Sunday, February 23, 2020

Reflection: Neurodivergent Teacher Trauma

I know I’m a good teacher. I know I don’t have to control everything. Yet, I always feel a need to prove myself. I see every disagreement as a challenge to my knowledge and skill. (And that fear, which is what it is, is exacerbated when I know I have current research on my side.) I know full well that, to my frustration, I do not have the social skill to make people see my way of interpreting the evidence. Trauma and fear means I often give in to avoid the situation when the other person presents a reasoned argument. For years, I have marveled at the people who are able to say exactly the same thing I just said and get people to agree with them. It’s a skill I don’t have. Body language? Tone of voice? Social rapport building? Probably a combination. Whatever it is; I don’t know how to do it. That’s a problem when you have a social communication disability and you’re being evaluated on your ability to coordinate a cohesive team unit. The problem is even worse when not everyone is coming from the same background/approach. (And the problem is only exacerbated by the experience of administrators who invalidated my voice in the process, or who flat out told me they didn’t believe I could do it. I haven’t learned better strategies, only more fear.)

I feel safest in a very silo-ed approach. I feel most comfortable if there is allowance for disagreement in approach among team members, but we all can do what we believe is best. I believe students benefit from multiple approaches, and that’s part of it. The other part is that because I don’t feel threatened, I’m able to work more cooperatively/productively with everyone on the team. But that model is not acceptable in modern special education. Consistency is the name of the game. We all must be on the same page, defined as taking the same approach to everything: lock stock and barrel. That makes me very uncomfortable. I’m neurodivergent; I simply don’t think the same way as everyone else. 

I tried working in an ultra-“consistency-is-everything” environment back at the beginning of my career. That experience marks clearly the start my education-system related trauma. Back then I totally drank the kool-aid. I believed in the system completely. Unfortunately, that school quickly and explicitly showed me that my brain didn’t respond to stimulus the same way. Purely by virtue of being neurodivergent, I was physically unable to live up to their standard of consistency. That experience has colored my feelings and approach to the whole concept ever since. (I’m not sure I was explicitly aware of it until I just typed that sentence. I knew the trauma was effecting me emotionally, but I’m not sure I understood how it was effecting my work until now.)


I’ve known for several years know that my trauma and my neurodivergence were causing most of my stress at work. I knew I was part of the problem (everyone has a role in a social interaction problem.) I knew my trauma stemmed from the reactions I’ve received over the years to my neurodivergence, but I always focused on the ableism in special education as the root cause. Special Education is incredibly ableist, but in reality I’m quite good at navigating that aspect of my chosen field. This trauma is pedagological. That’s why I have never been able to figure out how I could be successfully accommodated. I still don’t have an answer for how that can work in the future, but now at least I’ve started asking the right question.

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