, and that makes it a viable communication option when typing might not be.

So I put a pack of index cards in one pocket along with a pen, and that was my communication solution. If a student had a question that required a linguistic answer, I pulled out an index card and wrote on it. I then left the index card with the student when I went on to help the next person, which meant they didn't need to remember my answer. They could go back and read it again if they needed to. This seemed to work quite well, overall. There were a couple students who thought they could skim my answers instead of reading every word of them (seriously, these answers were 1-2 sentences, read the whole thing) and then got told by one of the other instructors to fix the problem that I'd just told them about, which was a bit awkward. (I underlined the relevant words from my original answer and waved the card at them at the same time that the other teacher started telling them about the problem with mouth-sounds.)

Other moments from the class:

• One student asked if I'd lost my voice. I wrote, "Approximately." She said that sucked. "Not really." But ... "It's my normal. I'm not concerned." That's so sad! [I point back to "Not really."]
  *Sigh* She was definitely following my lead on the assumption that I could teach while not speaking, but seemed to have some trouble with the idea that my being disabled and prepared to teach while disabled was not sad or needing pity.
• The teacher who runs all the lab sections for the whole course asked me if I was OK. "Yeah, I'm fine. I'm autistic and sometimes speech doesn't work." She circles "autistic" and says she'll need to look that word up. I turn the card over and start writing 自闭症 on the other side. She goes "Oh!" Sometimes the fact that I read, write, understand, and sometimes speak Mandarin Chinese comes in handy. She doesn't seem particularly concerned by the fact that I just disclosed a developmental disability that has lots of bewareness campaigns around it, and she does realize that I'm working with students and successfully helping them while speech isn't working. 

So that was that. For something I spent two years being worried about (and being prepared for) this was rather ... anticlimactic. I'm not surprised, really, but it is a relief that it finally happened and now I know from experience that losing speech in the classroom as a teacher is not a big deal. Students were fine, fellow teacher type people were fine, nothing is exploding, metaphorically. Literally... a few LED bulbs blew, but not based on my advice!

Disability in the Graduate Assistants Contract

Two years ago, I suggested to my graduate assistants union that disability and accommodations should be covered in our contracts.

I could understand why it hadn't been there before:

1. It's not the sort of thing most people automatically think of unless they are themselves D/disabled or have a disability.
2. The accommodations/access side is theoretically covered by laws like the Americans With Disabilities Act anyways.

But for a few reasons, I thought it needed to be there:

1. Enforcing the ADA is really hard for most people, because it involves filing a lawsuit with the department of justice. Yes, even the threat of a lawsuit can be effective at times, but it generally needs to be at least a semi-credible threat.
2. If it's in the contract, then violations can also be handled by having the union go to bat, such as by filing a grievance. That's got more force than showing up in an office and complaining alone, but is generally easier to accomplish than filing a lawsuit. This is important because many professors do refuse to ensure access for students, and many departments do actively exclude disabled faculty members.
3. Attitudes: If following relevant disability laws is explicitly stated in the contract, even if it is a bit redundant (and as an engineer, I like certain kinds of redundancy, including this particular kind,) tells people that there's a group on campus that cares about the disability side of things, beyond just disability services (who don't negotiate the graduate assistant contracts.) There being such a group is a whole lot more welcoming for folks who find disability issues relevant than there not being any groups like that is!

And one more reason that occurs to me now but I didn't think of at the time:

•  Graduate assistants are both students and staff. Students handle accommodations through Disability Services for Students. Faculty and staff handle accommodations through Human Resources. Where do graduate assistants go, since we're both? That being unclear would be a barrier for anyone who has issues with bureaucracy. So would an answer of "Do both, haha," because that means dealing with two different offices for one issue.  

Well. The executive board for the union agreed, and none of the union members objected. They pushed to get disability language into the contract, beyond the list of thing they're not supposed to discriminate against us for. (And disability definitely belongs on that list.)

Contract negotiations happened. While the university negotiators tend not to like adding information that's already in other places to the contract or even referencing those other places in the contract, they did add a line about disability accommodations.

4.5 Disability Accommodations– The Administration and GAU shall adhere to Federal and State laws and regulations as they apply to treatment and accommodation of persons with disabilities. Requests for accommodations shall be submitted to the Office of Disabilities for Students.

Am I totally satisfied with that? Not completely. I think it's progress, since there wasn't any information about accommodations before. I know that contracts are all about basic compliance and lagal language. I've still got the same issue with "will follow Federal and State law" here that I do with it on syllabus statements and generally everywhere.

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(Sometimes) Wearing Pride on My Bag

I am fairly open about being Autistic, about using AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication) both online and offline. Fairly open. When I am a student in a classroom, the teachers know, and most of my classmates usually know too. As an athlete, my coach knows and my teammates are aware if they remember. As a person on my college campus, people who look at my backpack may well see the buttons -- usually.

Purple backpack with three buttons on it."Our homes not group homes" is obscured by glare, while "disabled & badass" and "I USE AAC" are legible.

As a teacher, my supervisors know. My students don't.

Or at least, I haven't told them. I put some thought into arranging my schedule so that speech is still working while I teach, face-to-face, in the classroom. I don't tell them that speech going kaput on me can happen sometimes, so if it ever does happen, they'll be finding out it's possible right as it happens. I don't tell them I'm autistic. I only tell the ones who are seeking accommodations and seem nervous about it that I'm disabled at all, and the information they get is that I am also registered with disability services. Not that I'm autistic, not that I use a speech generating device part time, not that I can't always speak.

I take the buttons off the back of the backpack before I go teach, and I put them back on after class.

I know full well that my department would back me up if some of my students found out that I'm disabled and decided to take issue with it, and I suspect that most of my students wouldn't take issue, but there are some chances I am not ready to take.

My buttons represent my disabled pride. I remove them to teach because pride is an act of bravery, and I only have the energy to be brave some of the time. Not all of the time. 

Being a teacher who can't always speak

Today, I did something that's kinda hard, and kinda scary, and kinda risky. I told the department chair (so basically my boss, because I'm a teaching assistant and he's also coordinating the course I'm teaching) that I'm not always able to speak. I also told him what my backup plan is for those times (it's a pretty good backup.)

It went fine, by the way.

But I wanted to write a bit about what I think made me so lucky there, because there's some things I was able to pull off that not every disabled person can do, and these are relevant things! And it's not fair, and it deserves talking about. So does the fact that even with all the things I have working in my favor, it wasn't actually guaranteed that I'd get the good result I got.

Thing the first: I did my undergrad partially in this department (and partially in other departments in the same school.) That means that everyone in the department already knew who I was, and most of them actually knew me. I was that freshman who somehow managed to end up tutoring Real Analysis. What this means is that I got the chance to prove my ability as a tutor and as a student before anyone knew that the disabled side also exists.

Thing the second: I don't have big bulky tech that is obviously coded as "for disabled people" on my person... ever. My text to speech is on my laptop, which is a pretty common thing for a college student or grad student to own and carry with them. This means that my assistive tech's status as helping me with an aspect of my disability isn't clear until I start using it for that. I do a lot of other things with my laptop, same as most students do a lot of things with their laptops.

Thing the third: While someone who knows common traits and has a good idea what the tip-offs are for autistic adults will find me not even a little bit subtle, most people don't immediately know that I'm disabled upon talking to me. If they could tell immediately, my "pass for a little bit, then mention that I'm disabled a bit before I need any accommodations" method would be impossible to actually do.

Thing the fourth: I got lucky. Even when all the other things line up well, luck of the draw is still huge. (Luck of the draw may not be enough when the other stuff doesn't line up.) My department chair's initial reaction was to ask what he/the department would be able to do to help, and that I should let them know if I needed anything. I actually don't need much from them: I need them to not take issue if they see me using my text-to-speech in the classroom or if they find out about my using it. I need them to have my back if someone else takes issue with the use of text-to-speech.

What I've got:

1. Departmental not-taking issue and backup if someone else takes issue.
2. Offer that if speech is kaput I can text the office and they'll send another TA over if needed. (Probably not needed, the point of my backup methods is that I can keep teaching even is speech goes kaput.)
3. Statement that if my classroom's speakers turn out to be randomly incompatible with my text to speech/audio output, they'll get me moved into a classroom with compatible speakers. 

That's actually more than I asked for, but it's all stuff that's a good idea on their part. I want to get it in writing because a big piece of this was crossing my t's and dotting my i's to cover my hide from any potential students taking issue, so I will want to talk to disability services, but yeah. Seems to be working OK in my case, and my main issue is "So the solutions on the practicality side all exist, why is this sort of thing unusual enough that none of the classroom media assistance people had heard of sticking text-to-speech into the audio system?" My secondary issue is "So um maybe enough education that the phone isn't the first method of contact suggested for the event of speech going kaput would be good?" Because that was suggested before texting was, and if I can't speak, I can't phone. (Not that I do well with phones when I can speak, but...)