You do exist. You do matter. An account of humanity where you have been conveniently struck out of it is crucially incomplete. An approach that excludes you has lost not just something, but someone.
I do not think you are as alone as this feels. I think many of us get excluded, for many different ways of not fitting the norm. Silently, subtly disappeared.
There is an increasing appreciation that neurodiversity is a richness and opportunity, that one size fits all approaches make us lose people, valuable people with rights and feelings and skills who we need. And a lot of the groups working on inclusion and diversity on topics like racism, sexism, LGBT, disability etc. are increasingly including it as part of an intersectional approach, and would not protest the parallel. They are talking about needing more diverse ways of teaching content, or making stuff accessible, or reflecting how we speak about people and who that excludes, or considering radically different needs as legitimate. I’m involved with people who do, and I think we are beginning to make some headway. I’ve been increasingly encountering the results in activism and academia, people asking questions they did not before, making accommodations for problems where before they were saying these problems were imaginary, or faults one should just push through.
And this is a side note, but the way you and I were taught math is fundamentally broken, with painful consequences. Math is an incredible and beautiful tool, and the way it is taught systematically screens out the people who would love it the most. I grew up thinking I sucked at math, due to getting bullshit explanations like this, compounded by sexist prejudice that messed with my head, and the anxieties and choices resulting from that mean I now lack math skills I could really use for my work, and simply a connection to a field where, everytime I have seen it done properly, I have been mesmerised by its clarity and beauty and strength. I’ve seen logic taught the same broken way, and have been fighting that as hard as I can. I am fucking sick of people saying things are obvious when they are not. My girlfriend works in theoretical physics, and has had a similar issue of feeling stupid for not understanding the explanations, and slowly spelling out this confusion, and realising that the explanations are objectively faulty, and that trying to spell that out addresses fundamental problems that need to be targeted; and that if you explain stuff with that in mind, suddenly, a lot of students that were breaking down and thinking this field isn’t for them can suddenly thrive.
Point is, this is wrong, and it can change, and it should change, and your pain is fucking valid.
The worst explanation I’ve ever had in school was when my high school chemistry textbook was talking about “quantum numbers” in electron orbitals without mentioning there was such a thing as the Schrodinger equation. It was 100% bullshit handwaving and wouldn’t admit it, so of course nobody understood it. If they just went and said something like “this is a result that falls out of the advanced math of quantum mechanics, forget about what it means and just shut up and memorize” it would have been more honest.
Your text almost had me crying.
You do exist. You do matter. An account of humanity where you have been conveniently struck out of it is crucially incomplete. An approach that excludes you has lost not just something, but someone.
I do not think you are as alone as this feels. I think many of us get excluded, for many different ways of not fitting the norm. Silently, subtly disappeared.
There is an increasing appreciation that neurodiversity is a richness and opportunity, that one size fits all approaches make us lose people, valuable people with rights and feelings and skills who we need. And a lot of the groups working on inclusion and diversity on topics like racism, sexism, LGBT, disability etc. are increasingly including it as part of an intersectional approach, and would not protest the parallel. They are talking about needing more diverse ways of teaching content, or making stuff accessible, or reflecting how we speak about people and who that excludes, or considering radically different needs as legitimate. I’m involved with people who do, and I think we are beginning to make some headway. I’ve been increasingly encountering the results in activism and academia, people asking questions they did not before, making accommodations for problems where before they were saying these problems were imaginary, or faults one should just push through.
And this is a side note, but the way you and I were taught math is fundamentally broken, with painful consequences. Math is an incredible and beautiful tool, and the way it is taught systematically screens out the people who would love it the most. I grew up thinking I sucked at math, due to getting bullshit explanations like this, compounded by sexist prejudice that messed with my head, and the anxieties and choices resulting from that mean I now lack math skills I could really use for my work, and simply a connection to a field where, everytime I have seen it done properly, I have been mesmerised by its clarity and beauty and strength. I’ve seen logic taught the same broken way, and have been fighting that as hard as I can. I am fucking sick of people saying things are obvious when they are not. My girlfriend works in theoretical physics, and has had a similar issue of feeling stupid for not understanding the explanations, and slowly spelling out this confusion, and realising that the explanations are objectively faulty, and that trying to spell that out addresses fundamental problems that need to be targeted; and that if you explain stuff with that in mind, suddenly, a lot of students that were breaking down and thinking this field isn’t for them can suddenly thrive.
Point is, this is wrong, and it can change, and it should change, and your pain is fucking valid.
The worst explanation I’ve ever had in school was when my high school chemistry textbook was talking about “quantum numbers” in electron orbitals without mentioning there was such a thing as the Schrodinger equation. It was 100% bullshit handwaving and wouldn’t admit it, so of course nobody understood it. If they just went and said something like “this is a result that falls out of the advanced math of quantum mechanics, forget about what it means and just shut up and memorize” it would have been more honest.