Sari Piittinen

…Actually, a few different things have led me to think I am most likely on the autism spectrum in the past year, but many of my challenges have culminated in my experiences this past year teaching two different groups of (mostly) already experienced teachers.

To provide some context, the course I’ve taught these groups is designed to improve the professional communication skills of future English teachers. It’s usually taught in our university to students who have little to no previous background in teaching. However, in the open university, most students are looking to complement their existing pedagogical competence with the formal qualifications to teach English. Some of them may have been teaching for as long as twenty years.

Enter me, instructing them to (among other things) analyse teacher-to-parent messages and write one as a written assignment. Many of them think of it as insultingly easy. (But when I assess their texts, I often notice that they do need my feedback on their language skills.)

The setting alone would probably be challenging to anyone. The course can’t be changed greatly between what is taught at uni and open uni despite the different contexts because the teaching must be more or less directly comparable, with the same content, workload, and so on.

In addition to this, teachers as students are different, in surprising and less-surprising ways, from my ‘usual’ students at the university. I love my uni students. They take initiative and they have patience, problem-solving skills, and ambition, and I can usually trust them to work efficiently independently and in groups.

This is where things get a bit ranty, but the purpose is to give some background to why I found the experience at the open uni so challenging.

My open uni students would interrupt me with clarifying questions while I was in the middle of explaining instructions (completely throwing me off my game); many of them would try to do as little as possible for the group tasks, so that I’d have to ask them for additions to their analysis (which I’ve never had to do with the same course at uni); some would stubbornly want to do much of their practice teaching session in Finnish because “that’s how I usually teach” regardless of me telling them that in order to assess their teaching in English, it needs to be in English; they’d ask me strange questions like “what should I write in the self-reflection if I didn’t learn many new things” (the answer is what you just wrote). The only time I’ve had to deal with plagiarism and the only time I’ve had a student make me feel anxious in class because they couldn’t help but be rude also happened at the open uni.

All these different, unexpected aspects should be something that a healthy, neurotypical teacher could handle without much or even any issue. (I imagine that teachers of children and teens experience much worse on a daily basis.) However, they shot up my stress levels and social anxiety. I broke into tears after one particular teaching session where I was constantly interrupted with questions (thank god it was a remote one and I was at home). I was also shocked that I had to tell teachers to put more effort into their tasks and, you know, not to plagiarize. Having to justify assignments that I’m used to students doing happily – and with good to excellent outcomes – also contradicted everything I was used to. They broke me by breaking my system. In addition, while teaching always tires me because it requires social interaction, these sessions drained me entirely.

This experience, therefore, has really made me think about my limits and boundaries… Because my brain can’t handle this. Not the social pressure and not having my usual every-day teaching experience turned upside down. I usually go into class with a plan in mind and reasonable expectations of what’s going to happen. I know I will need to answer some questions, so I’m prepared for that and allocate energy for that. (Not for being bombarded with questions and “I don’t understaaand” comments before I’m even done explaining.) I know I will need to problem-solve some small issues, and I actually enjoy finding solutions. (But I’m not ready to have the entire existence of tried-and-tested teaching methods questioned.) When my expectations and preparations match the concrete events, I am a happy teacher who walks home from campus thinking how awesome her students are. When the opposite happens, well, I basically break down and think people are needy energy vampires and I should isolate into a bubble with my cats and never re-emerge.

Basically, I have needs, mostly regarding the ability to prepare mentally ahead of time for what’s about to go down (and sometimes, there’s no way to prepare enough, which is why I won’t be volunteering to teach this course at the open uni again).

To elaborate on my needs, in addition to challenges I’ve mentioned above, I also struggle sometimes with any group planning tasks with colleagues during development days and other events where we’re expected to sit down and spontaneously come up with solutions or ideas on different topics. I’ve had colleagues ask me unexpectedly about my courses and my answers sound like “…uumm yeah it’s a nice course, going well, yeah” or “yeaahh I dunno I just survive using these materials kinda, haha”. And I promise you I’m not an unqualified fool, I just can’t improvise certain things… most things… at all. I need time to formulate oral answers, I may need time to even look at materials ahead of time.

And I didn’t even get to the social aspects yet! Put me in any group of three and I can guarantee you I’ll be the quietest person in the group, the one barely talking. This is not just because I’m unprepared, but also because much of my energy is going into overthinking everything in the social interaction (“I should say something, right? But what should I say? Oh god, it looks like I’m not contributing at all, this is bad. I know, I’m going to nod in strong agreeance so people see I’m still actively here and participating. Am I nodding convincingly enough? I’m going to try a smile, too. Good. Oh, I have an idea. Should I say it? Let me– Well, everyone’s so busy talking, maybe now– oh, no this person is talki– now the other person is– maybe now– oh, the topic changed. Uh, well, I guess what I had to say wasn’t that important anyway…”). I am just going to guess that neurotypical people don’t think this way?

You can probably imagine how useful my contributions are in group work settings like this, combined with zero preparation. I do much better when we have scheduled a specific time to discuss a specific topic ahead of time (for example, if I’m introducing a course to someone who is going to be teaching it for the first time).

There are also some other wild observations I’ve made recently in terms of social behaviour. For instance, I’ve thought I can’t be autistic because I can have eye contact with people. Not being able to have eye contact is one of the first traits that people, including medical professionals, associate with autism. I’ve lately come to realize that I actually do struggle with eye contact somewhat – but especially with men. Almost like I’ve had “less practice” with men because I don’t exactly stare into my dad’s or my brother’s eyes when we talk (we are all more or less eye-avoidant, I suppose) and most my male friends are online. And I actually prefer less eye contact in general. While teaching, I know I need to have eye contact with students, but even then I don’t really rest my eyes on anyone, but try to keep my gaze moving. I’m not very comfortable with prolonged eye contact. I didn’t realize this as much until I also met some more male students at the open university. Sometimes the eye contact was so intense it almost felt like an intrusion. Super intense. It made me want to hide.

To overcompensate, I might also do super intense eye contact if I’m, say, visiting a doctor, because it seems like the normal thing to do. But at the same time, when I went to get my glasses, my poor optician had to ask me repeatedly to look at her so she could see whether my glasses fit correctly, since I kept looking away. So… Is my ability to do eye contact actually typical, or something else?

Now I’m almost at the point where I’m tempted to start copying here my entire compiled list of autistic traits that I experience to varying degrees. But instead, I’ll just raise one more that has stood out to me more since last spring: stimming. In Wikipedia’s words: “Self-stimulatory behavior, also known as “stimming”and self-stimulation, is the repetition of physical movements, sounds, words, moving objects, or other repetitive behaviors.” Stimming seems to often happen in situations of overstimulation, but can also be a sign of excitement or happiness in autistic people. For me, it can be rocking from side to side or back and forth, not being able to sit or stand still, and there’s a specific motion where I circle a finger around the shape of my nails. There are other weirder ones that I only do when I’m alone at home because I’m conscious about them on some level (one of them was pointed out as weird to me by someone, so I stopped doing it in the presence of others).

I find that stimming brings me comfort or is my way of expressing comfort. For example, I may start rocking if I’m having dinner and/or drinks with friends because I’m happy. But I also found myself stimming almost unstoppably in the practice teaching session meetings for the open uni students. There were moments when there would be, for example, a song coming up and I’d be excitedly moving before the song even started, while everyone else was just standing still. Me, I had energy to burn, it had to go somewhere. I think in this case my stimming was a combination of excitement and anxiety: a part of me enjoyed just experiencing the (mostly excellently conducted) sessions, not expected to do anything too demanding, but at the same time, I was conscious about my role as the assessing teacher, i.e. an outsider.

Because I continue to have these strong experiences of just not being quite like other people, I keep wondering whether there’s still something more about myself that I haven’t yet discovered. As discussed above, most recently, my search has led me to autism, but especially in women which can look a little different as girls and women may be under more social pressure to learn how to mask (to hide their “weird traits”). I might not be autistic, I might just be weird, or some other things. But my unusual and sometimes extreme physical and mental responses to events that should be fairly normal surely suggest something.