It’s common these days for people to insist that “dude” (and “buddy” and “guy”) is gender neutral. “I call everyone and everything ‘dude’. It doesn’t matter.” Then comes the reply: “‘Dude’ is a male-coded word. Its use for non-men is part of the masculine default nature of language. It’s still a male-coded word.” Both claims…
Author: Clio
A Literal Metaphor
I teach mathematics. In mathematics, we have a thing called “literal equations”. When I first met this term, and indeed for a long time afterward, it confused me. Isn’t every equation literally an equation? What makes some equations more equation-y than other equations? The issue here is that “literal” means something different in mathematical argot…
Diary: I May Be Wrong
An incident that happened last weekend stirred up childhood memories that help me understand why a particular behavior evokes a shutdown/meltdown reaction. When I was a child, my being right about even fairly arcane things was the norm, and so when I was wrong or ignorant about something, that was a source of mockery. I…
… la sensibilisation à l’autisme
Imagine you speak French as your first language. In your case, this is strange because nobody you knew growing up spoke French. You are surrounded by people who speak English. Your family speaks English and only English. You’ve never been exposed to any language other than English. Certainly not French. So you don’t know how…
No AI was harmed in the writing of this
We, educators, have brought the AI crisis on ourselves. For decades, certainly throughout my entire childhood and well before it, we have created and honed a myth that getting good grades is the same as mastery, and that hence the purpose of education is to get high grades. Education, the learning of new things for…
Rumination Draft: Clothes make me a man
Once upon a time in one of my transgender groups, someone asked: If you’d been born in a body of the other sex, would you still be transgender? On its face, I’d assume that binary transgender people would generally say no, they’d be cisgender, they’d be happy with the anatomy they had, and that nonbinary…
Fractions of Sandwiches
I have long been of the opinion that ratios and fractions are effectively the same thing, but I’ve recently changed that belief. A ratio is a relationship between two values that states the relative size. These can generally be expressed in fractional form, but they need not be. How much sense the units make depends…
Autism Acceptance Month
April is Autism Acceptance Month. Because our understanding of Autism is rapidly evolving, so too is the language we use. In this article, I’ll discuss current best practices for language and address some of the common misunderstandings around Autism. Autism is a neurological status (“neurotype”) characterized by differences from Neurotypical brains. To qualify for a…
it’s oh so quiet
there are time when the world is quiet enoughbut there are times when it isn’tthe swell creeps up slowlywhile i’m not paying attentionwhile i’m otherwise occupiedwhile i’m thinking that the world is quiet enoughbut then it’s screamingand i’m screaming so loudlythat i can’t hear myself thinkthat everything is so loudand bright and janglyand all the…
okay, so
okay, so i just wanted to let you know that i hope it’s okay for me to have even thought about saying what i was thinking about saying if it isn’t, please let me know (although i feel like you won’t) (i feel like your lack of saying anything is because you’re so offended that…