stanwshura

I am a 39 (FORTY!..ugh....HOLY...where does the time go???...Forty-one) year old career para-professional, formally employed by a beautiful and very special (but for chaotic management and multiple ADA, DOE and civil rights infractions and inadequacies) collaborative serving students with severe special needs.

I am also an amateur writer and poet, and have content in a variety of online fora. I am definitely an "artisan" when it comes to my use of words, both written, and increasingly in my everyday speaking as well. By this, I mean that I care very very much about the precise meaning of words, no doubt at least a peripheral consequence of my literal tendency, as is common among we with Nonverbal Learning Disability. I am rather proud of the "artisan" part of this, as I find it truly fun and artistic to mine new and nuanced ways to say something, and I frankly throw my gauntlet down in front of the euphamism "words don't do it justice". Just let *me* take a whack at it! ;)

I teach piano privately and have played since I was 6 or 7. Well, I played earlier, but didn't study/take lessons until 2nd grade. Supposedly I played by ear then, and do in fact have that ("perfect" pitch strength/skill today. I don't practice enough!

I love love LOVED my job, and have a real and driving empathy for these very special kids. There was no worthier endeavor into which to give my forty-plus per week, giving everything in that time and getting the inexplicably beautiful given right back from those kids.

I'm saddened but resolute to be an engine of change for ALL of us with "special needs". These beautiful children will grow up. I sure as hell hope what happened to me does not happen to them!

I, too, have some neurological and medical "stuff", including the aforementioned NVLD, as well as hydrocephalus (4 neuro-surgeries thus far - first one when single-digit months old, the latest in March, '12), *maybe* half a corpus callosum and other (get this: "incomplete" sections), episodic clinical depression, major visual-processing deficits, near ever-present and pretty severe anxiety (G.A.D.), and OCD.

I'm still waiting, and in no rush, to grow up. :)

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  Disabilities & the Disabled

  Understanding Literal Thinkers, and How to be Understood By Them

  11 years ago

  In this piece, I try very hard to "bring to life" what it is like to have a literal mind (especially as borne out of disease/disorder - such as Nonverbal Learning Disability) - and why we have such a very hard time processing the myriad figurative and joshing references of daily living "in real...