Counterintuitive Homework Solution!

If you are reading this, you have probably noticed that this is my first post since January, and thence deduced that my skills at keeping up a blogging schedule have proven to be abysmal.

If you had seen my grades at the midterm, you would also see that my skills at keeping up with homework have proven to be similarly abysmal for similar reasons.

For this reason, I have decided to solve both these problems at once... by blogging about my homework. Instead of doing it? No, in order to MAKE myself do it. (I may also end up copying over the blog posts mandated for my biology class to this blog, because if I'm going to work that hard I want to be able to go back and see it again!)

 So, here I shall implement my counterintuitive solution to the problem of homework by describing what I have accomplished today.

This morning, I took two tests: one as part of my computer science class this semester, and one immediately after class to prove that I was ready for computer science class next semester. I passed both with fairly good grades, and successfully registered for the next computer science course! Unfortunately, my attempts to register for any courses other than that and Latin have proven fruitless; I'll be talking with a professor to see if I can solve that one tomorrow. (It doesn't make sense; I tried registering for two different sections of Spanish, four or so of physics, and two of math, and it told me they were all full even though I checked repeatedly and the other page claimed there were many seats available! Oh, well... the programming class and love-of-my-life-Latin worked out fine, so it's not too bad.)

My theatre homework has started getting easy on me. I have abruptly gone from utter bafflement and uncertainty about what I was doing to... having large chunks of it done. The key seems to have been getting over the "activation energy," as it were (sorry, chemistry joke). Today I sat down with the chunk of my essay in which I had to analyze the parts of A Doll's House that were tragic, and after an hour or so it was done and took up most of a page. I even got a cited quote in, and analyzed that. Then I had to take a break, because I think I got too far into my themes and I haven't reached that point!

Yup, this is a personal blog and that was a snapshot of my life. If I have any readers--and I doubt that I do--then thanks for reading my uncomfortably detailed homework summary, and I'll be trying to write more-thoughtful things soon!

Maturity Redux

So, back a few months ago, I wrote a post about how I was worried I wasn't going to be mature enough for college. Turns out that not only am I mature enough, I'm far more mature than many of my classmates...

...Why, oh, why did I wake up this morning to discover someone had taped a giant cardboard penis to the common-room door?

Teaching Versus Learning

A few years ago, I wrote a story about the adventures a character of mine had when she was in second grade from the perspective of her teacher. In the middle of a lesson, my character asks the kind of question I always wished I was brave enough to ask in school--pointing out a gap in a lesson, specifically asking why they didn't ask the people who knew the recent historical figure they were studying about the "mysterious things" that had just been glossed over--and the teacher has a moment of resenting the question because she was hoping to avoid getting into the place where her lesson plan was pretty flimsy. The little girl wants to bring the conversation to a higher level, and the teacher is invested in keeping it down to simple things.

That's not necessarily what I would want in a teacher, but it's what I've usually gotten. And I've had some wonderful teachers who did go above and beyond what's on the test, but not many. There haven't been nearly as many as I wish there had been, and that comes out in my writing even when I don't think about it.

College, they promise, isn't like that.

I'm going to start college classes on Monday, and when I do I'll be looking for what was promised: real conversations, real questions, real learning. Finally, classes where I can be engaged. Asking questions, looking for answers deeper than just the obvious, I might be able to succeed.

Because it's when I'm bored that I fail.

Maturity, Autism, and Normalcy

It seems that, though most people don't realize it, the word "maturity" is used as a catchall term for a lot of different qualities that (are said to) become more common among any given group as its members grow older. Some I have. Some I don't.

I've graduated from high school and now I'm looking to leave for college in the fall, but I'm not sure I'm "mature" enough to survive there. I don't even know if I was really "mature" enough for high school, for all I managed to graduate. Believe you me, it took a lot of help for me to get this far, and now a lot of the support I've had to get here is dissolving while I still need it. It's going to be a struggle, and all the more so because I'm slow and I still haven't recovered from a rather traumatic, well... the past six years, really, ever since I first started secondary school.


Compounding the problem was the fact that I was also too mature for high school. Like most teenagers, I spent a lot of high school trying to figure out the answer to the question, "Who am I?" Unfortunately, a lot of the answers I found led me to conclusions that my classmates couldn't even seem to comprehend. I have never gone a single year in my memory without being the target of at least one major bullying incident, and by the time I finished high school I realized that it was because I was so obviously different from everyone else.


I am autistic, and ever since I discovered as much I have been struggling with how much to own the label. It does make me different, in demonstrable ways. I would rather be proud of my strengths than ashamed by the challenges that come with them, but even owning the name "autistic" too much makes me a target to the ignorant and a problem for my friends. But it's my life, built in, not something I can just turn off because I'm bothering someone. It's not the only thing in my life, but I can't ever get away from it even if I don't talk about it. Is it more mature to speak up, like my uncle (technically first cousin once removed) does in being part of an autistic self-advocacy protest group, or to stay quiet and let it just be the background of my life like most of my friends wish I would?


Sometimes even I forget I'm autistic. I believe the things that people say, about how I can do everything that everyone else can, that I'm no different, that I'm capable of anything. I don't look different. I've been forcibly and unpleasantly taught to observe the basics of "acting normal" that don't come nearly so naturally to me as to others. So I push myself to keep up with everyone else, but then I discover every time that I can't always do that. I'm truly good at gathering and memorizing information, but really only on the topics that are meaningful and important to me, and so I'm characterized as "lazy" because it's hard for me to force myself to fill my head with things I don't care about when there's something just one tangent away that's on a topic I have a passion for. And that's part of what my form of autism is: Hans Asperger, the doctor for whom my Asperger's Syndrome is named, characterized the children he studied as "little professors" because each had a deep and thorough knowledge about their own subjects of interest to the exclusion of most else. And I'm not good at socializing with strangers when I don't have someone I'm comfortable with around to make it easier. That's the part that's hit me lately: when too much is happening at once, I go into sensory overload until I can get away to calm down.


No, I'm not normal. And I just have to live with it. That's a form of maturity, too:


God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Amen.