Brain Bubble

I’m a college professor, and we talk a lot about strategies for teaching and helping our students. In this context, we use two types of assessment: formative assessment and summative assessment. Summative assessment is when you look everything over and give the student a grade. Formative assessment, on the other hand, is when you look at the student’s work, well before the end of the term and say “you didn’t get this answer right”, “your writing here isn’t in the right format”, or “you need more citations to support this assertion.” This type of assessment is how we learn. If you’re self-motivated, you can learn just fine without summative assessment. You don’t need grades to learn. You do need formative assessment. Someone (which could be yourself!) needs to look at your work so far and say “This part looks good. This part needs work. And over here, it seems like you’re not really getting the concept we’re working on.” Without formative assessment, you don’t know what you still need t...

Recently I had two very different experiences around accommodations and imposter syndrome.  In the first one, I was in a zoom training. I tend to have a really hard time keeping focused in zoom trainings. I have found that having the transcript going helps a lot. When the speaker is going too slow and I get bored and my brain wanders off, I can read back in the transcript and catch myself up. Zoom automatically has this available unless you turn it off, so it doesn't add any work for the people running the training. I went looking to turn the transcript on, and I didn't have access to do so, which means that they had turned this feature off. I asked if they could allow access to it.       This led to 10 minutes of waiting while they tried to figure out whether they could turn it on from inside zoom (it's normally a feature linked to the account) or how to deal with this. Well before this was over, I both felt bad for wasting everyone's time and was also angry wi...

Alright, this is more about body, but also about my brain's reaction to stuff about my body. For quite a while, I've been aware that I was hypermobile, and that a number of the weird jumping joint issues I've had on and off since I was a kid were likely related to that. When I first started having these discussions, I concluded that, while I was definitely hypermobile, my hypermobility seemed to be different than a lot of my friends, and I concluded that I probably had a non-standard variant of something. I had some vague hypotheses, but mostly settled with the "definitely hypermobile, but in a weird way" and was fine with that. In recent years, more and more of my friends have been getting diagnosed or self-diagnosing with hEDS, and I started to wonder. A lot of the experiences were shared. A lot of things did make sense. It still felt like I was a little different, but maybe that was just the feeling that your own experiences are always unique. Yesterday, I went...

This meme has been going around for a while. For me it's become a really useful shorthand way of addressing imposter syndrome around a lot of things.  Obviously, this relates to imposter syndrome around ADHD. It's easy to think "I have a PhD. Heck, I have TENURE! Clearly, that means I don't really have any issues." This helps me remember all the structures and work that I have put into place to work around the ways my brain works. While it can do amazing things, it's never in easy mode. I have to plan for everything and use a whole suite of tools to do simple things that most people don't think about. However, that, I've mostly processed through a long time ago, and it doesn't hit me too hard. Where it's actually been really useful to me is more on the physical side. I'm a very active person. I lift weights. I bike and walk everywhere. I'm strong, I have lots of energy, and I often default to thinking of myself as physically healthy and...

First actual new post on the blog! One of my minor superpowers is very good directional hearing. When I was in college, I took an improv theater class. At one point, there was a game, where one person was blindfolded, and the instructor took a ball of paper and tossed it into the center of the room. The blindfolded person then had to retrieve the paper ball. Until I watched other people, I simply didn't understand why this was a game. For me, it was not much harder than it would have been with my eyes open. Locating the paper ball by the sound it made was about as hard as looking to see where it was, then looking away and picking it up. It was a trivial task. Watching other people do it made me realize that was not true for everyone. Coming off of this, I have also taught myself very basic echolocation. When I am in a dark environment, I will made small ticking sounds. I can use these to identify nearby large obstacles. It's not anything like the detail I would get with sight: ...

I have a bit of an unusual take on body positivity. I love my body. I love my body. But I'm more or less neutral on my physical appearance. On the whole, I feel vaguely positive about it, but only very weakly so. There are a few features I quite like. Mostly I don't give it a lot of thought. But I love my body. I love biking 30 miles to give people cookies, or 100 miles to see my partner. I love that I can bench 100 pounds or squat 200. At a simpler level, I love the feeling of warming up on a cold day, or stepping into air conditioning on a hot day. I love the feeling of my partners' hands touching me, and I love being able to use my body to make other people happy. I love tasting a fresh berry that I just picked, or smelling bread that I made with my own hands.  I love my body because of the things that it can do. How it looks is something for other people. Enough people seem happy with that, but it's not my big concern. What I care about is all the things it does for...

Recently, I went to an osteopath to talk about some joint issues and wandering joint pain. I'm hypermobile, and, because of this, my joints are kind of stupid. This means that, frequently, I'm having trouble with some joint. The complication of this, is that it might be my right hip this week, my left ankle the next week, and my left shoulder the week after that. This means that trying to treat the specific one doesn't really make a lot of sense, because it will be something else next week, and the underlying cause isn't going away. I've heard from some people that osteopaths can be really helpful for taking this seriously and thinking about approaches for moving forward. The one I went to was wonderful, took plenty of time with me and took me seriously. I'm working on following up on her recommendations, and that's all great. That's not really what I'm here to talk about. I was a little nervous going into this, because I've always thought about ...