Media Monday: Exploring neurodiversity in pop culture

We actually don’t understand the landscape that younger people have to navigate. And that’s why it’s so important not to tell kids how it’s going to be, but to listen to them as they try to find words to tell us how it is for them. And that’s sort of the struggle of autism.

—Hannah Gadsby, The Ezra Klein Podcast, August 17, 2020*

*Please note that Hannah Gadsby’s interview and her shows are more appropriate for mature teens and adults, while Speed Cubers, the film recommended below, is accessible for kids 8 and up.

In the past few years, people on the autism spectrum have shared their perspectives with the world in new and compelling ways, including books, films, TV shows, and even stand-up comedy. In the past couple of weeks I’ve stumbled upon a couple of new entries to the mix that I enjoyed, so I’d like to share them here. I hope any parents and kids out there with other favorites to share will do that in the comments, and we can follow up with another blog post soon.

The Speed Cubers (Netflix) is a short documentary about Max Park, a rock star in the world of competitive Rubik’s cube solvers. Max’s world opens up to new friends and experiences when he takes his skills and determination to new heights at the 2019 Rubik’s Cube World Championship.

The film is really about the power of friendship and parental support. As a kid, Max is able to overcome some of his isolation and improve his motor skills by playing with cubes with his parents. In the wider world, his admiration for a champion “cuber” from Australia, Feliks Zemdegs, leads Max to learn to interpret social cues and to deal with both success and failure with grace. The connection and mutual support of the two young men is inspiring, and the joyful spirit of the competitions is an antidote to any pandemic-inspired malaise you might be feeling right now.

I’m a fan of the Ezra Klein podcast and was thrilled last week to discover an hour-long interview with Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby. Gadsby’s first Netflix special, Nanette, caused a sensation in 2018 when she used her incredible power as a storyteller to talk about trauma, misogyny, queerness, and her struggles to find her place in a deeply homophobic culture—all within the framework of a comedy performance.

Klein’s conversation with Gadsby was one of the most enlightening I’ve ever heard on the topic of living with autism in a world that can’t or won’t understand or accommodate differences. It’s also a somewhat rare look at the female experience. Gadsby was only identified as neurodiverse a few years ago in her late 30s. That revelation is the subject of her most recent Netflix special, Douglas (named after her beloved dog). Much of the podcast conversation revolves around how the education system at all levels failed to pick up on Gadsby’s neurodiversity, leading to years of struggle when she simply couldn’t navigate the world as others expected and ended up homeless and vulnerable. Her intelligence and wit shines through in the conversation as it does in her work, much of which is also inspired by her love of art history. And as Klein says, it makes the experience of autism “emotionally legible.”

A few other recent additions to cultural representations of autism are listed below; these are mainly for teens. The PBS show Reading Rockets has a full list of recommended books for younger kids featuring autistic characters. Please add your own favorites to the comments!

• There are several recent TV series centered on neurodiverse characters right now, and one of the most unique features Harlan, a young character on The Umbrella Academy who is autistic and nonverbal and has a variety of supernatural powers, including telekinesis. (Suitable for kids 15 and up.)

• Madeleine Ryan’s A Room Called Earth is a novel that draws on its author’s experiences on the spectrum, especially the way she processes feelings. Ryan says of her main character: “It felt like she’d chosen me. And in a sense, from that point on, she really helped me to embrace autism.” (For kids who read adult fiction.)

• Paige Lyle, a TikTok video star, takes on a wide range of topics, including debunking myths about her life with autism: “You should listen to disabled people on disabled issues. You should always listen to the person it affects.” (Suitable for kids 15 and up.)

Shelley Sperry | Sperry Editorial

Citizen of the World: Nioucha Homayoonfar’s Memoir of Childhood in Iran

Contributing writer Shelley Sperry is back with an insightful and relevant interview with children’s nonfiction author Nioucha Homayoonfar. I hope the conversation inspires you to get your hands on a copy of this beautiful memoir and share it with the young people in your lives. It’s a great conversation starter on the reality and diversity of immigrant experiences.

A while back I had the pleasure of talking with Nioucha Homayoonfar, an Iranian-American author whose memoir of her girlhood in Iran during the 1980s revolution came out earlier this year.

Nioucha’s story mirrors that of so many young people whose lives traverse two different cultures and communities, and who are caught up in larger historical forces as they also try to navigate their own evolution from childhood to young adulthood. I’m tremendously grateful for the chance to talk with Nioucha about her life and her book. Stories like hers, written specifically for young readers, provide human context for the complex events our kids learn about in school and news soundbites. I can’t recommend this dramatic, tender, and often funny memoir more highly—for kids or adults.

Here’s a slightly shortened and edited version of our talk:

Nioucha Homayoonfar, author

How did you decide to write a memoir for a young audience rather than adults?

That decision evolved organically. When I started writing, the voice of a young person just came out—not the voice of an older person looking back at her life. I really liked that voice, so I stuck with it. I hadn’t thought about the age group or my audience at first. I just knew the story I wanted to write. I did some research, and at the time I was starting to write, in 2008–2009, there really wasn’t anything like this available. Now I see it as a great opportunity because I feel young people should know more about what is happening in other countries, and what it’s like to live there.

The work you do in your day job deals with international relations too, so that perspective must be very important to you.

People have always told me I’m a citizen of the world. After 9/11, the circumstances were so tragic and horrifying, and there was a new thirst for stories from other countries and other cultures to help make sense of the world. 

And that’s true of children as well as adults. Many classrooms, including the school my own kids attend, have students from dozens of different countries, and it’s phenomenal. I see that my kids and their friends want to understand how people and events are connected. 

Why did you decide to write nonfiction, rather than turning your story into a novel?

I started out writing some short stories and personal essays. I think a nonfiction author is just who I am. If you want to hear the true side of a story, take Nioucha with you, my family says. She can’t lie or hide the truth. As a reader, I also gravitate toward authors who write from their own dramas and hardships. That feels genuine and pure, so that’s what I aspire to as well.

But having said that, once I had a book contract, I did decide to take some things out. I had to realize that I wanted to remove things that might be hurtful to people I love. 

You’re very hard on yourself though, and honest about your own anger and mistakes. Did you draw on diaries for the book?

As a child, I used to keep some diaries as “someone” to talk to, or a form of therapy. I lost them years ago, but they were written in Persian, so I hope whoever found them just tossed them away. I did write more diaries after we left Iran. I still have those in a box and have not opened them yet. Those were tough years, watching my parents struggle when we first moved to the United States. I just haven’t found the strength to revisit those, but I know that I will look at them eventually because I want to draw on them for another story.

That would be a valuable story for a lot of kids right now to read. 

Yes, the issue of immigration is so important right now. It doesn’t matter when you move from one culture to another, it’s still very hard. I find the thought of my parents’ move here with two children really terrifying, now that I have two kids of my own. I think about that a lot now. Migrating is one of the hardest things people can do. We went from stability before the Iranian Revolution to suddenly feeling like the rug was pulled from underneath us in a matter of moments. I carry that with me, realizing that life can turn upside down so quickly. The Syrians are living that right now.

How did you access your memories from so long ago? You talk in minute detail about food, clothes, and music—and then in the next sentence there’s a dramatic political event.

My memories are really intense from that period because of the heightened intensity of life. One day we could be enjoying a wonderful meal with family or coffee with friends, and the next moment we could be running to hide from bomb sirens. Or the religious police could come and arrest people in front of you. There was an element of danger just renting your movies or buying some music because you had to deal with the black market. All my memories from that time are still vivid and detailed. Even now that I live in the United States, I still sometimes panic when I hear a siren. The biggest trigger for me is fireworks. It’s a beautiful thing here, symbolizing family and picnics, and joy—I really have to calm myself down when I hear them, though. 

Do you have advice for parents who want to help their kids embrace the world and be citizens of the world like you?

What I do with my kids is bring them often to the local libraries and museums with exhibits about other countries and periods of time. Of course, I love National Geographic’s line of memoirs celebrating people from other countries, which is the series my book is part of. Nawuth Keat and Martha Kendall wrote Alive in the Killing Fields about surviving the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. There is also so much available for kids on video. You can find series in French and Spanish and other languages on Netflix, with subtitles.

I grew up reading novels by writers from other countries, and that really takes you outside of yourself, so I think most of all I would encourage parents and kids to search their libraries for those stories.

For more information about Nioucha and her story, check out these links: 

• Author Chat with Nioucha Homayoonfar at YA Books Central 

• The Iranian Revolution Forty Years Later at Connecticut Public Radio

• Author Pens Coming-of-Age Memoir on GirlTalkHQ

• Nioucha’s Facebook page

Shelley Sperry
Sperry Editorial

Recommended reading from Alt Ed Austin

If you’re like me, you look forward to summer as a relaxing time when you’ll catch up on the reading that’s been piling up on your nightstand, in your brain, on your device, or somewhere in cyberspace. Then reality sets in. Maybe you’ll finish it before the end of July and declare victory. More likely, you’ll tackle the first book or two and get distracted somewhere along the way. Or perhaps you’ll skip the list altogether in favor of shorter magazine articles, movies, games, or outdoor diversions during your precious free time. No judgment here; they’re all worthy pursuits!

So, with August winding down and the new school year and less laid-back schedules looming, I won’t burden you with more “must-reads” to add to your “must-do” list. Instead, I’ll just briefly let you know about a few education-related books I’ve read since spring that I think you’d find both enjoyable and useful.

 

What School Could Be:
Insights and Inspiration from Teachers across America

by Ted Dintersmith

Ted Dintersmith is best known in education circles as producer of the excellent 2015 documentary Most Likely to Succeed and co-author, with Tony Wagner, of the book of the same title. His follow-up book, published this year, grew out of a full year spent traveling to all 50 states, visiting hundreds of schools (public, charter, traditional private, and alternative), and talking to countless students, educators, administrators, parents, and policymakers about innovative ideas they’ve put into practice in all kinds of learning environments.

Dintersmith is a highly successful venture capitalist, but unlike many of his colleagues in the business and tech world who have jumped into the education reform movement in recent years, he does not demonize teachers or focus on tinkering with new forms of standardized testing. He is less interested in talking about all the things that are wrong with conventional education (though he’s not shy about doing that too when pressed for his opinions) than in sharing and spreading the potentially revolutionary practices he’s seen happening, often hidden and unsung, at local levels around the country.

I had the good fortune to meet with Dintersmith (or Ted, as he prefers to be called by everyone) this past spring when he came to Austin for a special screening of Most Likely to Succeed and to talk about his book with local education leaders. I found his knowledge to be vast and detailed; his thoughts on the kinds of education today’s learners need are largely aligned with my own. As you’ll notice if you read What School Could Be, Ted’s enthusiasm is contagious. I imagine you’ll come away from the book as inspired and energized to make change as I did.

 

Mighty Writing:
College Application Essay Guide

by Laurie Filipelli
in collaboration with Irena Smith

This is a long-overdue public recommendation. For more than a year now, I’ve been privately urging parents of high school juniors and rising seniors to give their kids Laurie Filipelli’s guide to writing effective personal essays for college applications. I’m happy to relay that my own son, who’s heading off to his first year of college at the end of the month, found the advice and exercises in Mighty Writing to be fun, accessible, and just the stimuli he needed to think deeply—and eventually write creatively—about his own experiences, values, and aspirations for a very specific audience: college admissions committees. When Sam was ready to start writing his official submissions last fall, he drew on the lists and vignettes he had composed during the summer while working his way through the guidebook.

For unconventionally schooled students like Sam, those required and optional essays often take on an even larger importance in the college admissions review, helping admissions officers form both a more expansive and a more specific understanding of who the students are and what they might add to the university community. Admissions staff at several colleges that awarded Sam substantial merit scholarships cited his unusual essays as helping his overall application really stand out from the stacks of more formulaic ones.

Austin-based author Laurie Filipelli is an essay writing coach, a former Waldorf high school English teacher, a social justice activist, and an award-winning poet. She’s been busy since publishing Mighty Writing in 2017; in fact, you can meet her and experience her way with words firsthand at the upcoming book launch of her latest poetry collection, Girl Paper Stone.

 

The Self-Driven Child:
The Science and Sense of Giving Your Kids More Control Over Their Lives

by William Stixrud, PhD
and Ned Johnson

How to Raise an Adult:
Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success

by Julie-Lythcott-Haims

Some friendly advice from a me as a parent and education professional: Read, as soon as you can, either of these two books, or both. The authors take somewhat different approaches to the same general ideas: that children of all ages, but particularly teens, need WAY more independence and agency than our generation of parents has been conditioned to give them; and that we need to do everything we can to lessen the pressures in their lives, especially academic ones. Our kids’ mental and physical health and happiness depend on it. Both books include helpful, practical suggestions for how parents (and educators, too) can do just that.

Finally, if you’re interested in exploring more great books in the alternative education realm, check out the Alt Ed Library on this site. We’ve added lots of new titles since we unveiled it a year ago, and we’re always open to suggestions! Also consider joining the Smart Schooling Book Group, facilitated by Antonio Buehler, which meets once a month at Laura’s Library in West Austin. This month, it just so happens that the group will be discussing How to Raise an Adult.

Happy reading!

Teri Sperry
Founder, Alt Ed Austin

Enjoy screens. Not too much. Mostly together.

You will be more effective as a parent, and have more fun as a family,
if you drop the guilt and embrace the good that screens have to offer,
while balancing media with other priorities.
When in doubt, try to use media as a means of connecting.

—Anya Kamenetz
The Art of Screen Time
 

Anya Kamenetz is a journalist who has been writing about schools, students, and families in the United States for more than a decade and is currently on the education team at National Public Radio. She’s particularly good at distilling vast amounts of cutting-edge academic research, evaluating it, and presenting the fine points in ways parents can use it to make everyday decisions for their families. Her new book, The Art of Screen Time: How Your Family Can Balance Digital Media and Real Life, is both an extremely practical guide for deciding the when, why, and how much of screen time for kids and a deep dive into the current state of research on the generation raised with tablets, smartphones, and 24/7 access to information and entertainment at their fingertips.

Kamenetz is a parent herself, with two young girls. One of the things that distinguishes Screen Time is that she frequently includes examples of her own family’s challenges and strategies for dealing with the digital world. And, no doubt as a result of her experience trying to juggle piles of information, she’s included a terrific little section at the end that boils down the takeaways of the book to a few pages of essentials. A few quick examples, which she elaborates on throughout the book:

• Media can have measurable positive effects on reading, school readiness, concentration, and learning.
• Habits are often set in the preschool years, which is when parents have the most control. But it’s never too late to have a positive influence.
• Different ages require different approaches.
• Parental rules and attitudes about technology make a measurable, positive difference through the teenage years and beyond.
• Screens and sleep don’t mix.

One of the clear conclusions is that much more research is needed and that absolutely critical questions related to the effects of screen time on anxiety and depression, learning difficulties, and violence are still hotly contested by scholars.

I highly recommend an interview Kamenetz did on the Tilt podcast in which many of the questions focused on digital media and kids with various learning challenges. Kamenetz spends significant time looking at how differently wired kids respond to digital media and how it affects social interaction, but it’s clear there are no certainties at this stage. “Even if the affinity some autistic people have for media doesn’t prove to be a smoking gun,” she says, “it is a prompt to consider how both our own and our kids’ screens might serve as either a barrier or a bridge to other human encounters.”

One of the ideas that made the most impact on me in reading Kamenetz’s research is the importance of separating screens and sleep. I’m not a good role model for my teen daughter on this count since I don’t currently follow the sensible rule of shutting down all screens an hour before bedtime. Her book is prompting me to look for ways of changing our family habits around bedtime as well as ways we can do more watching and discussing together, with the ultimate goal—as Kamenetz suggests—of raising kids who understand responsible media use in an atmosphere of trust, not surveillance.

I’m going to try to put into practice some other tips from The Art of Screen Time as well, and I really wish I’d had access to a book like this when my daughter was younger.

Throughout the book, Kamenetz uses the analogy of a healthy diet, with a nod to Michael Pollan’s famous adage, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” It’s practically impossible and probably undesirable to raise kids who are entirely media-free in our culture, so the goal has to be raising them to make good choices. Her own adage is: Enjoy screens. Not too much. Mostly together.

 My own advice: Get Kamenetz’s book from the library or bookstore and dip into it a chapter at a time, and you’ll learn a lot and find some seriously helpful advice plus a lot of new questions you might want to explore on your own. And at the very least, check out her final five-minute summary at the end, which includes some of most practical parenting tips I’ve read in months.

For her take on other critical issues in education, follow Kamenetz’s reporting at NPR and on Twitter or Facebook, and check out her other books on her website, which is all about the future of education. In other words: our future.

Here’s a long interview that delves into many of the book’s major themes and insights:

Shelley Sperry
Sperry Editorial
 

Book review: From Home Education to Higher Education

From Home Education to Higher Education: A Guide for Recruiting, Assessing, and Supporting Homeschooled Applicants

by Lori Dunlap
(GHF Press, 2017)

Buy from an independent bookseller or Amazon.

By all accounts, homeschoolers tend to show up on campus as self-directed, self-motivated learners
who have a sense of ownership and personal responsibility for their learning and their lives.

—Lori Dunlap

Lori Dunlap’s enlightening and important new book is clearly aimed at two distinct but related audiences: (a) college admissions officers who want to better understand homeschooled applicants and (b) homeschooling families who want to be well prepared and positioned for college admissions. I would suggest that there are at least two more audiences that could benefit from reading this book: (c) families of students who have attended small, alternative (and perhaps unaccredited) private schools that do not produce conventional transcripts and (d) guidance counselors and administrators who work at those same alternative schools and want to help their decidedly nontraditional students find success in the traditional college admissions system.

Dunlap is an education and career adviser at Teach Your Own near Portland, Oregon. She has served as a career development program director, adjunct faculty member, and admissions committee member at Arizona State University. The book is informed by her professional experience in admissions; her personal background as a homeschooling parent; her analysis of multiple scholarly studies of homeschooled and unschooled students’ outcomes as college applicants, students, and graduates; and her own research, including recent surveys she conducted of both college admissions officers and homeschooling families.

Published last summer, the book begins with a straight-talking overview of contemporary homeschooling and homeschoolers. The author explains that there are as many approaches to homeschooling as there are homeschoolers, and she describes a continuum, from highly structured (also known as “school at home”) to unstructured (best known as “unschooling”), with most practitioners falling somewhere in the middle as “eclectic” homeschoolers.

Dunlap goes on to examine and debunk the most common misconceptions about homeschoolers:

• Homeschooled children are unsocialized.
• Homeschoolers are religious.
• Only wealthy families can homeschool.
• Parents cannot teach better than licensed teachers.

She also discusses the most obvious reasons for, as well as some likely underlying causes of, the rapid growth of secular (nonreligious) homeschooling in the United States. Paramount among these is dissatisfaction with the quality (and, with the rise of high-stakes standardized testing, the quantity) of meaningful learning experiences in public schools.

One category where homeschoolers tended to outperform their [college] peers
from other schooling backgrounds was campus leadership—homeschoolers were
significantly more involved in leadership positions for longer periods of time.

—Kunzman & Gaither 2013, “Homeschooling: A Comprehensive Survey of the Research”
(quoted in Dunlap)

The book distills the findings of numerous studies that show homeschoolers to be just as successful in college “across all measures of success” as their conventionally schooled peers—and in some measures, such as leadership, even more so. This data is echoed in survey responses from admissions officers and administrators at colleges and universities small and large, public and private, including Ivy League and other highly selective schools.

These kids are the epitome of Brown students. They’ve learned to be self-directed,
they take risks, they face challenges with total fervor, and they don’t back off.

—Joyce Reed, Associate Dean, Brown University

Dunlap presents a set of “Common and Best Practices” derived from a series of interviews the author conducted with admissions professionals at a wide variety of colleges and universities in 2016. One of these recommended practices is the portfolio submission option, which is gaining in popularity for all types of students because it allows them to present a more robust picture of their abilities and accomplishments than the cold, hard numbers of test scores and GPAs.

The final chapter turns those best practices into actionable recommendations for admissions professionals. Dunlap’s suggestions include expanding admissions websites to include specific (and welcoming) instructions for homeschooled applicants, thoroughly educating admissions staff about the college’s policies and procedures for homeschoolers, designating a staff homeschool specialist, providing an online transcript template, and many more good ideas. The book’s appendices provide more details about Dunlap’s survey process and lists of helpful resources for both college admissions staff and college-bound homeschoolers and their families.

A personal note: This book couldn’t have landed on my desk at a better time for my family. As a parent of an alt-schooled senior in the thick of college applications, I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to soak up Lori Dunlap’s insights. As an educational consultant, I look forward to displaying From Home Education to Higher Education prominently on my office bookshelf and recommending it to my clients.

Teri Sperry
 

Media Monday: Locals we love

Did you Buy Local for your Halloween pumpkin this year? Are you giving out local Lamme’s next week—or at least buying some for yourself? Good. Now, how about some local video and audio fun for you and your kids?

Here are two truly terrific homegrown, certified local, and maybe even organic things to try this week:
 

ARTtv is a YouTube channel that wants your kids to do just one thing: MAKE SOME ART! The channel is the brainchild of Ron Pippin, an Austinite with 25 years of experience in film and video production. The topics on this vast channel of mostly kid-made videos include mini lessons on all sorts of skills and projects, from drawing faces to writing poetry about bats to making an automaton. Plus lots and lots of great music by and for kids.
 

ARTtv is connected to Outside Voice, a creative community for kids that you can help fund through Indiegogo. You can find out more about Outside Voice on Facebook and follow them on Twitter.

Tumble is a podcast for kids ages 8 to 12 about every aspect of SCIENCE! But honestly, I’m five times older than that target demographic, and I’m adding it to my playlist today. The hosts are partners in life and on the podcast. Lindsay Patterson and Marshall Escamilla love trivia, cool and gross stories, and dumb puns.  But mostly they love science.

In episodes that last about 15 minutes each, Lindsay and Marshall share fascinating facts about salamanders, electricity, and exploding stars.  As with most podcasts, the thing that will keep you coming back is the chemistry (!) of the hosts, who ask sharp, interesting questions of their scientist guests and do a lot of giggling. And if you end up loving it like I do, there’s also a newsletter you can subscribe to and a way to support the podcast through Patreon. Follow Tumble on Facebook and on Twitter.

Shelley Sperry