The woman who breastfed her one year old baby, while teaching a college class, didn't irk me because she was breast feeding in public. I raised my kids around militant breast feeders, and we're all used to seeing boobs all the time. What irked me most was that, according to her own account, the child was crawling around the room and was making a beeline for an electrical plug at one point. Nobody can give a good lecture or have any hope of paying attention to a lecture, when a toddler is crawling in front of the classroom.The woman was unable to put herself in the position of the students of the classroom, who were undoubtedly calculating the cost of the class and the likelihood that they would leave the classroom with any knowledge.
Autistic people are often described as missing the ability to understand the world from other people's perspectives. It is said that they are the ultimate narcissists. I'm not entirely sure that it is true. I've seen remarkable empathy, even supernatural understanding of suffering in others, among autistic people. And I've seen remarkable narcissism among non-autistic people.
One of the reasons that I continue to write personal posts from time to time is because so few people really understand what it's like to raise a son with autism. They can't understand how much we love our son and, at the same time, how much work is involved with getting him a proper education and keeping him from being marginalized by society.
OK. here's one story. I'm supposed to be at a funeral right now, but I couldn't go, because a sore throat plus the request to put on dressy clothes was too much for Ian. He cried and cried. He was afraid of going to a funeral, too, I think. We didn't attempt to bring him to the open casket wake yesterday. Jonah was upset, because he had successfully tied a windsor knot all by himself and he didn't want to disappoint his grandparents and it's difficult to not be able to do what other people do.
Mostly the stories are good these days, but there are still days like this one.
I'm grateful for Michael Berube's many essays on his son, Jamie. I particularly love his last one for Crooked Timber. Through his writing, I've learned a ton about Down Syndrome, the Beatles, and Harry Potter.
I also really enjoyed Tim Burke's post, which pointed out the implicit prejudice and arrogance behind the latest job advertisement at CSU. Tim didn't really give us a window into his life, as much as point out the lack of empathy in others.
One of the unrealized potentials of the Internet is that it provides a window into so many lives. With some minor efforts with a search engine, I can read essays from a single mother in Texas or a debutante in New York City or a retired grandfather in Alaska or exchange student in Russia. Theoretically, we should all become more empathic, because of our encounters with these different cultures. In reality, we use the Internet to find people who are more like us just spread across a wider geographic area. We like people who confirm our biases and reaffirm our world view. Yet the potential is still there, as those two posts show.
Apt. 11d 
Well I have not found anybody on the internet who agrees with me on much of anything. I certainly do not come across anything “confirming my biases and reaffirming my world view.” Just about everything I read on the internet is just the opposite.
LikeLike
“Autistic people are often described as missing the ability to understand the world from other people’s perspectives. It is said that they are the ultimate narcissists. I’m not entirely sure that it is true. I’ve seen remarkable empathy, even supernatural understanding of suffering in others, among autistic people. And I’ve seen remarkable narcissism among non-autistic people.”
Take Temple Grandin for example–she found her niche in the world in part by figuring out that she had more empathy and insight into cattle and their anxieties than the average person. And I believe that this sort of empathetic bond with animals is not at all unusual among autistic people.
LikeLike
“Theoretically, we should all become more empathic, because of our encounters with all these different cultures. In reality, we use the Internet to find people who are more like us just spread across a wider geographic area.”
Well, the other possibility is that we do both. You are just like me in a number of ways (we’re moms to two kids, PhD’s, married to spouses with financially rewarding, but consuming careers, who didn’t have those plans when we met them, liberals, . . . .). But, we’re also different (and, raising a kid with autism is one of the differences, but so is living in the east, being catholic, . . . .). Since I’m the reader and not the blogger, my differences might not matter as much, but I do learn about your culture from your posts, though I’m also here because we are similar.
LikeLike
I also really enjoyed Tim Burke’s post, which pointed out the implicit prejudice and arrogance behind the latest job advertisement at CSU.
It is certainly arrogance but I don’t think it requires prejudice. Shoving several years of Ph.D. production out of the potential hiring pool is a way to move toward something like equilibrium in supply and demand. Obviously it isn’t fair, but for an administrator or current faculty member, it has many advantages. It imposes most of the pain on people he or she is less likely to be currently in daily contact with, it cuts down the amount of work reviewing applications, it helps keep wages higher by keeping the most desperate out of the pool, and, probably most importantly, allows them to continue producing more graduate students at the current rate without moral qualms about wasting everybody’s time/money.
LikeLike
“Obviously it isn’t fair, but for an administrator or current faculty member, it has many advantages.”
It’s way fairer than publicly accepting a bigger pile of applications, and then silently circular-filing everybody who didn’t come out of a handful of programs.
The bigger the pile, the faster and more driven by prejudice the winnowing process is going to be.
LikeLike
If we’re talking about readers rather than bloggers, I think this job does a pretty good job of bringing together people with differing perspectives on a lot of things but who can, over time, maintain a civil conversation with each other on a wide range of topics, even if particular topics can get heated. I know that probably in terms of race, education level, and rough current class/socio-economic status (though as a grad student I’m definitely in a different income bracket than most of you), we’re probably pretty homogeneous, and we’re probably all generally somehow connected to academia, but I think this blog has readers with different backgrounds and upbringing, from different parts of the country, of different ages, religions, different outlooks on life, and different politics. I think that’s an accomplishment of sorts and allows for some very interesting conversations.
LikeLike
the child was crawling around the room and was making a beeline for an electrical plug at one point.
I’ve tried to ignore this whole thing, which seems like a silly non-story to me, but I have wondered about this part, which I’ve heard a few times. Is an electrical outlet really much of a danger to a baby? I was once shocked at a small kid, but that was because I stuck a bobby-pin in it. (I have no idea why.) Isn’t it pretty hard to be shocked by this sort of thing, and likely to be very difficult for a baby?
LikeLike