Today’s episode offers a first-person reflection on a professional development (PD) day for educators, focusing on the author’s experiences and frustrations. The author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, critiques the standardised “rigor by design” approach to teaching, arguing that it fails to accommodate neurodivergent learners, specifically autistic individuals and gestalt language processors (GLPs). Dr. Hoerricks highlights the disconnect between the PD’s linear, step-by-step methodology and the intuitive, pattern-first knowing characteristic of these students. This disparity leads her to experience mental tangents and daydreams, picturing characters from “The Young Ones” and the band Madness, as a way to cope with the irrelevance and inadequacy of the training. Ultimately, the piece serves as a critique of institutional inertia in education and a call to reclaim individual ways of knowing in a system that often excludes diverse learning styles.
Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/what-happens-when-the-map-excludes
Let me know what you think.
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