2024 Roundup

After a year and a half of managing teaching around long covid/post-viral fatigue, with the last six months particularly bad after a second round of infections, I left classroom teaching at the end of the 2023-24 school year.

While I was reluctant to make this move, I haven’t missed the classroom as much as I thought I might, and I certainly don’t miss the hours spent commuting across town every day. I have been building up my private tutoring/mentoring business – slowly, to make sure I didn’t head straight into a crash – but it didn’t take too long before my income exceeded what I was making as a part-time classroom teacher. I’m also doing a bit of this through The Wildheart Foundation and look forward to working with Grove, as well.

Just as importantly, this move has given me a bit more time and space to rest, read, write, and make things. I even took a pottery class, which was great – I’ve always loved working with clay, but never learnt how to throw on a wheel until this summer. It turns out it’s very satisfying! I have a Small Wheel and a microwave kiln at home, but I haven’t spent as much time with them as I want to, yet. The best thing I’ve thrown so far is this teapot:

I’ve been fantasising about making teapots for years! I look forward to making more.

As for the writing, I have written and published six fairly substantial pieces this year:

1. My Mum and Monotropism – a five-minute read about Dinah’s 30 years as an autism activist/support worker/researcher/writer, which I wrote after finally managing to find copies of her earliest papers on monotropism and put them online. I also made a video of this.
2. Autism and Mainstreaming – an eight-minute read about the presumption of mainstreaming for autistic learners in Scottish schools, which started as a presentation for the Autism Cross-Party Group (CPG) at the Scottish Parliament.
3. Magic and the Weird – a seven-minute read for the Weird Pride Day site about the power of weirdness, the allure of magic and… lots of things, actually. This one took a long time to write, and I had no idea where it was going to take me when I started.
4. Weirdness and the Right – a three-minute read provoked by the USA’s Democratic Party’s successful but problematic (and ultimately short-lived) tactic of focusing on how weird their right-wing opponents are.
5. Electing ‘None of the Above’ – a nine-minute read about Britain’s deeply bizarre 2024 general election, in which an uninspiring, right-wing Labour Party achieved a crushing victory over their widely-hated Tory opponents, while agreeing with them on almost all the key issues, and getting substantially fewer votes than they had at their ‘worst defeat in a generation’ in 2019.
6. Neurodiversity at School – more a collection of resoures than a piece of writing, but with some advice as well as links; this evolved from what I sent around to my colleagues at school the first time I gave them neurodiversity training, and every time since.
7. How Wikipedia Systematically Misleads People About Autism – a half-hour read on what might sound like a niche topic, but one that’s both highly consequential and surprisingly deep. To explain why Wikipedia’s coverage of autism is so dire, I needed to get into the meaning of ‘epistemic injustice’, the state of autism research and publich discourse, the rise of the neurodiversity paradigm and Wikipedia’s systematically-embedded status quo bias. Hopefully the result is of some interest to most people who are interested in autism, Wikipedia or epistemic injustice. I’ve felt a bit more supported since then in my efforts bring this coverage up to date, at least.

On top of these, I’ve spent a lot of time this year on long-form pieces which I either haven’t finished, or wrote as book chapters for books which aren’t out yet. I mentioned in last year’s roundup that I hoped to have 2 or 3 chapters published this year; that still hasn’t happened yet, but I have now written five chapters for four books, including two pieces I wrote long time ago but which I look forward to seeing form part of a book; and two co-written chapters relating to autism and education. I may even co-write another one in the next few weeks, but I’m not making any promises.

Oh… and I contributed to two peer-reviewed papers this year, both of them open-access! Towards autistic flow theory: A non-pathologising conceptual approach, and Evaluation of wider community support for a neurodiversity teaching programme designed using participatory methods (on the LEANS Project) – both of which I’m very proud of, even if my own contribution was relatively modest.

I was on a couple of different podcasts this year: the Table Talk podcast, talking about monotropism and eating disorders; and Neurotypicals Don’t Juggle Chainsaws together with Sonny, talking about quite a few autism-related subjects (part 2 should be out in the new year). Also, bizarrely, I discovered in June that I’d been on a Stephen Fry podcast in 2022 – not my voice, but my words (as well as Dinah‘s) being read by Stephen Fry!

I managed to read more books than I have for a long time this year, especially if you count listening to audiobooks as reading (I’m in two minds about this, but I’m not suggesting that listening is inferior). I’ve been trying to keep track of my book-reading on Storygraph, which I find much less annoying to use than GoodReads (which is also, depressingly, owned by Amazon). It looks like I finished ten books this year, including three graphic novels, five audiobooks and only one nonfiction book (Oliver Postgate’s autobiography, Seeing Things, which is lovely and often very relatable). I’ve probably read at least two or three more books’ worth of nonfiction this year, I just haven’t finished anything else.

What else? I finally started learning to drive, and I returned to tai chi for the first time in about twenty years. I cut about six inches off my hair, so now it’s only moderately long, like this:

I went to Japan with Sonny in April, which was great! We both look forward to getting back there again, before too long but hopefully after we’ve learned a bit more Japanese.

I’ve found myself really enjoying Bluesky, the first time in years that I could really say that about a social media platform. It’s just so nice being on a site that’s basically functional, run by people who don’t clearly hold their users in contempt! I’m @fergus.oolong.co.uk on there, if you want to find me.