Please sponsor my 5k swim coming up in April and help support Marie Curie Cancer Care, an organisation which provides home nursing care to people with terminal illnesses.

I spent most of today in the teachers’ office on the third floor of the foreign language building, administering oral examinations.  The office itself has neither ceiling fans nor air conditioning (classrooms have the former, administration offices the latter).  It is furnished with rows of desks with dividers and non-functioning power strips, and the windows let in enough natural light that the overhead bulbs are really unnecessary for most of the day (though the Chinese teachers generally turn them on when they come in).

The six-story building, too, is unremarkable, though I do appreciate how the concrete construction keeps the heat down.  One major difference between the building and one you might find on a US campus is the “Keepers’ Room” on the first floor.  This glassed in room on the first floor is where you (or the class monitor) can go to get a whiteboard marker and eraser, which you have to sign for.  It’s also where the security cameras throughout the building transmit their information.  These are not (so far as I know) inside the classrooms but in the hallways.

Besides this room, the first floor holds lecture halls and a broad, bare lobby.  Regular classrooms (for about sixty students) are on floors 2-4; each class has is own homeroom, where they take most of their classes.  The classes split up for oral communication courses; the rooms for these classes are floors 5-6.  The sixth floor also hosts the English corner, where students can come to practice their conversation skills in a cafe-like setting.

Live Like It’s the End . . .

             How long will you hold onto you
             with body being broken from you
                           We ask in years & decades

                          until they break our skin
                          with teeth or hypodermics

Hold on too long   body goes on
walking its rot   hungry for minds
             still calling them brains

Notes: The subject of this poem came from yesterday’s Blog Like It’s the End of the World event. I realize the central metaphor is a bit of a cliche; I was hoping to reanimate it with a bit of nuance. Now it’s an undead metaphor.

I can’t believe how poorly some of my students have done on their oral English finals. Seriously, it seems like every single one I tested this morning had regressed. Some of them were completely incoherent; I couldn’t make out a single word. One guy just said “brains” over and over again. And, I know this might sound crazy, but I think one student tried to bite me when I told him he had failed! After that, I looked for someone to report him to, but I couldn’t find any of the tutors or administrators.

Anyway, I’ve heard some talk about “the end of the world” on other blogs I read, but the Great Fire Wall seems to be blocking the site they link back to (and for some reason, using a proxy isn’t helping). I’m sure it’s all just paranoia, but could anyone tell me what this site says?

After a long day of administering oral English finals, I started on my evening run a little later than usual (I usually jog around sunset so that I can benefit from descending temperatures without being too worried about stepping on the frog chorus beside the lake or tripping on the stone steps.  As I rounded the far end of the lake, however, the wind kicked in and kicked up even more dust than usual. Lightning flashed in the distance as I rushed back to my apartment with my T-shirt pulled over my mouth, nose, and (occasionally) eyes to avoid the harsh grains.

Meanwhile, students came down from the hill behind the lake– mostly young couples trying to escape campus regulations on PDA.  (For those of you who didn’t go to summer camp, that’s public displays of affection.)  A few minutes after I made it up to my room (and after I’d managed to rinse most of the grit out of my eyes) a loud rain tamed the dust, while thunder rolled overhead.

The Detroit Free Press website has an article about a book written by a PhD candidate who has been diagnosed with Asperger’s; the focus of the text is on ending the bullying that is often experienced by those with Aspie traits. Unfortunately, that sort of bullying is only going to end when we overcome an attitude displayed in the article itself.

In the first chapter, Dubin tells of how in the fifth grade two kids he knew left him handcuffed to a swing at nearby Poppleton Park. They taunted him until his father peered outside the Dubins’ nearby home and intervened. The ruse: They were playing cops and robbers. Those with Asperger’s often have an especially tough time knowing when someone is not telling the truth.

In this passage, trouble detecting another’s lie serves as explanation for torment. The cause of the bullying is located within the victim, not the perpetrators. Why is this acceptable?

This is one of the problems with medical model psychology. Once you receive a “diagnosis”, you are marked so that anything that goes wrong in your interactions with others is assumed to be part of your already labeled wrongness. The behavior and mentality of those called normal, by contrast, remains unexamined.

Part of the solution to this is to make mental “normalcy” a marked category, to interrogate the concept, find its edges and its center. To this end, I’m going to start a new academically oriented journal (though appropriate art or non-academic will not necessarily be rejected) that will take an interdisciplinary approach to the study of minds that do not qualify for “diagnoses”. I plan to have the journal be open access, with articles appearing as they’re accepted in a blog format, along with a print annual. Ideally, I’d like to submit at least the academic work to a blind review. If you would be interested in a spot on the editorial review board (or any other role in making this journal a reality), please email your CV to NormalMinds_at_gmail.